Not long after the first Labor Day celebration, a New York parade in 1882, the holiday’s creator felt obliged to issue a statement that reports of the union movement’s death were greatly exaggerated.
Labor had been losing battle after battle in its struggle to reduce the workday, then 10 or even 12 hours, to 8 hours.
“It is a mistaken notion to imagine that trade unions have failed,” Peter McGuire of the carpenters union bravely wrote.
In recent years, similarly self-conscious denials of rigor mortis have been the centerpiece of many a union leader’s Labor Day remarks. Buffeted by downsizing and outsourcing, the labor movement has been barely treading water lately.
On the eve of this year’s Labor Day, a lot of shop stewards and local presidents must be ripping up pessimistic speech notes. The Teamsters Union’s thrashing of United Parcel Service has given organized labor its first opportunity in years to raise arms in clenched-fist optimism.
That victory was all the more remarkable considering that the strike violated some basic strategies of an organizer’s handbook. Trying to get full-time employees to stand up and fight for part-time fellow workers isn’t considered a smart tactic. Nor is striking a service industry, where an inconvenienced public isn’t likely to respond with bundles of food and clothing, as it might if, say, Appalachian miners had put down their picks and shovels.
UPS tried to exploit that latter potential misstep with newspaper ads asking readers to demand that President Clinton force its drivers and sorters back to work via the Taft-Hartley Act. But a lot of home shoppers decided they could wait for their orders from Land’s End and other catalogs.
The public’s sympathies remained with the strikers–a dramatic turnaround from America’s last landmark strike, the 1981 walkout of the nation’s air-traffic controllers.
Some strikes go beyond a dust-up between a company and its workers to become watersheds that mark a new phase in labor relations.
So, when President Ronald Reagan fired the striking controllers and the public shrugged, American business got a clear message that it was open season on unions, launching one of the darkest eras in labor history.
The UPS strike, which pundits have labeled as an example of a broader “worker backlash,” may have ended that era. The Teamsters, long organized-labor’s corrupt pariah, basked in the movement’s backing when the picket signs were lofted this time around.
Something has changed, and that something is pregnant with importance for the future of the American economy. The question now is whether the UPS victory is the turning point it seems to be or only a last defiant gasp of a dying movement.
The American labor movement was on its deathbed long before Reagan’s fatal blow. To most Americans–not least to union members themselves–it had become irrelevant, a bloated embarrassment headed by corrupt caricatures of the union heroes, the Joe Hills and Sam Gomperses, whom Labor Day is meant to honor.
Organized labor gained its power in the Depression and the post-World War II years, when it fought for a place at the table for workers who demanded better pay, job security and healthier working conditions.
The movement won these battles and in a twist of fate sowed the seeds of its own decline.
Sharing the postwar prosperity, many union members–especially those in the big industries such as autos and steel–were able to buy homes, take nice vacations and send their kids to college.
In short, they became middle class. They no longer looked or thought like their working-class parents and grandparents. They still belonged to unions, but with their battles won, those unions became little more than irritants, and most visible to their members when union dues were deducted from paychecks.
“What has the union done for me recently?” the worker asked. And the answer often was, “Not much of any importance.”
If the rank and file couldn’t figure out what a union was for, neither could union leaders. For some, such as the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa, the union became a private trough for graft and theft. The honest ones, such as the AFL-CIO President George Meany, abandoned the picket lines for the halls of power, more interested, according to the political fashions of the Cold War, in fighting communism abroad than dealing with labor problems at home.
Over the last decades, union membership declined to barely 10 percent of the non-governmental work force. Partially, this was due to worker boredom with unions and partially to the shift from heavy industries to small and mobile high-tech companies that are notoriously hard to organize. Partially, it was the result of a union-smashing effort given the green light by the Reagan White House.
Once a popular and romantic cause, unionism came to be seen by the average American as part of the problem, not the solution. As imports from leaner and more efficient companies in Japan undercut American products, the high wages enjoyed by U.S. workers were seen as a drag on American competitiveness, not a sign of national prosperity. Strikes, especially by public service workers such as teachers and firefighters, brought public condemnation, not sympathy.
By the time of Reagan’s coup de grace, it was hard to see what real difference the decline of unions made. But it had.
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Other things besides union membership had been going down. Wages fell not only for low-skilled workers and factory hands but, in more recent years, for everybody in the bottom 80 percent of the work force, according to government statistics.
Job security–the ultimate reason for which unions exist–was replaced by layoffs and downsizing. Tremors of instability went through factories; then the echoes began to resound in offices and even in executive suites.
Good full-time jobs fostering steadily rising living standards began to disappear. Part-time and temporary jobs, without benefits or decent wages, became the norm.
Technology and the globalization of the economy played a role in all of this. So did the deification of the shareholder and the enshrinement of the market. The reigning political philosophy of the ’80s saw nothing wrong in the gap between soaring pay for executives and falling pay for employees.
When the protective shield of the unions began to vanish, the once-secure workers sensed that a framework of stability and decency was disappearing from the entire economy.
All this became a national scandal in this decade as the country enjoyed the longest boom in its history. Profits, stock prices, executive pay hit new highs. Workers, however, bringing home paychecks that bought less than they did in 1979, realized they weren’t sharing the boom, that the prosperity of the top 20 percent of America was being built on the backs of the bottom 80 percent.
With this realization has come rediscovery of unionism.
Exit the Hoffas and Meanys and their heirs. Enter Ron Carey, the embattled Teamsters president, and John Sweeney, the new AFL-CIO leader, and a new generation of union leaders who are busily organizing women, minorities, the less-skilled, the part-timers–the folks at the very bottom of the economy.
These new leaders seem to believe that if a strong floor is built beneath the economy, the upper stories will rise that much higher.
That’s what the UPS strike was all about. Carey led it, and Sweeney gave invaluable support. Full-time employees supported part-time employees. The public, grasping the stakes, cheered them on.
Can unions prevail in a new economy made up mostly of smaller companies, where big outfits such as UPS are more of an anomaly than the norm? Can labor insist on a better deal in a global era when employers not only are able but willing to shift jobs to low-wage countries, or replace them by machines?
In some ways, the economic times seem right for labor’s rebirth. Unemployment is at its lowest level in 25 years, leaving businesses short in all job categories–including strikebreakers. With millions of these jobs being low-wage and part-time, and with demand for labor high, dissatisfied workers know they have less to lose by standing up for their rights.
It seems impossible that any society can exist with the current level of job insecurity. Sooner or later, workers were bound to reorganize, if only to put some measure of stability into their lives.
Maybe labor’s role will be to set a decent floor through strikes against such powers as UPS, knowing that this floor will prop up workers throughout the economy, even in companies that never will be unionized. But maybe some new form of advocacy will have to emerge, because traditional union leaders won’t realize that the times they are a-changin’.
Mother Jones, the two-fisted matriarch of American labor, once observed that in every era “the workers have to fight not alone their exploiters but likewise their own leaders,” until both sets of honchos finally get it through their heads that what the workers want is simple enough.
“All the average human being asks,” she said, in words that any UPS striker would have understood, “is something he can call home; a family that is fed and warm; and now and then a little happiness; once in a long while, an extravagance.”