Why We Need Labor Day More Than Ever Now
Scenes from quarantine — Day 170:
The light was orange all day, pushing through the haze and coating every surface with an angry warmth. It was a tangible residue of the record-breaking heat of the day before and of the wildfires that had been sparked in the high temperatures and now dotted the dry, grassy countryside that surrounded the vast, sprawling concrete metropolis.
California was burning again, or burning still, depending on where you lived and the only real change we could take comfort in was the knowledge that a week ago the state legislature passed a bill allowing inmates who worked as firefighters during their sentence to be hired as professional firefighters at a fair wage after their prison sentence was ended. Happy Labor Day, California!
After years of watching my mother scrape together an hourly wage across long hours into just barely enough to live on with scant few holidays and vacation days hoarded against one of us getting too sick to function, it wasn’t natural for me to conclude that Labor Day wasn’t a day for People Like Us. For years I assumed that this was some other, archaic form of the word “labor” that had nothing to do with the ordinary people who worked for a living. I’d thought it had something to do with the military, a surprisingly common misbelief even today as Americans seek some kind of intuitive symmetry with Memorial Day’s honor of those killed in combat or military service. It is often confused with Veteran’s Day in November, although my mother is a veteran, so even when I was very young I at least knew that wasn’t what we were honoring on Labor Day (though she never seemed to get Veteran’s Day off either).
In reality, Labor Day IS about all workers, or at least it is supposed to be. It came out of the late 19th century labor movement that also saw the formation and rapid growth of labor unions which fought for basic protections in the workplace and in the lives of workers who the large corporations of the day would otherwise squeeze dry of every last drop of productivity before casting about for another able body to consume. The labor movement is the reason that child labor is illegal (and children in this country are required to be schooled instead), why pensions and retirement funds and worker’s compensation exist and the reason that healthcare, or rather, health insurance is tied to employment, and why we have weekends and sick leave.
Of course, all of that was a very long time ago and conditions for workers in our country slipped rather badly in the intervening century, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s with a push by the government to deregulate commerce and weaken the political power of the unions. Today, only around 12% of US workers are members of a labor union, compared to around 70% in Germany. My mother was never a union member, and Kevin and I have only ever briefly been union members ourselves, both while teaching college, he as an adjunct and me as a graduate teaching assistant. And while my mother shared a belief that college-educated individuals didn’t need the same kind of labor protections as blue-collar workers, in our various working lives, all three of us dealt with blatant labor law violations, primarily being obligated to work 12+ hour days for 10 or more consecutive days for a wage that fell far short of being liveable.
With long hours, meagre pay, and little-to-no stability, we were lucky (or at least, constantly reminded we were lucky) to have the jobs we did. Even before the pandemic, conditions for US workers were so awful that Labor Day seemed more like a mockery of the worker than a celebration. Walmart and Amazon, two of the largest employers in this country, routinely had (and still have) employees that relied on public assistance to pay for food and housing and who still fear the slightest misstep will see them fired from their job and unable to bring in sufficient income to survive. Companies like Uber and Lyft defined the “gig economy” where scores of workers were no longer considered “employees” but instead were defined as “independent contractors” and shut out from access to health insurance, sick leave, holidays, and stable and consistent earnings and were even expected to pay basic workplace equipment costs out-of-pocket making it easy for individuals to put in dozens of hours of work in a week and still lose more money than they earned. For all their efforts, they gained little more than a nod of acknowledgement from teachers, the other notable employees who put a large percentage of their income back into materials and supplies for their job.
And then pandemic arrived on these shores and while the stock market continued to bubble up ebulliently, millions of jobs vanished overnight and those jobs that remained demanded that the “essential” workers toil for long hours at high risk of sickness and death. Corporations made placating statements and hustled to pull together marketing to raise their public image even as they fired employees for speaking out about working conditions, and refused (and were not compelled by the government) to provide reasonable sick leave for this long-lasting illness.
The latest assault on workers in the midst of the pandemic has been a bizarre weaponization of “privacy” across a wide range of workplaces. Corporations have made employees sign confidentiality contracts and NDAs so that when they get sick, they cannot speak publicly about their illness or whether their employer is testing and isolating the sick or just forcing them to get back to work to avoid inconvenient labor shortages. Companies are refusing to report illness, refusing to test or to pay for employees to get tested, refusing to inform employees when they have been exposed by a coworker, and insist that they are keeping all these secrets to protect the privacy of their individual workers. We are seeing these policies in big-name for-profit companies like Disney and Amazon, we are seeing them in widespread chains and franchises like McDonald’s and Burger King, we are seeing them in our schools and publicly funded institutions. If you are employed in America right now, if you are going into your workplace, then there is a very high chance you are not allowed to speak out if you get COVID-19 and that you will not be informed if those around you get sick either.
As horrific as this is for “ordinary” US workers, the burdens faced by those in the grey labor markets are even worse. These are the thousands, possibly millions of undocumented workers in this country, the farm laborers and field workers, the day laborers who linger outside Home Depot in search of their next job, the gardeners, the nannies, the housekeepers, the corner fruit vendors (now turned corner mask vendors), everyone who is paid in cash under the table, who takes whatever job they can get to eke by for just a few more days, feed just a few more family members either here or thousands of miles away “back home”. Some are citizens, some are not. Some speak English, some do not. All of them work incredibly long hours with absolutely no benefits, no protections, no security. None of them had a contingency when the pandemic hit and every single one had to weigh the risk of getting sick against the risk of not getting paid while they were still able to work. No one offered them sick leave, paid or unpaid, no one made sure they had masks, gloves, sanitizer to protect them from the virus. To them, Labor Day is just another day to hustle, just another day to try to make ends meet and pray you don’t get sick.
You may have celebrated Labor Day as the end of summer, gathered with friends on beaches or lakes, had a cookout, had a drink, had a laugh. Millions have every year long before COVID-19 and millions did again this year. But the hazy orange sky arced over Los Angeles in an ominous reminder that, for millions more, Labor Day was just another day of hardship, of danger, of work. The quaint, dated, nineteenth century notion that we must protect the poor from the exploitation of the rich and fight for equality, opportunity, and quality of life for everyone in this country had somehow fallen to the wayside.
The truth is, we need Labor Day now more than ever. We need to be fighting for protections for ALL workers, not just the lucky few whose unions have persevered through the horrors of late-stage capitalism. Those who have toiled so long and so hard that one day set aside in the calendar ends up being a day of sleep, clawing back at a whole year of exhaustion, they need us. They need everyone who has the freedom and leisure to celebrate on this one day to spend many, many more days of our year demanding a living wage for all, the freedom to stay home when you are sick without worrying that you will lose your home if you do, easily accessible healthcare as a HUMAN right, not as a grudging benefit of labor. They need opportunities for education, for growth, to seek careers they are passionate about, where they feel meaningful, relevant, fulfilled. To do any less is to continue to observe Labor Day as a mockery of the millions of nameless souls who built this society we benefit from now and who did not get what was fair, what was decent, let alone get their measure of honor. We already block off the square on our calendar every year. It is time we fill that square with meaningful action.
