The REAL History of Labor Day and the War on American Workers

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Throughout history, work is something humans have done to provide for our basic needs. In the Bible, the necessity of working for subsistence is attributed to God’s punishment for the original sin of disobedience. Work evolved from the subsistence of hunting and gathering, to more stable farming and trading, to the highly complex and abstract forms of work that we do today.

There might have been times in early human history when work was performed in communal, tribal collectives, or as family-centered self-provisioning. However, the expropriation of labor by humans from other humans has been around for millennia. The most brutal form was slavery, which most modern and enlightened societies have made illegal. Yet, many people continue to do unpaid (or undervalued) work, usually women and people of color. The subject of work implicates power relationships–a subject which is often ignored or neglected in our history books. Today, conversations about work revolve around unemployment rates, job creation, and “skill sets,” subjects defined in the cold and bloodless terms of rationalized economics.

Here in America, freemen (white males) for the most part owned their own labor and small capitals, earning a living as farmers, shopkeepers, and craftsmen well into the 19th century. As corporatized industrial production gradually replaced home and community-based production, workers left their homes to work in factories. In the beginning, it was the men that left their homes to work. In order to engender compliance among men who had previously worked for themselves, the will and independence of the worker had to be broken.

To break the will of the worker, the jobs themselves had to be broken into small, discrete tasks that the worker could perform over and over. The executive (higher-level decision-making) function was divorced from the lower-level, manual functions of the job. Men were also inculcated to view themselves as “workers” and not as citizens, which also helped to keep them compliant (and politically impotent).

The War on Workers was probably most physically brutal during the late 1800s. When miners, railroad and steelworkers protested blatantly unsafe (and often deadly) working conditions, business owners were able to enlist local armed vigilantes to threaten the workers at gunpoint. As industrial barons gained both economic and political power, they were able to enlist armed strikebreaking forces first from local police and sheriffs. This expanded to the organization of state militias, which then were federalized–the National Guard was born in 1877 specifically to neutralize strikers.

As strikebreaking began to look more like warfare, not only the state militias were activated, but federal army troops were sent into mines and textile mills–usually at the request of the owners. Most of us have never heard of the Bayview (Wisconsin) Massacre, the Ludlow (Colorado) Massacre, or the Bisbee (Arizona) deportation. These events sully our congratulatory, jingoist history the same as slavery, the forced removal and murder of Native Americans, and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. We attempt to disavow our dark side by ignoring it.

In the beginning, men were paid a “family” wage, because women were expected to feed today’s worker and breed tomorrow’s. The women’s liberation movement opened the world of paid work to disaffected housewives at the same time men’s wages began to stagnate. Women–whose previously unpaid labor could now be expropriated–followed men into the corporatized workplace on the promise of “liberation.”  When women were preferred as employees in some jobs because they were willing to work for less, men and women began to view each other as competitors. Both women and men now had to work twice as hard to maintain the same standard of living.

In modern times, workers are not so much subjugated by force as they are kept precariatized and inferiorized by a form of surplus powerlessness. The right to organize has been decimated by a multi-prong assault from unfavorable legislation and court decisions driven by Big Money and its minions. The laws that we do have to protect workers are toothless and ineffectual–either because the agencies charged with their enforcement are underfunded or headed by someone who serves the oligarchy.

Perhaps the most insidious weapon in the war on workers is a corporatized media. We are bombarded with stories and images of wealth and glamour that is ours if we only keep working hard enough. Alternatively, “real” people like teachers, autoworkers, university professors. and health care workers are demonized when they stand up not only for their own rights, but also for the wellbeing of their students, customers and patients–i.e., the public. We are proselytized with the values of the plutocrats: greed is good, everyone for himself, and obscene inequality is a sign of divine grace.

Labor Day offers us one day a year to honor ourselves and each other. This war is not over, even if workers continue to lose. It is the day we should dedicate to rise up and challenge everything.