Labor Day - 2016

A day when the rights of workers and labor unions is recognized.  Unfortunately, for most Americans it is commemorated as the last day of summer – schools reopen, seasonal resorts close and hundreds of thousands workers get up and go to their jobs in services industries just like any other day.

On Sept. 5, 1882 — a Tuesday — 10,000 workers took unpaid time off to march in a parade from City Hall to Union Square in New York City as a tribute to American workers. Organized by New York’s Central Labor Union, It was the country’s first unofficial Labor Day parade. Three years later, some city ordinances marked the first government recognition, and legislation soon followed in a number of states.

Then came May 11, 1894, and a strike that shook an Illinois town founded by George Pullman, an engineer and industrialist who created the railroad sleeping car. The community, located on the Southside of Chicago, was designed as a “company town” in which most of the factory workers who built Pullman cars lived.

When wage cuts hit, 4,000 workers staged a strike that pitted the American Railway Union vs. the Pullman Company and the federal government. The strike and boycott against trains triggered a nationwide transportation nightmare for freight and passenger traffic

At its peak, the strike involved about 250,000 workers in more than 25 states. Riots broke out in many cities; President Grover Cleveland called in Army troops to break the strikers; more than a dozen people were killed in the unrest.

After the turbulence, Congress, at the urging of Cleveland in an overture to the labor movement, passed an act on June 28, 1894, making the first Monday in September “Labor Day.” It was now a legal holiday.

With the power of the corporation over the individual at a level in many way comparable (except for violence) to the 1880s, it is important to reflect how the equation between the people who do the work and those who profit from that work has changed over the last fifty years. 

Here is the future of labor in the United States.   Think how this disruptive technology effects the wages of workers as the number of jobs shrinks and the ramifications for social programs such as Social Security and Medicare.