Sunday, September 5, 2010

In Memoriam of Labor Day

Ah, Labor Day, the last hurrah of the summer season. As a child, I remember thinking of it as the last weekend of freedom, so I would throw myself into playing non-stop until Monday night. We usually camped, so I would come home sore and sun burnt, but happy.

Now, my husband is the choir director at our church, and we usually have the “start of the season” choir party at our house over Labor Day weekend. Getting the yard and everything ready, I still get sore and sun burnt, just not by playing.

My husband and I heard a news story on the radio about the Labor Day parade in downtown Peoria. He commented that soon the holiday would be a moot point, unless they celebrate it overseas. It made me wonder about the original reasons for Labor Day.

125 years ago, the Central Labor Union in New York City celebrated a workingman’s holiday. The next year, in 1884, they selected the first Monday in September as the holiday, and urged organizations in other cities to follow their example. By 1895, many industrial centers in our nation celebrated the Labor Day holiday.

In June of 1894, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September a legal holiday dedicated as a “tribute to the American Worker”. The first proposal of the holiday suggested that celebration include street parades to exhibit to the public “the strength and spirit de corps of the trade and labor organizations”, followed by a festival for the recreation and amusement of the workers and their families.

“Ay”, as Hamlet said, “There lies the rub”.

It seems somewhat ironic to celebrate the American Worker, when they seem to be an endangered species as “outsourcing” becomes the word of the day for most corporations.

In full disclosure I must admit, I’m not neutral on this subject, my husband’s job was outsourced to India. Unfortunately, that’s no longer unusual.

A friend, who works as a temp at a major corporation, told us that her employer was bought out by a Chinese company. The help desks in many companies are no longer the next floor up, but are on the other side of the world. Order from a catalogue and most likely the person on the other end of the phone is not in this country. Same with tech support, and the person who tells you his name is Brad, but you suspect it’s a little more exotic than that.

Companies, lured by the siren call of more profits, abandon their American workers to build factories in every foreign country that promises an abundance of workers willing to work for slave wages. Ironically enough, the “Big Box” stores sell these cheap and sometimes dangerously defective foreign products back to the American Worker at low prices, thus completing the vicious circle.

The unions that started Labor Day have lost a lot of their clout as companies threaten to move to another country whenever negotiations don’t go their way, leaving their employees to get new jobs that are more secure. Sadly, these jobs include phrases like, “Do you want fries with that?”, and “Welcome to (insert the Big Box store of your choosing)”.

And so it goes. My fear is that someday the true reason for Labor Day will someday go the way of the Dodo bird, along with the American Worker.