Labor Day and school closures - 3 September 1993

So here at last is the possibility of an end to steaming days and muggy nights! Come Monday, the first Monday in September, Labor Day, so called because 119 years ago, a New York carpenter one Peter McGuire thought there ought to be an annual holiday between Independence Day and Thanksgiving to celebrate what was then and for many generations since called the working man.

In those days, the 1880s, a politician would be no more against the working man than against mother or Santa Claus. The definition of a working man was the same for everybody, a skilled worker. And Peter McGuire thought it time to found a carpenters union as a stimulus to other skilled trades and celebrate it with a parade and so in New York it was.

It was only 12 years after McGuire's initiative that President Cleveland signed a bill making the first Monday in September forever a national holiday, so next year will be the 100th Anniversary of Labor Day. You may have noticed my stress on "skilled", unskilled workers weren't a threat to anybody, they were always available in large numbers and from the turn of the century on by the millions, poor immigrants who plainly could have no say in the terms of their employment. So though craft unions were well established by the 1910s, unskilled labour was on its own and the unions failed to penetrate a great range of industrial labour until the Depression years of the 1930s, which is when Labor Day became a big noisy trumpeting national affair, parades everywhere, bellowing speeches from labour leaders to huge rallies in public squares. The president, whoever he was, he was usually Franklin Roosevelt giving a special solemn fireside radio talk on the eve of Labor Day and/or getting out of solemn proclamation expressing the external gratitude of the American people to the men and women who made all things possible by the sweat of their brow.

Well the vanishing of Labor Day as a national festival is one of those social phenomena that happens so gradually there not noticed till they've gone, like the vanishing of the drug store as a sociable centre and lunch counter and only incidentally in one corner a place that filled prescriptions. For, ooh I should say 10, 15 more years, there have been no parades, few speeches, cursory proclamation by the sitting president. Why is this? Nobody I know has given me a satisfactory answer, but the steady in decline of unionism must have a lot to do with it. After the great organising campaigns of the 1930s and the later merging of the national craft union with the national industrial union, one third of working Americans in all sorts of jobs belong to a union. Today, 85% of employed Americans don't belong to a union.

Labor Day for most of us is simply the last day of the summer holidays, it's the day when everybody on holiday shuts up the rented summer cottage, comes in from the seashore or the mountains when families get home early to pack the children off to bed and make ready for the opening of the schools on Tuesday that's the theory that's the clockwork annual practice. But to the anger and despair I should guess hundreds of thousands of parents around the country, the public schools in some cities will stay closed for a week two weeks, a month, who knows.

In Chicago, 400,000 pupils were told last week that the schools couldn't open until something was done about a $1 billion debt or as we poignantly called it, shortfall. The governor of the state of Illinois had just signed a bill for bidding rates, what Americans call property taxes to be used to sustain the school budget, so some other institution or method will have to be found, probably a new whacking great school bond issue backed by a friendly bank. I'm sure it will happen. We read every day of great corporations, famous firms declaring bankruptcy under a law that's become a godsend to collapsing big businesses. Chapter 11 – file under this famous law and the trustee approved by the owners and the creditors is appointed to re-organise your bankrupt firm and keep it going.

The creditors, the security holders of course, are going to have their existing claims reduced, but the alternative is for the owner to go bust under Chapter 7, which happens after the courts have decided that reorganisation is a hopeless prospect and the firm had better be liquidated. I doubt that the public schools of Chicago are going to be liquidated.

New York City has a different problem and one that must look as bad as insolvency to Mayor David Dinkins who's running for re-election in November and needs all the political booster shots he can get. The 1,069 city schools will positively not open on Tuesday, probably not the next Tuesday or the next. One city official guessed the likeliest date would be 4 October. The problem is asbestos.

I'm sure I mentioned sometime in the past year, the enormous job this city and many others was undertaking in stripping all public buildings and private apartment buildings of any remaining asbestos insulation. Asbestos we learned in school long ago is a fibrous form of magnesium and calcium silicate, which does not catch fire and so is an incomparable material for insulation. By the way, I hope it will be of morbid or ironical interest to note in passing that the word derives from the old Greek name for a fabulous stone that once set on fire could not be quenched. Asbestos has been since the late 19th century a tremendous world industry, all sorts of uses – drop curtains in theatres, perhaps the most conspicuous fireproof wall linings and boiler pipe backing, brake linings, tiles, protective gloves and on and on. Although the Soviet Union wouldn't report its total deposits, it was thought to be about third or fourth in total production. Canada, which I imagined as lately taken a beating was responsible for 60% of the world's production. So, as we say in New York, what's to be frightened for?

Well again, I have a creepy feeling that I talked about this some years ago, on second thought maybe not, because I remember very vividly a pledge the first time I heard about asbestosis, which is a lung disease that comes from protracted breathing in of asbestos particles. It was from a doctor friend of mine then at the Mayo Clinic who like the hero doctor in AJ Cronin's The Citadel had in his practice come across men with lung trouble that to him was at first very baffling, it wasn't any of several familiar lung afflictions, it came out that all the sufferers had on their job as construction men, builders, plasterers and similar trades been fairly constantly exposed to asbestos dust. This doctor came to make a specialty of it and at one point he was looking into the incidence of the disease in, shall I discreetly say, a mountain community. He happened also to be something of an amateur geologist and after looking over a geodetic map, he saw that throughout one range close by a city there was a long and deep vein of asbestos, he swore me to lifelong secrecy. The point was that the city's water supply arose from the mountain spill and while the presence of asbestos deep in the mountains posed not the slightest hazard to life or limb, don't breath a word my friend said or the entire city will sue the state or god or somebody. I never breathed a word.

Well for the past two years or so, they've been very busy taking the asbestos out of the New York City schools. And last month on 6 August, the mayor ordered an emergency inspection of the thousand-odd schools to make sure that they were all free from any asbestos hazard, gun-toting 11-year-olds are bad enough, you don't want to have to cope as well with asbestosis. August the 6th seemed rather late as Mayor Dinkins political opponents are pointing out. All that came out by Friday of this weekend was that the inspection was not complete and that the schools could not open till later in the month at best. Need I say that hundreds of thousands of parents who arranged their life's and their family budgets around the regular school re-opening are now breathing outrage what to do with one million kids on the loose?

And there's a little social novelty that is guaranteed to increase,to inflame just a normal amount of outrage, it is and it's already epidemic across the United States, the new digital telephone system. Briefly, American telephones have been since the invention of the telephone the envy of the world, before you could dial anywhere outside your town, the operators would give you the new address of a vanished tenant, get you a long distance number in a jiffy in every way speedy, courteous putting the burden of inquiry on themselves not you. No more, now you call say as I did a hospital to talk to a doctor friend, a social call. I won't grind your teeth by repeating the intolerable boredom of the procedure itself, just say that a voice comes on "you have reached St Christopher's Hospital, if you wish to continue this call in Spanish dial one, if in English press 2, if you wish to speak to the emergency clinic press 3, if you wish to talk to a particular department press 4 and follow their subsequent instructions, if you want to reserve a hospital room press 5, if you wish to proceed in either language go back to 0 and press the key, if you wish and on and on and on". I used to make say six business calls in 15 minutes; I know make three out of four every half hour, the fourth I can't get. I sent my doctor a funny postcard.

Imagine the raging ordeal of these thousands and thousands of frustrated parents who not only don't know when the schools are going to open but can't reach any official even if he knows. Stay tuned.

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