The Abject Failure that is Labor Day in America
We need to remember the roots of the labor movement.
Labor Day was first celebrated in the late 19th century and became a federal holiday in 1894. It has its roots in the original labor movements of the industrial revolution, when workers started organizing into unions and striking against their corporate bosses who forced poor working conditions and long hours on their workers.
It was a violent time in the history of the American labor movement. Attempts to violently put down strikers were common, and the Pinkertons gained their infamy for their strike-breaking efforts on behalf of the various robber-barons. They don’t really like to talk about it, though.
The efforts of these various labor reps and unions eventually won out, and things like the 40-hour work week were eventually put into effect. A lot of the things that we take for granted came out of the worker’s movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The price for these gains was a significant amount of blood and death on behalf of union members and workers throughout the country. To some degree, Labor Day is a celebration of the brave people who stood up to their cruel bosses and demanded better conditions and pay for themselves.
We are a country of workers built by workers. There are tens of millions of us throughout the 50 states that make up our country, and workers have a lot more power than I think we realize sometimes. The amount of control that we could exert over the various American Oligarchs that make the rules is vast. Should we return to the roots of the labor movement in those early days, a lot of progress could be made.
Unfortunately, we have come to a point in our culture where “hustle culture” (read: overworking ourselves) has not only become the norm, but looked upon as morally upright. If you’re not hustling, you deserve to starve, at least according to some. Never mind the fact that the majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, largely through no fault of their own.
Out-of-control inflation over the past few years has wrecked many, driven at least in part by corporate greed as they raise prices more than necessary to squeeze more profit out of consumers. Rents are going through the roof — the standard wisdom of not spending more than a third of your income on housing simply cannot apply to many people these days — also driven largely by corporate greed. Most large-scale landlords know they can get away with charging higher rents
What’s worse is that incomes aren’t really doing the best job of keeping up, more or less by design, although many factors affect individual income. Still, even income increases driven by the so-called Great Resignation and the Act Your Wage movement haven’t helped people keep pace with the rising costs of everything.
The unfettered capitalism put in place by Ronald Reagan has done nothing but further enrich a small number of already-wealthy people at the expense of most of the rest of us. Supply-side economics, commonly known as “trickle-down,” has not lived up to its promises to enrich those lower down the economic ladder, and the data backs this up.
We live in a country where healthcare is a for-profit industry (it absolutely shouldn’t be), workers have limited rights (they should have more), and damn near every other major world power has happier, healthier, and wealthier citizens. Workers in many other countries have paid time off and parental leave guaranteed by the government, while we have to rely on the kindness of our employer to get our meager scraps of PTO approved.
What’s worse is that we are constantly fed the lie that things are better over here than in Europe because we have FrEeDoM, but again, we have less of that than 14 other countries, most of them in Europe. Many Americans are convinced we are the greatest country in the world, but I’m not sure that’s true now or if it ever was at any point in the last 100 years. It certainly hasn’t been if you weren’t a straight white man.
We idolize work and the hustle as morally good, but the constant work without enough time off to properly rest is burning us out. Whatever labor gains were made around the turn of the 19th century have been lost to the mists of time, further obscured by the modern American robber-barons who insist that working is morally good and taking too much time to rest is morally bad.
Unions have been systematically oppressed and stripped of power by regressive state and federal government policies and painted as enemies of the working class. And, while there are some bad and corrupt unions, most generally have their workers’ interests at heart and legitimately want to improve working conditions for all.
I’m starting to think that the only way to get through to the vulture capitalists that are stripping the life out of American citizens for profit is a general strike. Let’s shut down the country for a week and see what happens — I’m pretty sure a bunch of billionaires and economists will collectively crap their pants over all the lost productivity.
Still, that’s a dangerous proposition for many — again, about 61% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford to take seven days off of work. Plus, the police have commonly been weaponized against strikers in the past, and there is little to prevent this from happening again. And, of course, there are the aforementioned Pinkertons, who are still active and ruining people’s lives.
On top of that, there are a whole bunch of billionaire stans who will hop to the defense of the wealthy ruling class like the good lapdogs they are. They still cling to the beliefs that the wealthy job creators should be taxed less because it drives innovation and job creation despite this being provably wrong.
Of course, they’re generally chasing the hustle as much as they can in the hopes that they’ll hit it rich and be one of those billionaires. It’s easy to mentally justify lower taxes on millionaires and billionaires when you see yourself as not a normal worker but simply a soon-to-be millionaire who just isn’t there yet. You might be in a position to pay those taxes very soon, so we gotta keep them low so you don’t have to pay them once you’ve made it.
I have some hope that we will hit another wave of increased worker’s rights and more power to the people in terms of our working conditions. Thanks to the internet, we can see that people elsewhere in the world have better working conditions and more protections than we do, and those of us who recognize that can fight to get those same rights.
The amount of support that unions are getting is also encouraging. Starbucks everywhere are starting to unionize, and more and more people are considering workers’ unions to be an important part of gaining and holding onto their rights. The antiwork subreddit has helped numerous people know what their rights are when it comes to work, and as more people arm themselves with knowledge, fewer are being taken advantage of by crappy HR departments.
The ongoing support for the current Hollywood strikes among actors and writers also gives me hope. Plenty of people understand that the union is trying to defend the rights of the bulk of their membership, most of whom aren’t big-names earning millions. Plus, last time this happened, we got reality TV, which is arguably one of the biggest travesties to befall the entertainment industry.
Yes, a handful of billionaires run much of this country and have their lackeys in congress run the rest at their whims, but there are 300 million of us and not that many of them. The power is and always has been with the people; we just need to fight for that the way our ancestors in the 1880s fought.
The workers’ tactics might need to change — we live in a digital age and the ways workers can hinder their corporate overlords are new and varied. Crippling businesses can be accomplished by any number of tactics, from a classic walkout to a few lines of code. The internet is built on a system of constant maintenance, and when people stop doing that maintenance, things tend to fall apart, as Elon Musk is learning over at Twitter (it’s still Twitter as far as I’m concerned) as we speak.
The opposition will likely fall back on their standard tactics, though — intimidation, economic manipulation, and outright physical violence. The Hollywood execs said the quiet part out loud when they said that they hope strikers become homeless and starve this winter so they can gain leverage in negotiations. I’d guess the Pinkertons will happily roar back into the headlines with more skull-bashing and strike-breaking if that happens.
Still, if we want the first Monday in September to mean anything going forward, we very well might have to cripple the country to get our demands met. More and better rights as workers, government-guaranteed and protected paid time off for vacation, illness, and childcare leave, and a higher minimum wage at the very least.
We cannot rightly let corporate overlords control this country as much as they do. At this point, we are on the verge of drastic action needed to ensure that we don’t collapse into even more of a capitalist hellscape, possibly ruled by a bunch of fascist wingnuts.
As much as I empathize with the “eat the rich” movement, I honestly cannot get behind its main premise. Cannibalism is wrong and dangerous — we really should compost the rich instead.
Be well out there.
