Today is Labor Day in America, a holiday established in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland following the end of the bloody Pullman strike. Over the years, the holiday has morphed from a celebration of labor (i.e., organized labor) into a "last weekend the pool is open!" kind of celebration. In these days of Republican/ oligarch-funded assaults on organized labor, let's remember a few of the things we owe organized labor:
-- the 8-hour workday/ 40-hour workweek (a.k.a., your weekend);
-- minimum wage;
-- workplace health and safety standards;
-- child labor prohibition;
-- civil rights (the UAW under Walter Reuther shone); and
-- what's left of the American middle class.
As Harold Meyerson notes, the labor movement today is seeing a revival and is skewing much younger:
Today, the unionization efforts that may seem to have sprung out of nowhere are dominated by young workers. While the majority of members in long-established, shrinking industrial and crafts unions are mostly in their forties, it’s 20- and 30-somethings who are organizing at warehouses (Amazon Labor Union leader Chris Smalls is 34), and at retail and food outlets ranging from REI and Starbucks to Chipotle and Trader Joe’s. It’s younger professionals who are organizing at nonprofits, museums, think tanks, and state legislatures, and young aspiring professionals who constitute the grad student unions steadily growing at universities.
For companies like Starbucks that are working mightily to keep employees from having a say in their work conditions, the new unionists pose a particularly knotty challenge. The company can, of course, fire workers and close facilities to keep workers in line. It can offer higher wages or better benefits only to those workers who aren’t going union. Starbucks has done all of that, and more. But there’s an ideological and generational gap between these uppity baristas and the preceding couple of generations of workers whom firms managed more successfully to intimidate. This new generation seems more determined to try to unionize than any since the 1930s.
Have a safe Labor Day!
BONUS: A good news unionization story at Google.
BONUS II: Support for labor unions is at a 57 year high (click to enlarge) --
(Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
