As Labor Day approaches, this would not be a bad time to keep something in mind: It was the unions that built America’s middle class — and often at terrible cost and sacrifice. It was the unions that demanded wages that raised families out of penury; fought for health and life insurance; worked to integrate the trades; made the 5-day, 40-hour week the employment standard; demanded safe working conditions; won paid vacation time; and forced companies to invest in the education of workers’ children.
Repayment of my student loans was guaranteed by the Ford Foundation, so I am a direct beneficiary of that last item and, reared in postwar Detroit, an indirect beneficiary of all the rest. So is every one of you.
One of the best-known events of the Labor movement happened in my home state of Michigan.
In the summer of 1913, a Western Federation of Miners local in the Upper Peninsula declared a wildcat strike against the Calumet and Hecla mining company. At Christmas the miners were still out, and Christmas Eve they gathered on the second floor of a place known as Italian Hall to hold a party for their children. Just as gray wintry dusk came on, a strike breaker appeared in the crowd and shouted “Fire!” The women and children were sent first down the stairs — where they were unable to use the exit. Seventy-three of them, mostly children, died in the crush at the bottom of the steps. There was no fire, and nobody was ever prosecuted.
We all know, of course, of the corruption associated with union figures such as Jimmy Hoffa, and that made it possible to tar the entire movement and set up the union-busting and growing wealth inequality that began with Ronald Reagan; the condition of American workers has been in decline ever since. Most shockingly, the working middle-class that benefited most from the Labor movement are the very demographic who are targeted by the Koch brothers’ propaganda and today support such as Donald Trump and Scott Walker — the people who are cutting their throats.
This Labor Day would not be a bad time, then, to actually give some thought to the Labor movement and its part in making America great.