While many of us shared some kind of gathering with family and friends to celebrate the unofficial end of summer, the foundation of Labor Day is ironically absent from our minds.
Labor Day began at the height of the Industrial Revolution. As commerce boomed with new and exciting inventions that were transforming American life, the plight of workers became increasingly dismal. Most workers labored seven days a week for up to twelve hours a day. Children as young as five or six performed menial tasks, cogs in the wheel of the industrial complex.
Many of these American workers were recent immigrants and faced discrimination in addition to their poor working conditions. Doors to the factories were often bolted shut from the outside. Fires in the garment district in New York were common and workers perished because the doors were bolted shut. Other unsafe working conditions in factories across the nation plagued all workers, but recent immigrants faced the most difficulties.
Our national batting average with immigrants is pretty low. It is a long and wretched history.
In response, workers across the country began organizing to protest the predatory economy they were coopted into as slave labor. Unions first emerged in the late 1800’s and quickly evolved into organizations that organized strikes and rallies to protest unsafe working conditions.
Two strikes are worth noting. The Pullman strike and the Haymarket riot, both in Chicago, marked turning points in the labor movement. The Pullman strike pitted employees of the Pullman Company against the railroad and the government. It crippled rail travel nationwide. The Haymarket riot pitted labor members against police. It turned violent when striking workers threw a bomb at police and chaos erupted. Both strikes were crushed by either government troops or local police.
Such strikes and riots were common in the late 1800’s as workers organized and fought for better working conditions, eight hour work days, child labor laws and weekends off. The protests incited widespread hysteria against immigrants and labor leaders.
The government began to recognize the plight of American workers. Legislation to regulate industry gradually emerged. It was never easy for workers. Many of the benefits American workers enjoy today such as over time, weekends off, reasonable work hours and child labor laws are the fruit of these early struggles.
The parallels to our time are worth noting. There has always been mixed reviews for the place of unions in American labor. Immigrants still face the worst working conditions in manufacturing and agricultural jobs. Low wages and long work hours require many American workers to work multiple jobs at minimum wage to make ends meet. Despite working forty or more hours per week at multiple jobs, many American workers still rely on public assistance to feed their families and access health care. This amounts to government subsidy of some of the largest companies in the US.
While corporate salaries have risen 2000% or more, workers’ wages have remained essentially stagnant. Striking workers face the rage of management while public sympathy for striking workers is waning.
Opportunistic pricing of goods and services, free market capitalism and collusion between political leaders and big business always spells loss for workers. The promise of low prices for consumers always means low wages for workers. Businesses are free to send jobs overseas for cheaper labor creating predatory economies in the countries they target. Meanwhile unemployment rises here and workers are faced with low wage jobs.
It is impossible to have access to cheap goods and services and a just wage for workers. Business will always choose profits over people, as witnessed in the injustice toward labor across the centuries.
What the unrest in the labor movement across the years has in common is the effect of a predatory economy. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann summarizes this when he observes that biblical texts are critical of “…an economy of extraction whereby concentrated power serves to extract wealth from vulnerable people in order to transfer it to the more powerful. That extraction is accomplished by the predatory if legal means of tax arrangements, credit and loan stipulations, high interest rates and cheap labor.”
The witness of Scripture is for an economy of reconciliation. While we treat it as a side issue occasionally referred to, it is actually central to the biblical message. Distributive justice, described most simply as a just wages for just labor is central to the prophetic witness.
What is needed in this time is more than food pantries and used clothing stores, though they serve a vital need in our communities. What is needed are just wages and equal access to health care, affordable housing and childcare, and better public transportation. These are components of distributive justice that make a quality of living available for all people.
Labor Day is a time to remember the historic witness of the labor movement and the gains it brought to American workers. It is also a time to reflect on the erosion of those gains and the effects of a predatory economy in our day.
The Irreverent Reverend 