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Labor Day: Still getting the bone instead of the steak
Today's post is a revision of last year's Labor Day post, which was itself a revision of the entry I wrote the year before, which in turn was a revision of a post written two years before that, which was actually a post written two years before that. I decided last year to continue rewriting it every year until what it says no longer applies. I'm still afraid it could be a while, especially given an economic climate that--in as much as it favors anyone--favors management over labor.
It's good to have a special day dedicated to workers, but the extent to which a country really values workers isn't measured by having one holiday or making commercials about how committed company X is to its workers. By any realistic measure, in our economy workers are not so much valued as quantified. Labor is a cost to be minimized, a factor in productivity to be maximized. In short: get as much as you can out of workers and give as little back as possible. Individual businesses do better than this, but this is the systemic trend.
Perhaps nothing says "I love you" (or the inverse) in this case so well as vacation time, and if we look at the nations of the industrialized world, it's clear who values labor as people by giving them time to be people instead of workers. This ABCNews article points out that the U.S. is one of the only major countries without any guaranteed vacation time; the average vacation time, however, is 10.2 days per year. The article cites 17 European countries, all of which have 20-25 days guaranteed, as well as those notoriously industrious Japanese with 10 guaranteed and an average of 18 and China which is guaranteed 15 (and take precisely 15!). Another article, from Joe Kissell's Interesting Thing of the Day points out that these guaranteed days are in addition to national holidays, whereas a lot of those holidays in America are sort of allowed but not necessarily encouraged. The ABCNews article goes on to point out that many Americans are reluctant to take time off (unemployment is good for businesses because it makes workers more expendable and thus scared), and even when they do take time off they're often still working at home. The second article I cited uses anecdotal evidence for 6 weeks being pretty standard in Switzerland (this appears exaggerated, but it says something that this is the perception of things there, this is what is cosidered normal) vs. the two weeks that Americans feel fortunate to get.
More, though, the article points out that it's not just about vacation time; Europe has a standard work week of 35 hours, a number which is actually adhered to. Our 40-hour workweek is, for many Americans, a fiction. You may get paid for 40 hours, but it's expected that you will do 50 or 60, whatever is needed to keep your projects on schedule. Interestingly, this article tells us that studies show that productivity isn't actually impacted that much by the shorter workweek--it seems that Europeans generally work harder when they're actually at work, while Americans spend more time socializing (Office Space, anyone?). Maybe because Americans know they're getting screwed and so do as little as they can get away with--we take our time where we can get it. The article points out that the shorter workweek does--at least sometimes--lower pay, but it also lowers unemployment. Perhaps the difference is that in Europe the labor unions are stronger, whereas business (i.e. ownership and management) is stronger in the U.S.
Another aspect of this issue is a way that Americans are coerced to work more: health care. I remember hearing a woman call in on a radio program who wanted to quit her job, because their family was paying more in child care costs than she actually made in her job, but the prohibitive cost of insurance if she didn't have that job made it impossible to quit, even though otherwise it made more sense both economically and in terms of spending more time with her children during these formative years. How did we end up this way? I've heard figures that suggest that less overall money would be spent for centralized health care than is being paid now. And there's the crux of it, no doubt. It's just a little side benefit to business interests, that we're encouraged to work full-time to get health care. The real benefit is the money to be made by insurance companies. So much money, in fact, that the insurance lobbies have been able consistently to defeat attempts to reform health care, appear well on track to do so again with Republican help, and, if/when health care is "reformed," you can bet the changes won't hurt insurance companies' bottom lines any more than they have to. There's a reason why Republicans want a government plan off the table, and I'll wager it has more to do with the cost to insurance companies than the cost to the government. It's not just manipulation of politicians, of course, but also systematic disinformation and distortions to keep just enough voters against universal health care--or, perhaps more accurately, to keep the appearance of voters being against health care.
