Labor Day parade

Ten... ten, twenty years ago, there would have been no question at this time of year what we were going to talk about – an American festival almost as sacrosanct as Washington's Birthday or Thanksgiving – Labor Day, the first Monday in September.

It's still a legal holiday in all the states but the reason for it, how it came to be, has dimmed down the past two decades so that I'd guess there are millions of children who know it only as the last holiday of summer, the day before the schools reopen.

It used to be celebrated with huge rallies and parades in all the big cities and they all had the purpose of commemorating the once-revered but now forgotten name of Peter McGuire who founded, in this city, the carpenters' union. He was, by the way, a socialist – something we do not mention in our fond recollections.

Just 100 years ago, McGuire proposed to the New York City Central Labor Union, which was an affiliation of the growing unions in several trades, that the first Monday in September should be designated as an annual labour day. The city responded and the first Labor Day parade was held here on 5 September 1882. Five years later, a Pacific Coast state, Oregon, where the timber grows high and the lumber-men first organised, Oregon was the first to declare the day a public holiday. Within the next seven years, 31 states, mostly states with developed or burgeoning industries and therefore with embryo craft or industrial unions, followed this example, and in 1894 President Cleveland signed a bill proclaiming Labor Day a national holiday.

In the early years, the parades were long and carried an air and posters of defiance. Unions were suspect in many parts of the country. In the 1880s especially, there was much violence growing out of strikes for, usually, better working conditions. It's almost impossible, today, to credit the genesis of the notorious Haymarket riot in Chicago – a simple, to us, demand for an eight-hour day. Several rebellious workmen were shot and an editor, unfortunately the editor of an anarchist paper, called for a mass protest meeting. The mayor of the city, anticipating the worst, concentrated the unheard of number of 200 police, but the speeches, though eloquent, were mild and the mayor went home.

This provided the police with what they took to be the signal to disperse the rally. They ordered the crowd to break up, when somebody – nobody ever found out for sure who – threw a bomb. Seven police were killed and in the subsequent riot, many people were injured. The 1880s in this country had the wrong climate for staging impartial investigations. Eight men, all dubbed on wobbly evidence to be anarchists, were convicted of conspiracy. Four were hanged and the unions retreated like frightened rabbits from the idea of an eight-hour day.

So, for years, Labor Day from the union point of view seemed to be the day for throwing down a gauntlet to the employers and the general public. The public responded either by staying away or looking on warily, as you might at a duel. And then, down the years, organised labour became a force, a respectable force and the parades shed their defiance and their numbers, shrinking to small meetings of workers and modest parades; sometimes no parade at all.

In the 1930s, in the pit of the Great Depression, Labor Day warmed up again as a recruiting ceremony. Both the National Craft Union and the National Industrial Union, which didn't merge until 1955, claiming strength or survival only in union. There were some bloody scenes then, too, especially in the steel and automobile cities. But since the Second War, when unemployment nosedived out of sight, Labor Day, its protests, its rallying cries, its flamboyance, have dwindled to almost nominal ceremonies which pay the passing tribute of a bow in the direction of that doughty symbol, the American working man.

You'd guess from this little history that the country was a nation of workers with their dues paid up and a calendar marked every other year with a reminder of the day the old contract lapses. Well, the fact is that while the American labour force is officially calculated at 106 millions, only 24 millions belong to a union. In other words, only one employed American in four has a union card. At one time, it was more like two in four. I've not seen any thorough investigation of why this is so.

But things were different this Labor Day. The New York Times had a front-page picture on Tuesday morning which, at a glance, looked like a reprint of a photograph you'd have seen in any big-city newspaper during the 1930s. It showed women striding along Fifth Avenue, carrying placards saying, 'Jobs Not Handouts' and 'Protect the Needy Not the Greedy'. These women were members of the most powerful textile union, the garment workers, which can tell a stormy history in its early days.

