Labor Pains

Our current economic crisis is immediate, immense, and irreparable. In response, the United States is going through what can be considered labor pains towards a rebirth of a new economic reality. Idealism is on its way out; reality is what is left us.

What would be ideal is a retirement account fully funded by employers and health insurance payable by taxpayers, not by individual contributors. What would be ideal is a job guaranteed for life.

The reality of our worldwide recession dictates otherwise.

Labor has the most to lose and is fighting the hardest to keep what it has won.

Public employees unions across the nation, from statehouse to statehouse, are nervous and have called strike after strike in the futile attempt to prevent the inevitable – a rollback of hard won rights.

Among those rights are collective bargaining agreements between employees’ representatives and state employers.

That does not mean we should denigrate labor or use labor as a scapegoat for our economic ills. Our power was built upon the backs of Labor.

Labor built our cities, it built our canals and our railroads, and it built our infrastructure. And it saved our nation from tyranny and chaos time and time again.

Case in point, the American Civil War: If it wasn’t for our laboring class who built our northern railroads which transported men and material, and our northern mills and factories which produced our cannons and artillery, the Union may have lost the war and the country would have been split between North and South; Slavery would have flourished longer than it had.

Case in point, World War Two: If it wasn’t for Rosie the Riveter, women who toiled in factories that produced the nation’s warships and weapons, the world just may have succumbed to Japanese and Nazi domination; and women would not have had this experience that motivated them to seek employment rights outside the home years later.

These examples are but a few which have helped give rise to American power and eventual Superpower status.

Labor however was not always seen as a savior in the eyes of government, business, and the American People.

Suspicious of organized labor, the unions were seen as hotbeds of Socialism and Communism which ideology stressed overthrowing the current capitalist democratic system for an egalitarian ideal. This threat, real or imagined, pitted government and Big Business against labor.

Case in point, the Battle of the Overpass: On May 26, 1937, during the Great Depression, labor organizers clashed with Ford Motor Company security guards. Labor demanded fewer hours and more wages; the company, led by Harry Bennett, seeing the strikers as agitators, quashed the revolt, mercilessly beating demonstrators including women, and reporters and photographers gathered to report on the scene, all the while nearby police stood by doing nothing.

After years of struggle and sacrifice, labor won many collective rights including contract negotiations, pay, safety, and benefits.

Today, it appears to union leaders that the government and the American People seem to once again be against labor.

These labor pains may hurt, but once we accept the reality of the current situation, our pain will hopefully recede. We can begin to recover our former luster, but only if we work hand in hand in hand – labor, government, and business working together.