The bloody origins of Labor Day
Bill Federer recounts history of holiday which began with strife
Rosie the Riveter
Labor Day. To appreciate it, one needs to know the history preceding it.
This led to the creation of factories which could mass produce items inexpensively. In America, most factories were in the Northern states. As there was originally no federal income tax, the federal government was financed primarily from:
- Excise taxes on items like salt, tobacco, liquor
- Tariff taxes on imports, making them more expensive so people would buy goods made in American factories
After the Civil War, the North passed more tariff taxes which successfully allowed factories to grow enormous. Textile manufacturing produced items like clothes, glass, dishes and farm tools for a fraction of the previous costs. New ways of making stronger steel led to the building of bridges, buildings, steamboats and mining machinery.
Railroads now could take people safely and inexpensively across the entire nation, opening up unprecedented mobility and opportunity. Inventions and advances in manufacturing made more goods available at cheaper prices, resulting in America having the fastest increase in the standard of living of any people in world history.
President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty in 1886. Immigrants arrived and could get jobs working in factories, where they learned the language and skills.
One such factory was that of George Pullman, who founded the Pullman Railroad Sleeping Car Company just outside of Chicago, Illinois. George Pullman saw that workers needed a place to live, so he built them houses in a safe little village around the factory, deducting the rent from their paychecks. Workers were paid in company “script” which was accepted at the company-owned grocery stores. It was thought to be a utopian workers’ community and worked well for over a decade.
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Then something happened. There was a nationwide economic depression and orders for railroad sleeping cars declined.
In 1893, George Pullman had to make cuts in wages and lay off hundreds of employees, though rent and groceries stayed the same price. Employees walked out, demanding lower rents and higher pay.
The growing discontent was a seedbed for Karl Marx’s theory of class-struggle and the communist redistribution of wealth.
A young worker named Eugene V. Debs led a strike of workers in 1894. Railroad workers across the nation boycotted trains carrying Pullman cars. There was rioting, pillaging and burning of railroad cars.
It became a national issue when mail trains were interrupted. President Grover Cleveland declared the strike a federal crime and deployed 12,000 troops to break the strike. More violence erupted, and two men were killed.
Since it was an election year, President Grover Cleveland thought it would improve his chances of getting re-elected if he appeased workers with a national “Labor Day.” He chose the first Monday in September.
President Grover Cleveland did not choose May 1st, as he did not want Labor Day to be in coordination with the Communist “International Workers Day.”
He also did not choose May 1st as it was the anniversary of the bloody Chicago’s Haymarket Riot, where rioters blew up a pipe bomb on May 1, 1886, killing seven policemen and injured 60 others. Attorney Clarance Darrow gained fame defending the rioters.
The statue dedicated to the police who died in the Haymarket Riot was blown up on Oct. 6, 1969, by Bill Ayers’ militant leftist group “Weatherman Underground” during their Days of Rage. The statue was rebuilt, only to be blown up again by the Weatherman Underground on Oct. 6, 1970.
The 1894 railroad strike-organizer Eugene Debs went to prison and Grover Cleveland lost the election, but Labor Day remained a national holiday.
Unions successfully advocated for an eight-hour work day, a 40-hour work week, minimum wages, safer working conditions and more benefits for workers. With these unprecedented improvements in working conditions came an unintended consequence, namely “out-sourcing.”
After World War II, America helped rebuild Germany and Japan with new factories. These overseas factories, together with their cheaper labor, allowed companies based overseas to produce items for less, whereas in America, the costs were increasing due to:
- Higher wages
- Increased taxes
- Expensive lawsuits
- Burdensome regulations
- Environmental restrictions
- Crony capitalism, where politicians give subsidies, contracts, and relax regulations on companies supporting their reelections and agendas, but companies not supporting them are left at a financial disadvantage and have to go out of business or out of the country
If it becomes more expensive to manufacture in America, jobs will leave. To bring jobs back, it simply has to be made more profitable for factories to be located here than there.
But building the political will is difficult. Global companies funnel large amounts of money into lobbying to keep tariffs low. Political agendas of higher corporate taxes, higher wages and burdensome regulations produce an anti-business climate.
Some political strategies include intentionally raising the unemployment so more people will sign up for welfare benefits and thus be more inclined to vote for candidates promising to continue those benefits.
Beginning in 1950, union membership among American workers shrank from 50 percent to less than 12 percent. Instead of addressing the need to make it more economically advantageous for business to bring jobs back to America, many unions have focused their efforts on increasing membership by recruiting from other occupations, such as government, education, medical professionals, service industry and retail.
Addressing the American worker, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had spent 11 years in Communist labor camps, warned on June 30, 1975: “I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust … and prevent those … because of short-sightedness and still others out of self-interest, from falsely using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road. Because they are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat. … I call upon you: ordinary working men of America … do not let yourselves become weak.”
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