Some Plain Talk for Labor Day

Since I've already written on the equal importance of the Labor Day and May Day holidays for working people in these pages, I don't think there's a need to revisit the history of Labor Day as it rolls around this week. Or to point out that May Day certainly deserves equal status with Labor Day. Suffice to say that Labor Day is the only day when workers of all kinds are officially recognized for building this nation. And for making the United States a better place to live for everybody. Naturally it's true that for most working people - though not all - Labor Day is just a day off. Still, for a vocal minority, mostly trade unionists like yours truly, it is a day to celebrate the many victories of the American labor movement. And it some states - though not all - it's a day when the political establishment feels that it needs to honor labor's achievements ... following which they stick their hands out for the next wave of fat campaign donations. True that it is primarily Democratic Party politicians engaging in this ritual, but a fair number of Republicans happily get into the act if it doesn't cost them too much political capital to do so. I must sadly also hasten to mention that only a vanishingly small number of third party candidates ever get to participate in this particular ritual, left or right, so they don't even really enter the picture in this discussion. The lack of an independent "party of labor" is a critical part of the following discussion, but I must leave it aside for another day in the interest of keeping this editorial reasonably brief.

Now, only a few politicians actually keep any of the many promises they make at Labor Day events around the country. But ironically, only a few labor leaders seem to actually believe that they should get anything in return for their money. And we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions in every presidential election cycle, and significant amounts in between. Not pocket change by any metric. They seem happy to get whatever crumbs are thrown to them from the political table, and even pleased when they are afforded minor victories like long overdue (and woefully insufficient) increases in the minimum wage on the state or national level or changes in some minor regulation that usually only affects one industry.

The very public funeral of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy threw all of this into bold relief for me last week, and put a thought into my head that I decided was worth sharing with the viewing public this week.

Mother Jones, the famous labor leader of the last century, popularized the sentiment she expressed after the Ludlow Massacre in 1914 - exhorting striking coal workers (and by default, the American labor movement) to "Pray for the Dead, and Fight Like Hell for the Living."

And as I watched a sudden frenzy of activity by the Massachusetts labor movement surrounding the ceremony of laying a politician to rest who did a lot for working people - but not nearly as much as he should have or could have - I said to myself, "Man, the American labor movement has got the mourning for the dead part down, but they seem to have nearly completely forgotten how to fight for the living."

I mean in an age where the labor movement provides the Democratic Party the biggest chunk of non-corporate money that it gets and fields the only major grassroots machine that the party has to get the vote out in many parts of the country - but can't even guarantee its success in winning back regulations like the Employee Free Choice Act that it had already won back in the 1930s - what else am I supposed to think.

This is an age when the Service Employees International Union - the biggest labor union standing in a dwindling field of unions that now only represent 8 percent of the private sector workforce nationally - rather than mobilizing its not inconsiderable resources to slam dunk the EFCA instead gets itself embroiled in a massive internal fight with its former health care division in California (now a breakaway union called the National Union of Healthcare Workers) over union democracy issues and also inserts itself in the middle of a huge fight between two halves of a once-merged "super union" the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union.

This is an age when - rather than back single-payer health care as the only option that will truly create a desperately needed national health care system and virtually eliminate the hated and criminal health insurance companies that make vast profits out of people's misery (and refuse to cover nearly 50 million Americans) - the major union federations, AFL-CIO and the SEIU-controlled Change to Win meekly line up behind President Obama's doomed "public option" plan (that isn't). All the while feeding their membership the line that this so-called public option is the same thing as a real public health care plan that ensures that "everybody is in, and nobody is out."

This is an age where the labor movement allows itself to get outflanked by corporate-bankrolled PR operations on both the EFCA and national health care fights - to the point where hundreds of thousands of working people that should be solidly behind both reforms in their own interest are now in opposition to them. Hell, just today I saw a Comcast linesman riding around with that racist freak show of a flyer featuring Obama's face made up as The Joker from the recent Batman movie with the legend "Socialism?" underneath. In Cambridge, no less - supposedly one of the most left-wing places in the country (although it really doesn't deserve that moniker anymore ... if indeed it ever did).

I know we're all supposed to think that "wow, Richard Trumka, the fiery former United Mine Workers leader is about to take over the helm of the AFL-CIO from John Sweeney" which is supposed to signal some kind of big change. But I don't buy it. [At least not yet.] Lots of labor leaders can give a fiery speech. Yet time and time again, I see the same labor leaders go hat in hand to politicians that working people have bought and paid for with their union dues and have that hat shoved where the sun don't shine by those politicians on pretty much every vote of consequence at every level of government. Even when the Democrats are in full control at the federal level. Like now.

So my message for the American labor movement - and all working people in Boston and beyond - this Labor Day is ... think hard over the next few weeks about whether you want everything the movement has built in the last 200 years to evaporate like so much dry ice in the years to come. Or whether you all want to get serious and make labor into a truly powerful force for social justice again.

Because if you all don't want to fight like hell for the living, then you sure as hell better get ready to pray for the dead, early and often - both figuratively, in the sense that the labor movement as we've known it will end in that scenario. And concretely, since tens of thousands die every year from lack of health care on the one hand, and bad labor conditions on the other. The very things that reforms like EFCA and national health care are supposed to ameliorate. And more and more of those that don't die are consigned to bad jobs that don't pay enough to support families on - which creates a whole cascade of bad political, economic, social and cultural consequences that this society is increasingly unprepared to deal with in a rational way.

That's my two cents. Happy Labor Day.

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston, and a Steering Committee Member of the National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981 - Boston Chapter