It is Labor Day as this week’s column is posted. This is not a holiday which usually rises to the level of comment here, but given that one-third of the public (according to surveys) doesn’t know what day it is, added to the fact that this is the latest possible date for Labor Day, I thought I’d say a word or two.
I am a life-long supporter of, believer in, student of and beneficiary of the American Labor Movement. I know writing is not really labor.
I am a beneficiary because my father, who became a Teamster after selling the family dairy and remained one for the rest of his life, was able, with just a high school degree, to provide an upper-middle class life to our family of four which included regular vacations, a terrific pension and great medical and dental coverage. Take that, gig economy. For that matter, take that, non-union American journalism.
I became a student of Labor History under Dorothy Gilmore at Benson, whose unit on the subject was so thorough it enabled me to win a college scholarship based on a written labor history essay test.
Alas, with the exception of my three years in the Wire Service Guild at AP and UPI, and my 11 years as a teacher, I spent most of my working life without the protection and support of a union. The Oregon Journal, a Newhouse newspaper, was the stepchild of a bitter strike, so I worked with a staff full of scabs. Wonderful people, great journalists, but most with start dates during the strike that destroyed the paper’s independent existence. Their pay scale was set, although they never acknowledged it, by the union-dues paying staff of the Salem newspaper; Newhouse met that standard in an effort to throttle organizing. If the reporters on the Statesman got a raise, we did too.
CMP, where I spent 21 years, used to say it didn’t need a union because it treated its employees fairly, and for the most part that was true as long as the founders were alive—less so later. The point of a union is that fair treatment of the workers should not depend on the benevolence and good health of fair and reasonable founders, who, more often than not, are eventually bought out by parsimonious idiots who do not view the employees as assets. My “write this someday list” now includes “Why it’s too bad about the end of the Union movement.”
I will close with a quote I can’t find on the Internet. I could swear it was George Meany, and that I’d quoted him before, but I also can’t find it anywhere on my website. I have been repeating it all my life. “Most people who talk about the dignity of labor have never done any.”
For some of my thoughts on labor and class, check out my essay on the subject.
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