Employment in America - 9 September 1994

A man from Mars or even a woman from England or Australia hearing that last Monday was Labor Day in this country might obediently look it up in some almanac or other and read that it was started by an Irish carpenter in one of the first New York labour unions in 1882, that it was made a holiday there on the first Monday in September, that 12 years later President Cleveland proclaimed it as a national holiday and that, thereafter, and I quote, "its observance has been celebrated with great parades and demonstrations though latterly with workers convocations, which labour leaders use as public forums". Is that so. Well, as Duke Ellington said, there's been some changes made.

Last Monday evening, it was quite casually announced somewhere long in a network news programme that today's New York City Labor Day parade was cancelled, why? For, it said, "lack of interest". When I think back to the huge parades before the Second War and the big labour rallies in public squares across the country in the later years, I think the better reason to explain Monday's cancellation would be lack of muscle in the union movement, did you ever think you'd hear anyone today use the 19th-century phrase "the union movement", here always called "organised labour".

I didn't see any pictures, any television coverage of any other Labor Day parade, except, ah one, in Brooklyn. It wasn't celebrating labour or union labour, it was just a happy demonstration that Brooklyn is now the home of a new generation of West Indians, it was called a West Indian parade and it was very colourful and gay in the old sense. And if the Russians were by nature colourful and gay in the old sense, perhaps there would have been a Russian parade in Brooklyn of many many thousands. For one part of Brooklyn is so exclusively lived and loved and worked in by immigrant Russians that it's the nearest we've come in modern times to the quarters – the Chinese quarter, the Italian quarter – of the first decade of this century before the different immigrants grew bold or relaxed enough to get out and live in what we now call the mainstream, which incidentally has always been a thrashing gurgling river fed by many different tributaries.

The recent Russian migration into Brooklyn settled down in, wouldn't you know, Brighton Beach, which lies east of Coney Island, fallen by the way into miserable tattiness and decay … that's Coney Island.

Do you remember the time no more than 10 years ago certainly when we all talked about the Iron Curtain that the Kremlin put up against the immigration of Jews to Israel or anywhere else. Well when the curtain was lifted, they came roaring out and today in Brighton Beach there are about 30,000 recent Russian immigrants, mostly Jews, so far as I can gather they have not found the streets paved with gold, but they inhabit a town of their own, which is closer to an earthly paradise than any they have ever known. Stroll along the beach front this week in a gorgeous foretaste of brilliant fall weather and amid the rumble and splutter of the Russian language and feeling like a man from Mars or even Blackpool, you pass groceries stacked with many black breads with herrings, kasha, yes and sturgeon and caviar. Also incidentally, vodka from Connecticut – a digression.

In my time of covering the United Nations, I knew one or two Russian delegates casually – they saw to it that any contact with the progeny of the fascist imperialist beast was casual, I noticed that they bought and drank American vodka. And one day the only time a Soviet citizen except Mr Gromyko ever leaned close to whisper to me, the man confessed that he didn't like the famous Russian vodka that every American snob found compulsory to stock – it smells he said of perfume.

Anyway, if you want to buy an amber necklace, Russian needlework, a nested doll, stroll along Brighton Beach Avenue before you settle down in a sidewalk cafe and with your new-found Russian friends, sip a vodka, or slurp a glass of tea, you can then when you get home tell your friends that one of the things you most enjoyed on your visit to New York was a day at as it's known Little Odessa by the sea.

Well apparently, the the new residents of Little Odessa had as little concern about Labor Day and its meaning as the rest of the city and judging by the absence of parades or workers convocations the rest of the country. I did see on the tube once small protest march outside a tyre, a rubber tyre company, the striking employees were marching up and down a short sidewalk with placards, the most conspicuous of which said "get rid of the Poles who don't care for the working man". I suspect the cause of the lack of interest in a Labor Day parade is rooted in that word "working man". The sight of these pickets could have been a clip from a motion picture news reel of the 1930s.

There's the rub and I think the continuing error of organised labour, the clinging to the old instinctively confrontational language the working man, the workers versus the bosses. The failures of labours propaganda, you could say, is a failure to make the language of its publicity and its debates catch up with reality. Sixty, 50 years ago, young idealistic Americans – disillusioned with, as we later saw, a very restricted and bilious view of Wall Street – accepted the idea that the workers were getting a raw deal or no deal at all during the Depression, and many of the young who never became communists either card-carrying or freewheeling yet used the Marxian jargon, some of which described the truth, more of which asserted what Mr Lenin and his followers wanted to believe was the truth.

At the centre of protesting labour was the phrase the "working classes", so late as 1948 when the leftist liberal Henry Wallace ran for president. Wallace ran for president, his campaign song celebrated lumberjacks and teamsters and there's farming boys from Texas and there's miners from Kentucky and fishermen from Maine. The assumption everybody picked up with this language was that the working people were always lower class and were always manual workers. And it's true, the the early unions were craft workers and the later ones that overpowered the craft unions were the industrial unions, which battled the system as they called it in the depressed '30s, got the right of collective bargaining, abolished the closed shop, established a minimum wage and reaped pension and health benefits they never had before.

The late '30s was the peak of union membership around 40%, today it's 23%. Since then, the farm population has drastically dropped again, industrial unskilled labour is more and more being taken over by technology, but the biggest the most continuous change, which has anachronised the meaning of the phrase working classes is the immense increase in what we call the service industries, all the millions of people who are not in the economic sense productive but maintain things, serve people and things.

I see the Oxford Dictionary definition of the word service as a branch of public employment or a body of public servants concerned with the supply of some particular need and, believe me, that was first so defined in 1685, 21 years before it started even to be used to describe the armed forces.

However, even though it has that hoary history, I don't remember any great organising campaign in labour's heyday here of the service population, but today most workers, the vast majority are in the middle-class and the service worker has through history covered everything from a blacksmith to a computer programmer.

Here I have put together the latest figures on employment in the United States, who does what. You'll see that it bears no relation to the rhetoric and the slogans of the older and some of the younger labour leaders.

In 1900, 37 Americans in 100 worked on farms, today 2 who produced more food than those 37. Now remember the the population of the United States is 258 million, 3 million are farmers. People in managerial jobs big and small are 31 millions and their underlings also non-producers add another 10 millions. Labourers, truckers, machine operators, transport workers of all kinds the whole comes to 17 million. Now sales employees, sales forces and other service workers 36 millions, 12 times the number of farmers. So roughly 3 million people grow our food, another 17 million process it, transport it and join as labour types, machinists maintenance people, that's 20 million of what was once called "working people" but also now there are 77 million workers of other sorts, more than half of them in service trades. How dramatically the word servant has changed since the Edwardian days of Richard Bellamy and Mrs Bridges.

Today, I have one friend, a very rich, very old man who has a servant – a maid, cook from Colombia.

There's much talk, I was going to say in the leftist press but there really isn't any leftist press with a survival-rate circulation. The liberal press has, however, taken note of the word coming from the president of the once-towering AFL-CIO, the great national industrial union, that there's going to be a great revival of organised labour. We're waiting.

At the moment as I speak though, it may end or have ended with a bang any minute there's one big national strike, the baseball strike. But since this is a conflict between multimillionaire bosses and downtrodden millionaire workers, the average baseball player's salary is a million and a quarter dollars a year. Most people don't seem to see in the strike any sign of a more enlightened view of the working classes.

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