Labor Day 2025

 

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 the Malignant Fascist's war on workers and unions, 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. 

Harold Meyerson on the Malignant Fascist, the most anti-union president in our history, and how unions can exercise their remaining strength despite his onslaught:

From the viewpoint of American workers, there have been better Labor Days. Donald Trump chose to celebrate this year’s edition by announcing last Thursday his unilateral abrogation of the federal government’s contracts with the unions that represent the scientists, engineers, and other staffers at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which includes the National Weather Service), the Patent Office, and the International Trade Administration. This follows his earlier contract terminations with the unions that represented 400,000 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as those at the Department of Health and Human Services, and other major departments.

According to a study from the Center for American Progress (CAP), these Trump-imposed contract nullifications have cost 81.8 percent of civilian federal workers their right to collectively bargain—and that study came out before last Thursday’s new round of government fuck-you’s to its workers. The total number of workers whose contracts Trump has trashed now exceeds one million, which comes to approximately one-fifteenth of American workers covered by a union contract. Georgetown University labor historian Joe McCartin terms this “by far the largest single action of union busting in American history.”  [snip]

... While union members still constitute about one-third of the nation’s public employees, the near-pathological opposition to unions from American employers, abetted by the erosion of labor law protections, has reduced the union share of the private-sector workforce to just 6 percent. Nor do the nation’s union members constitute a blue wall. In the 2024 presidential election, a majority of blue-collar union members preferred Trump to Kamala Harris, while white-collar and female members preferred Harris. (The two unions that are home to the largest number of both white-collar and female members—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—have played key roles in the nationwide anti-Trump “No Kings” demonstrations.) The political divide within the American electorate—non-college voters aligning with Republicans, college graduates aligning with Democrats—is present within the nation’s labor movement, too. If Democrats and unions can’t win back the working class, the prospects for a Democratic victory so large that it could finally rebuild an NLRA with the power to revive workers’ rights are dimmer than dim.

That said, labor has retained and even enhanced one form of strength: Today, in this populist age, unions are the only American institution whose popularity has been steadily rising, winning 68 percent approval ratings in Gallup’s polling. The gap between that level of approval and the 6 percent unionized share of private-sector workers, however, illustrates how completely the rickety remains of labor law have failed to enable a pro-labor workforce to go union—despite the best, though short-lived, efforts of Biden’s NLRB, and even before the havoc that second-term Trump has inflicted on unions. The 2026 elections may afford unions an opportunity to arrest some of Trump’s attacks; the 2028 elections, an opportunity to reverse them. Even then, the road to re-establishing workers’ rights will be steep.

Labor also has to overcome scab leadership like the Teamsters' Sean O'Brien and do more political education for their members as well as provide resistance, in the form of demonstrations and strikes, to the Malignant Fascist's war on the working class and organized labor.  Labor unions can choose to hang together or hang separately, to quote a Founding Father.  It's also called "solidarity."

Have a safe and happy Labor Day.