Labor Day became a national holiday in 1887 under Grover Cleveland's presidency. It started from a parade held by the Knights of Labor in 1882. Most of the rest of the world, under the International Workingmen's Association, holds Labor Day on May 1. Cleveland only made it a holiday so that it would officially be in September rather than in May. Why? To de-politicize it. May 1, 1886 was an organized strike by unions in Chicago, wanting the radical 8-hour work day. They were joined over the next few days by 350,000 workers nationwide, including 70,000 in Chicago. When a fight broke out, police took the opportunity to attack the strikers, killing two. Since it wasn't exactly uncommon for the police to side with business owners against strikers (in fact, it was the consistent trend--property and profits have long been more important than people), many people believed that the police had murdered the strikers on behalf of business interests. On May 4, there was a rally, which the police eventually ordered to disperse by marching in formation toward the speakers' wagon. Someone threw a bomb at the police line, killing one. The police opened fire, ultimately causing the death of eleven. Seven labor leaders were tried for inciting the violence that led to the policeman's death and (surprise, surprise!) they were found guilty. Most of them were hanged. Outraged unions and labor movements across the world protested.
So you see why Cleveland didn't want a May 1 Labor Day? A May 1 Labor Day could have been seen as a commemoration of Chicago's Haymarket Riots, as a rallying for the labor movement akin to "remember the Alamo!" And we couldn't have that. This less-politicized holiday was about all that labor would willingly get from the government for the next several decades. Government has always been on the side of the moneyed elite, and perhaps never more so than this period in history. The political party that really stood up for labor (I mean the socialists) was vilified and all but destroyed in our country by our government. Much like in the Middle East, the government wants democracy only insofar as democracy does what it's "supposed" to do. This has been so culturally ingrained that "socialist" is a dirty word in our country (I wrote that sentence years ago now, but now that "liberal" isn't a dirty enough word in the American lexicon, the Republicans have branded Obama--what else?--a socialist.
Evidently, the de-politicization worked. Labor day is for sales (ensuring that some people do have to work!), for bbqs, for getting to the beach one last time before summer gasps its last breaths (or, in my case, slaving away over a hot stove canning tomatoes!). Beaches and bbq are, you understand, good things: opportunities to spend time with family and friends, to relax, to whatever, but there's little even remotely political about it. That would be fine, if Labor Day was just one day that we didn't worry about the politics of these issues, but instead it's just one more day that we don't worry about it. There's barely any political consciousness around labor issues, and why? Probably because any denial that we're all middle class strikes a note of class warfare of Karl Marx, of socialism. Demonizing such consciousness of class, though, only benefits one group: the wealthy, the owners of the means of production (now I do sound like a Marxist, don't I?). Make that two: the Republicans clearly think they're benefitting from such talk too.
I say all of this largely to remind us of a few things. First, that labor, to the people in charge, is still a cost to be minimized (by paying less, by laying off, by outsourcing to other countries) and a resource whose efficiency must be maximized (by demanding more). They want us to be human doings, not human beings; they want us to be workers, not people. In order for us to have greater opportunities to make something of our lives besides work, we should be demanding more--universal health care, more vacation, shorter work-weeks. The only way most businesses will do this is under government pressure--which is convenient for most businesses since the government will do as much as it can to keep them happy and as little as it can get away with to keep the rest of us happy. Let me repeat: as much as it can to keep the wealthy happy and as little as it can get away with for the rest of us. We the people? We get Wonder bread and circuses; where's all the steak going?
I realize that I'm saying all of this in a period during which our economy is in a bad slump and some will argue that businesses cannot afford to make these concessions now. To which I say: baloney. In many cases, the slowing economy doesn't mean that businesses are losing money, it means that they aren't making as much money as they would like. They'll lay off people or hire less to keep their profits high for their shareholders and management bigwigs, not to keep the company solvent (and why shouldn't they when they get "too big to fail"?) There's plenty of money available to better the lot of workers if we get rid of the golden parachutes that let bad managers run practices that hurt the workers and the shareholders and then get away with a big severance check for his incompetence (or willful mismanagement). There's plenty of money available if we just narrow the gap between the obscene amounts being made at the top and what the rest of us get. And more to the point, such things are more important than ever, because it's the laborers who are hurt most by our recession (or is it a depression?).
But it won't happen unless people make it happen. We have to send messages that the politicians can't ignore, can't cover over with their sham grass-roots organizations, their staged protests by ignorant ditto-heads. We have to put aside complacency and force our politicians to do the same. Happy Labor Day.