Harry Targ
LABOR DAY PARADE, 1882. The first
Labor Day Parade, held in Union Square, New York City, by the Knights of Labor
on 5 September 1882. Wood engraving from a contemporary American newspaper.
https://www.granger.com/results.asp?image=0041831
On the
morning of September 5, 1882, 30,000 men and women bricklayers, freight
handlers, printers, blacksmiths, railroad workers, cigar makers, furriers,
seamstresses and other workers lined up to begin the first Labor Day march in
New York City. Many of the marchers carried signs with such messages as
"Labor Will Be United," "Eight Hours for Work-Eight Hours for
Rest-Eight Hours for What We Will" and "Strike With the Ballot."
The New York
Central Labor Union spread the word about Labor Day and two years later a
national labor organization, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor
Unions, resolved at its convention that the first Monday in September be set
aside as labor's national holiday. It was to be celebrated by all workers,
Black and white, women and men, young and old, skilled and unskilled,
industrial and craft. After years of labor-initiated celebrations, the Haymarket
Affair of 1886, and the rise of a worldwide anarchist and socialist workers’
movements, and growing support for a Labor Day in cities and states around the
nation, Congress finally adopted Labor Day as a national holiday in 1894.
The original
Labor Day was designed to symbolize the demand for the 8-hour day, a healthy
work environment, adequate rest, and basic health and other benefits. It also
was designed to express the pride that workers felt about their role in the
production of all the goods and services in the society. Finally, Labor Day was
a time to mobilize workers for the ongoing struggle to achieve a fair and
living wage, safe and productive worksites, basic economic security, and worker
participation in economic and political decision making.
And the conditions that necessitated the building of a
strong labor movement still exist.
First, since the 1970s, there has been
increasing class polarization. Gaps in distributions of wealth and income have
grown. Real wages of workers have stagnated since the 1970s. In addition,
workplace benefits have declined, including pensions. Permanent jobs have been
replaced by contingent labor. The percentage of unionization of the work force
has declined by two-thirds. A recent study estimates that
only one-fourth of jobs today are “good jobs”, paying at least $16 an hour. And,
on the other hand, the share of income and wealth accumulated by the top one percent or ten percent or twenty percent, the entire privileged class, has
risen. The rich have gotten richer while the poor poorer.
Second, since the 1980s, workers and their families have experienced downward mobility, that is their social and economic position has declined. This has occurred because stable, well-paying jobs have disappeared due to outsourcing, capital flight, and deindustrialization. By any number of measures, the “American Dream” of helping one’s children to move up the status ladder has been reversed.
Third, the increasing accumulation of wealth and power through tax cuts, deregulation of financialization, and declining government support for public services have encouraged the privileged to embark on class secession. Increasingly, the privileged class withdraws its support for public institutions as it funds its own private schools, libraries, recreational facilities, and additional social services. The rich build gated communities, electrify their fences, hire private guards to protect themselves and create private institutions to replace public ones. Robert Reich once referred to the “secession of the successful” which refers to the elites combining “traditional forms of physical and social separation and increasing numbers of privately provided services with the ideology of neoliberalism, an idea system of free market fundamentalism that encourages and legitimates hostility to public institutions.” Sociologists Earl Wysong and Robert Perrucci concluded that “class secession today involves both a separatist social identity and a conscious secessionist mentality.”
In sum long-term trends in the United States since the 1970s have led to growing wealth and power at one pole and increasing immiseration at the other pole. The idea of a broad middle class is further away from reality than ever.
For the vast majority of Americans
economic security is declining. And, most importantly, the privileged class,
which has built its wealth and power on the growing immiseration of the new
working class, including service and part time workers, is physically, financially, and ideologically seceding from the
system that historically claimed to provide at least some institutional support
for enrichment of the citizenry at large. Data also shows how the brutality of the new class society particularly impacts on people of
color, women, immigrants, and other traditionally marginalized people.
The specific issues of the 21st century are different than the 1880s but the general concerns of workers remain the same
-Workers
must stop plant closings and the millions of good jobs that have been lost
because of capital flight.
-Workers must stop
the shift in the economy from well-paying jobs to part-time and minimum wage
jobs. Workers must reverse the 30-year decline in real wages that Americans
have experienced.
-Workers must
challenge the decline in health and safety in the workplace.
-Workers must
struggle to reverse the rise in the numbers of homeless people and the
declining ability of people to pay for health care.
-Workers must join with
their brothers and sisters from Mexico, Canada, Asia, and Africa to oppose the
pitting of underpaid and overworked men and women in one country against men
and women in other countries using the excuse of "free trade."
-And finally, it is
clearer now than ever that worker solidarity worldwide is needed to stop
militarism, wasteful military spending, and war.
To achieve
these goals, workers have to combat the economic and political assault on trade
unions which reached massive proportions in the 1980s and 1990s. Without trade
unions, there would have been no Labor Day proclaimed in 1882 and there would
be no Labor Day in 2025.
https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/search?q=the+new+class+society
