Labor Day History
Doing a Google search for “Labor Day history” [without the quotes] produced some interesting results. One might expect to get links to pages from the government and labor organizations, but after the top hit from the US Department of Labor, the rest of the top ten was a motley mix: a family oriented page, PBS, a woman oriented site, the Detroit News, a service that advises unions, a computer science professor’s site, an anarchist group, a commercial site linking to the government and a middle school near Chicago.
Here are the results in order and a few comments on the pages and what they reflect:
1. Even in an anti-labor administration like Bush II, the Department of Labor was the top link. Right after quoting Samuel Gompers, the grandfather of the American labor movement saying this holiday is different from all the other nationalistic ones and “is devoted to no ...nation”, the DOL page in the next breath says the holiday is dedicated to the achievements of American workers.
2. The second page link is the creation of an individual whose home page bills itself as a family site including bible study. The labor day page has a changing ad at the top of the page, which on a couple of my visits included a “Fart Button” which it urged me to press, saying it knew I wanted too. I did not press it, but on my first visit it nevertheless continued farting at me.
3. The PBS page gives a straightforward history, with some political background from the 1894 Presidential election.
4. Rumela’s brief history seems to be part of a general female oriented links site.
5. The Detroit News page confirms the historical importance of the labor movement in the auto industry in Michigan.
6. The Big Labor page is interesting, even though it is the only one which does not give a history of Labor Day. Instead it gives a labor history for the current week, referring to notable labor events of the past. The site home page indicates the site exists to provide “info and ammo for unionists”. It was produced by Union Communication Services, a training and PR firm working for unions.
7. A computer science professor at the University of Northern Iowa is apparently behind this page, which includes some interesting information, including the decision to put Labor Day in September, to distance it from the May Day celebration of socialists.
8. The difference between Labor Day and May Day is further explained by the next page, from the Anarchist International Information Service. I did not know Anarchists had such a developed organizational structure that they have an international informational service.
9. The ninth site is one of those annoying sites whose URL makes it sound more worthwhile than what it actually is, just a compilation of freely available links used as a framework for advertising. It merely provides the same DOL Labor Day history found at DOL.
10. The last site shows how effectively some schools have used the Web. The Lake Zurich Middle School put this page up and may be doing a better job than some colleges of educating students about the history of the labor movement in America.
These sites show the exact history of the creation of Labor Day may be somewhat confusing. Unfortunately they also seem to confirm that the holiday has failed to maintain significance as a day to honor workers, but instead has become merely an occasion for a last long weekend to end the summer. The fact that no labor organization made it into the top ten Google hits shows what a poor job the labor movement is doing to counter the anti-labor policies started in the Federal government by Ronald Reagan. Organizations like Union Communication Services have their work cut out for them.
posted by Tom Blake | 7:17 PM
4 Comments:
Tom,
I've read and re-read this article thinking that I must be missing something. And just now I figured it out: this article interests me because it is so uninteresting.
It's not just that for most people reading about the labor movement is like studying history, and Americans don't care much about history, W being a case in point.
No, its that Americans don't care about the true meaning of holidays anymore. It's a cliche to say that about Christmas, but its true about many holidays.
Let's count them off. Since we have dismissed Christmas, let's start there. New Years Day. Now there is a holiday people care about! Party the night before and sleep it off in front of the TV on the holiday itself. People are always coming up with new "traditional" food items for New Years Day.
MLK Day- uh uh. We just feel guilt, not celebration on that day. Guilt because we don't want to go to the MLK lunches. Cities have MLK lunches with boring speekers to commemorate the day. Corporations are coerced into recruiting people to attend. They often pick the most junior black employees because they haven't learned how to say no. The rest of us enjoy the day off if our companies observe it. Mine doesn't.
Columbus day. In some states this is a holiday. But really, who cares about Columbus? Sure there are Italian-American organizations that make a fuss, but that's artificial.
