Odds are, not many of you thought about labor much on Labor Day itself, unless it was about having a day off from your usual labor. Little was seen of the holiday’s traditional trappings in this former hotbed of organized labor. There was a Moon Pie eating contest, a couple of church barbecues and, if you were willing to put the town of Ider into your GPS, a mule parade.
Henry McKiven Jr.’s excellent 1995 book, Iron and Steel, describes how Birmingham rolled for Labor Days last century: “Union members donned the regalia of their respective trades and marched as units through the streets of the city, often preceded by floats on which craftsmen displayed their skills. After the parade, people typically gathered at one of the local parks for a picnic, patriotic speeches and lectures on the relationship between labor and capital. Then there would be balloon ascensions, parachute drops and athletic contests before the day ended with a grand ball.”
Okay, the lectures might have been a bit much, but remember, there was a lot more to say about the relationship between labor and capital back then. “Estranged” hardly describes the relationship nowadays. Capital has moved on to a hot new relationship with plutocracy, leaving labor to sit around the kitchen table on Saturday nights with social justice and mope about what might have been.
It’s not just that union membership has been slipping nationwide — from 20.1 percent of salaried workers in 1983 to 11.3 percent in 2013 — but the environment for recruiting workers to unions is positively toxic. The Chamber of Commerce is one of many business groups anxious to characterize unions as job-killing machines and union leaders as cartoon villains.
It makes good rant on talk radio. However, what really seems to have crippled the union movement is the globalization of our economy, which has given corporations unprecedented leeway to take jobs out of America and place them in countries where they can get away with paying a fraction of American wages. Only workplaces not subject to foreign competition appear resistant to the attrition of workers and their salaries.
If you didn’t think about labor per se on Labor Day, perhaps you thought a little about the middle class and how you and it no longer seem to be in the middle of anything. In the current economy, the investor class is going great guns, but every other level of income is stagnant or worse. There’s no shortage of colorful graphs to illustrate precisely the throes middle-income families are in, but a few numbers regarding the first family of Arkansas might do the job as well.
The heirs of Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, have become sort of the one percent of the one percent in America. With wealth weighing in at around $141 billion, these six individuals are wealthier than the bottom 40 percent of all Americans combined. Consider the number of Wal-Mart employees existing in that bottom 40, getting by on minimum wages with less than full-time employment and insufficient healthcare benefits, and you might start giving some credence to the impact of income inequality on all of us.
(And before you leap to your keyboards, note that no one is calling for the Waltons to be divested of their riches. But how about paying an estate tax or a gift tax to get a few of those piles of cash back into circulation? When John D. Rockefeller, the oil tycoon who was America’s first billionaire, died in 1937, his estate was taxed 70 percent, leaving but a piddling few hundred million dollars for his heirs to scrape by on.)
Far from taking decisive action to help save the middle class, President Obama has focused his hopes for change on the minimum wage. In his weekly media address for Labor Day, the president pulled a phrase from the campaign playbook — “America needs a raise” — to urge the private sector to do what Congress will not; namely, to raise the minimum wage to at least $10.10 per hour. To set an example, he has used an executive order to require federal contractors to pay their employees at that rate.
Touting a report showing that 200,000 jobs have been created each month for the last six months, the president said, “There are reasons to be optimistic about where we’re heading.” Perhaps he should share with the group. How many of those jobs are high-paying, and how many are part-time service economy jobs? With technology exerting its influence on the marketplace, how many occupations are disappearing altogether? How many unemployed citizens, unable to restore their incomes in the wake of the Great Recession, have quit looking for any work at all?
In this context, the story of Maria Fernandes is a poignant one. As reported in The Huffington Post, the 32-year-old Newark, New Jersey, resident was found dead in her old Kia Sportage in a convenience store parking lot in nearby Elizabeth on Aug. 25. She was wearing her work clothes, a Dunkin’ Donuts uniform, and she apparently succumbed to fumes from a gas can tipped over in the back of the car.
The reason Maria kept gasoline in the car was so she wouldn’t run out while she was commuting between her part-time jobs. She had as many as four, all apparently with Dunkin’ Donuts. She worked at several locations in the area, picking up hours and shifts where she could. She often slept in her car, in parking lots, to try to get a little rest between her jobs.
A spokesperson for Dunkin’ Donuts said, “We are deeply saddened to learn of the tragic death of Maria Fernandes.” The rest of us should be as well. In honor of all the workers like her, struggling to get by as best they can in this land of opportunity, every day should be Labor Day.
