The meaning of Labor Day - 4 September 1987

The first Monday in September has been, for nearly 100 years, a national holiday called Labor Day.

It was so proclaimed by President Cleveland in 1894, when he signed a bill making all the states follow the example of a humble carpenter, one Peter McGuire, who put up to the New York city fathers an idea 12 years before. His idea was to mark the end of the summer, when children went back to school and the labourer to his labouring, by holding an annual procession up Firth Avenue, to celebrate not so much the working people of America, as the working people who had joined the union.

It was a pretty daring thing to do in those days, when unions were about as acceptable to industrialists and conservative businessmen as Communists today. There were some carefully interrupted processions, cracked skulls and sporadic chaos. But, in New York city, where every other Irish cop probably had a brother who had joined the union, the police protection came to be impeccable and as organised labour was seen, regretfully, by many employers to be the way of the future, first 31 states and then all of them followed New York in holding a parade on the first Monday in September.

And the bigwig politicians elbowed each other aside for the privilege of making the big speech to the big crowd, saluting the glory of the working men, and the virtues of honest toil. The parades and the speeches in every city, and also in every hamlet, were going on in my early time here, but then, so was the annual get-together, or encampment, of veterans of the 1865 Civil War.

In 1932, after all, there were still more than handful of octogenarians who had fought on the Southern or the Union side, and who picked some old battlefield for a sober, and I must say, quite often, a very moving reunion. But of course if there was a veteran of the Civil War alive today, he’d have to be at least 138.

Well, today I suspect that not many Americans under 40 could tell you why next Monday's holiday is called Labor Day. The holiday is there but the cause is as vanished as Empire Day in Britain. Still, I don’t doubt that those 13, 14 men running for next year’s presidency, especially the seven so-called Democratic dwarfs, who are against the administration, they will probably show up in Detroit, or Pittsburgh or some other industrial city, and promise a workers utopia, to be ushered in on 20 January 1989 when they are elected.

But to everybody else Labor day is the theoretical end of the summer. I say, theoretical because the theory is that all the public beaches will close, families lucky enough to own or rent a summer cottage by the ocean, on a lake, by the mountains, will shut up shop and return to the city.

The fact is that the climate of most places is such that September and October are warm, sunny, usually brilliant months, and, in the more or less continuous prosperity this country has enjoyed for the past 30 years, more and more people take long weekends through the fall, and think of the working year really beginning only after the baseball championships, the World Series, end in mid-October. Still for parents, young and middle-aged, Labor Day is the end of the summer fun and games – back to school, back to college.

Back to college these days confronts the parents with the grim prospect of budgeting anything between $12,000 and $18,000 a year, some places higher, for the education of an offspring during the regulation four years in college. Except, I hasten to say, for children going to the state universities where tuition is free, thanks to the foresight of the legislators in those states that long ago started the state university system and charge the bill to the taxpayer. But at the privately-endowed or self-sustaining universities and colleges, the tariff is alarming.

The other day, an enterprising father put an advertisement in three of our papers, appealing to all civic-minded readers to club together to send his son to Yale, the college of the young man’s choice. Eighty thousand dollars the father thought would be about right, for the required four years. You can imagine the instant and voluminous response of other parents protesting that the father's enterprise was only exceeded by his gall. It will be interesting to see how much, if anything, he collects.

I should say that Americans, both in song and story, and in spite of the famous Disney character, are just as adamant as any other people, in refusing to believe that the world owes them a living. But while we have all accepted this hard fact, there has sprouted a generation which does seem to assume that it has a right to set conditions for its employment. Of course, that was the whole reason for the rise, and, acceptance, of labour unions.

Today, however, you may have heard organised labour in America, is a smaller percentage of the workforce than at any time since the beginning of the big national organising drive of the 1930s. By the late '30s and '40s it had got up to, I think, something like 30%. It’s now hovering, below 20%.

So, say that four workers in five, don’t belong to a union, it’s an astonishing figure and, easily jumps to the conclusion that working man, from the labourer to the office worker to the computer programmer, is pitifully bereft of protection, and is back at the mercy of the buccaneering employer. Not at all.

What has happened throughout industry and manufacturing, and the service industries, is that the private companies, learning from the long embattled experience of the '30s and beyond, have come to offer, automatically as a term of employment, what the private companies of long ago fought to resist, then accepted and then were almost proud to offer.

I think of all those bloodily-fought issues: a legal minimum wage, time and a half, the five-day week, illness benefits followed by the three weeks' or a month's holiday, the company recreation club, the tennis courts, swimming pools, the cost-of-living adjusted pension, the maternity leave and now, in some firms, the paternity leave, for the young men who have, for a stated time, to attend parenting classes.

Course, I am not saying that every motor car company, cell company, spaghetti manufacturer, offers all these benefits and blessings to everybody who shows up to a job, but in the past decade or so, American companies have had to offer more and more of these incentives, especially in automobile factories, in computer firms, high-tech companies, makers now of semi-conductors and coming soon, super-conductors, in order to hire skilled workers who can compete with the Japanese firms that made such a big thing of regarding their workers as partners in a family firm.

The Japanese, during the past decade, their executives, presidents of firms, have been over here in a steady stream giving instruction almost you might say, giving classes to American executives not only in how to make an automobile, but how to conduct labour management relations, on their model.

Now, the snag here, of course, is that the Japanese worker, for all his company's paternal affection, earns less money than the American workers and in view of the enormous Japanese cost of living, has nothing like the Americans power, or choice as a consumer, and so, the American firms, by copying such Japanese management indulgences, as worker profit-sharer plans, recreations clubs, maternity leaves and so on, have made the cost of their product uncompetitive against the Japanese product. It’s a stalemate, a bind, a chronic unsolved problem.

Well I got off on labour management practices from mentioning that there appears to be a new generation of Americans that not only sees no point in joining a union, since so many of the old union demands are now normal perks of industry and business, but a generation that will condescend to take a job, provided the employer meets some particular demand.

I have rounded up from an employment specialist, reported by USA Today, some of the more audacious of these demands, which, undoubtedly will be received with chuckles by some potential employers, but, as I have checked, are not considered unreasonable by various spritely young people.

For instance, a man who will gladly take on a new job, if he is paid for a three-week holiday before he starts the job, another wants medical insurance to pay for visits to a faith healer, a willingness to take the job only if there is an Italian and a Chinese restaurant close to the office.

Another wants a guarantee that the job will never require trips to New York, Los Angeles, Houston or Miami. (Some of us would certainly second that motion if it applied to Miami and Los Angeles.) And here is a man who’s requested that salary be boosted to meet the exact cost of his wife’s alimony. And here is another who will take the job if he may every year take off Elvis Presley’s birthday.

The most far-out demands are a man who has been out of work for four months, who asks that his new employer, pay him half – two months income. Last, and grandest of all, a man ready and willing to sign a contract with his new firm, if it will bear the cost, of flying in his prize-winning horses from Australia.

The expert in the employment studies who put together this bizarre list, one Dr Robert Haffe, admits that these particular examples of nerve or chutzpah, are, as he says, unrealistic and self-defeating, but, he adds, they are not freakish. Far from singular is the way he puts it.

We have come a long way from the first slogan of the first national labour union of the United States which, in 1886, proclaimed the limits of its demands, "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what you will."

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.