Labor Day = Memorial Day

373 issues printed since July 5, 2017. 16 weeks to paper’s final issue.

Monday is Labor Day, the last of the summer season holidays and the unofficial start of fall. It is the picnic and barbeque holiday, the gather friends and family together occasion, the toast the kids before they head off or back to college or return to the classroom holiday.

It is a holiday that is uniquely American, as if our laborers are special, and separate from the riff raff of all the other workers around the world. The U.S. Congress created Labor Day in 1894 to distance American workers as far as possible – four months – from May Day, the almost universally recognized and celebrated International Workers Day. In just about every country in the world, May 1 is when people take to the streets in parades, marching shoulder to shoulder across vocations, work classifications and wage gaps.

Labor Day used to have real meaning, though in that typical suck-the-complexity-and-depth-out-of-it twist American culture imposes on so much of our common history, it has fallen to the remnants of labor unions to fly the tattered flags that they still carry.

The bumper sticker cliché “Unions: The folks who brought you the weekend” is too glib, its necessarily short and upbeat phrasing unable to make the critical point that thousands, perhaps more, were killed as they fought for decent working conditions as simple as bathroom breaks and as necessary as fire exits and health and safety standards.

How did the weekend come about? American workers first agitated – took to the streets – for a 12-hour day. Then the struggle became winning a 10-hour day. Alongside there was insisting on and the push for a six-day work week.

Yes, what we take for granted, normal, the eight-hour day and five-day work week, were once fantasies for America’s working classes.

The struggle has been more than a fight and more than one battle and went on decade after decade throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. People died. Lots of people, in one strike, one battle, one massacre after another. Google labor massacre. You will find, as a sample:

Morewood Massacre, Pennsylvania, 1891, seven workers killed. The Lattimer Massacre, Pennsylvania, 1897, 19 workers dead. The Ludlow Massacre, Colorado, 1914, 21 workers killed. And Chicago’s Memorial Day Massacre, 1937, 10 workers killed. There is the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, 1920, the largest internal American conflict outside the Civil War, with over 100 people dying.

Unarmed, nameless to us, workers died, shot in the back, shot in their homes, shot in the street, shot with their wives and children huddled in tents on a Colorado plateau. That is probably true in just about every state in the nation, whenever people stiffened their backbones, organized together, stood up and said “No,” or really, “Yes.” Yes to dignity. Yes to jobs and freedom, Yes, “I am a man.” Striking Memphis garbage workers were carrying that sign in April 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. came to support them.

It is hard to find the American working class today. Politicians extoll the middle class. Our rich get lavish tax cuts. The poor cannot get their minimum wage increased, not since 2009 nationally, when it was upped to $7.25. Try living on that 40 hour-a-week paycheck.

All those migrants dying in our desert borderlands, they are undocumented workers, the very real descendants of the Irish, Italians, Poles, Slavs, Greeks, Germans, Scandinavians, Lithuanians and, of course Jews, all who came, worked, got sick and died as America’s underclass. Oh, and Africans, of course. And Asians, from China, India, Japan, probably every country of that huge continent.

For decades, indeed generations, from the 1830s into the 1960s, many stuck together to end the dying in factories and deaths in the fields and so died in the streets fighting together for a better life for all of us, at least all their fellow workers. That is why they sang “Solidarity Forever” and “The Union Makes us Strong.”

Because it did and it does. But Americans forgot and hardly march shoulder to shoulder anymore. The parades have petered out. We eat hot dogs without caring, much less knowing, that workers reach across borders, intentionally celebrating International Workers Day every May 1. In reality Americans are not better or special or separate from the rest of the world’s masses. We just let corporate America and their many political lackeys insist that we are.