For 90 years or so, New York City has been the capital of the garment industry. It became so through the enormous influx over the turn of the century of poor, city-bred Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, of young women especially, whose only saleable skill was what they could sew with their needles. At that time, half the piecework was peddled out to the immigrant's home. The rest was done in sweatshops and, once again, it took a catastrophe to rouse the public conscience, or even the public's awareness that its clothes were being made either by single girls in garrets or by teams of girls working 12-hour days, six days a week, in airless sweatshops.

Certainly only an occasional reporter, on this subject a photographer, could remind people that the raw material for much of New York's manufactured goods was produced by ten-year-old spinners in the cotton mills of the Carolinas. In 1911, a solid, grimy, blouse factory, right here in the city, caught fire. It was so constructed, with two exits only leading to one staircase that 140 people, nearly all of them women, lost their lives. The survivors went on strike and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union was born.

Well, there was a new note struck by the garment workers this year. They were not protesting working conditions. Their posters stressed, 'American-made fashions for American maids' and 'Made in USA'. They were talking in this shorthand about the shirts and slacks and blouses from Hong Kong and Singapore and Thailand that are flooding and depressing the American market as Italian shoes, long ago, depressed the shoe manufacturing towns, and as, most grimly today, Japanese mainly, and German, motorcars have produced the highest unemployment since the Depression in Detroit, the automobile maker of the nation.

In New York last Monday, the parade started in mid morning and didn't end till the late afternoon. By then, 400,000 workers had marched by. It was the biggest, the longest Labor Day parade that even veteran union leaders could remember. The garment workers were only the most conspicuous of the army of marchers because, I suppose, we know that this is their capital and we look to see them, but they were preceded or followed by electricians, glaziers, bakers, leather workers, steel workers, schoolteachers, nurses, furniture makers, printers and by squads of people you would not expect to see in a labour parade – actors, bartenders, ballet dancers and government workers.

It was a peaceable parade, boisterous but merry, with 150 marching bands and Mayor Koch was there in a hard hat, waving like a victorious general in a ticker-tape parade, waving and grinning even as placards floated by announcing, 'Shame on Koch' and 'Dump Koch' – the inimitable Ed Koch interpreted these signs as a form of affection. 'It's like a Yankee ball game,' he said, 'they boo you but they love you.'

Drowned out by the bands and the razzle-dazzle was the most obvious reason why this parade was bigger than ever and presented, as I imagine other parades in other cities did, presented a warning, at least, to the Reagan administration.

In spite of the administration's insistence that the present ten per cent unemployment is a growing pain on the way to an era of new productivity and more jobs provided by a revitalised private sector, working people in the lower and middle classes have got it into their heads, whether rightly or wrongly, that in fact this administration has lifted the tax burden off the rich and the comfortable to the middle class and the poor. And the people who are capitalising on this feeling are the leaders of organised labour.

We have only two months to go to the congressional elections and one startling figure that concerns them is the new imbalance between contributions made by corporations and business to candidates for House and Senate seats and a sudden upsurge in contributions by the unions through their so-called political action committees.

If you'd asked most good political reporters six months ago, they'd have told you, I think, that what with the recession and the heavy unemployment in the basic industries, labour, organised labour, simply wouldn't be able to afford to make sizeable contributions to politicians running for office. It's not so. Business has increased its contributions to electioneering campaigns by between five and ten per cent. The unions have somehow managed to increase their contributions by close to 30 per cent to men and women of their choice, and their choice is almost overwhelmingly to Democrats. Which must mean that union labour, which broke into two camps in the election of 1980, is unifying again under its traditional banner, the Democratic party.

Most political analysts by now are agreed that a decisive turn in the 1980 presidential election was the rebellion of union members against the advice of their leaders to vote for Mr Carter – 43 per cent of the voters from union householders went for Reagan. If all these new signs and portents mean what they say, then something is about to happen which, during the comparative calm of government-labour relations in the past two years, we've overlooked.

The sleeping giant of organised labour is organising once again for political action. This time, agin the government.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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