Veteran's Day: A big YES. The veteran's in my state refused to let it be celebrated on the closest Monday. Or is this true nationally? Anyway a good way of determining if the holiday means something is that it isn't always celebrated on Monday.
Good Friday. I include this because at least one company gives that day off, mine. I can't believe that in today's world a company has the temerity to make a holiday of a high holy day of a specific religion. Makes me kind of proud. Anyway people do care about the true meaning of this day.
Memorial Day. This used to be important, but how many people do you know that still go out to the graves to spruce them up?
Independence Day. Yes
Labor Day. a big NO.
Thanksgiving. Yes. This seems to be one big holiday that hasn't been commercialized (except by Big Footbal). Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday being a family day and a day of optimism about one's life.
Now we are back to Christmas. Did I misss any?
John from Phoenix
You are correct. There is a hidden message in the article and your comment draws it out. People are not interested in history -yesterday’s news - and are not interested in labor unions - institutional dinosaurs. So the history of labor unions is the ultimate bore.
All our holidays have two things in common: most workers have a day off and most businesses advertise holiday sales, staffed by workers who did not get the day off. By the way, you fell for the Thanksgiving myth of non-commercialization, forgetting that the day after Thanksgiving is the most heavily advertised and biggest volume shopping day of the year.
The right wing strategy to eliminate American unions and keep labor issues out of globalization agreements has unfortunately been effective. Workers constitute the vast majority of the potential electorate. Unions not only bargain for fair contracts for workers, but also educate workers on political issues and candidates from the worker perspective. The diminished role of unions has meant deteriorating economic status for workers and a less informed worker electorate, both of which have been bad for America.
Public support for an increase in the Federal minimum wage is high. Unions could gain valuable PR by championing this issue in dramatic ways, such as by purchasing effective advertisements depicting the heroic minimum wage workers struggling to support their families, and by organizing broad community based protest marches to send a message to Congress that nine years without a raise in the minimum wage while Congress gave itself numerous pay increases is outrageous. If young people are not interested in learning about unions by studying history, they could be turned on by a union movement that produces dynamic ads and takes to the streets in support of hardworking people being screwed over by the current system.
The day after Thanksgiving used to be the start of the commercial Christmas season, not part of Thanksgiving. The commercial Christmas season now starts the day after Holloween. Nevertheless, I still consider Thanksgiving separate from the commercial Christmas season.
You blame the "right wing" (what an obsolete term - my wife sneers at me when I use such terms as "sack" instead of "bag" or "drainboard" instead of "counter" or "davenport" instead of "couch", or "pocketbook") for failing to protect workers in the globalization movement. It wasn't the right wing. It was the failure of the labor movement itself. The workers of the world never united. Only the "vanguard of the proletariat" (led by Lenin, Stalin, Castro, and Mao) made an attempt to unite. And they were never successful at uniting the workers because they not only exploited the workers, they killed them.
John from Phoenix
I have already seen Christmas items in some stores here, indicating the season now starts after Labor Day.
By “right wing” in this context, I mean those on the right side of the political compass on economic issues - believing government should have virtually no role in regulating business activity, but that government should have a role in enhancing and protecting business profits.
You are correct that workers of the world have not yet united, in spite of the inclusion of “International” in the name of so many of the unions. When they were excluded from global trade talks, the unions of the world should have organized their own global labor talks. But workers have always been the most patriotic and nationalistic supporters of their own countries - the ones who fight and die in wars. US labor leaders in the 1950s were some of the fiercest anti-communists.
You are also correct that communists, once in power, in fact often turned against the workers. The American model of labor relations adopted in the New Deal, that the government should set and referee the rules for fair bargaining between business and labor, is the best one in existence. Unfortunately, it has not been applied in the globalization process.
But in blaming the labor movement for not doing a better job of protecting workers during globalization of business, we should not excuse businesses and governments for disregarding worker protections in the first place.
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