Our American and Canadian celebration of Labor and the contributions of the labor union movement was set for the first Monday in September to consciously separate it from the international workers day observed throughout much of the world on the 1st of May. Me, I’ve always felt conflicted about this.
On the one hand our American left has had little stomach for command economy systems that mark much of the world socialist movement, particularly communism and instead has persistently advocated for those variations of mixed economies that ensure and even foster economic creativity and enterprise, while controlling the naturally occurring excesses of any market driven system, particularly the inclination to consolidation and monopoly, as well as cutting corners to ensure profit even when it means poisoning the atmosphere or painting spoiled meat while also channelling a significant proportion of the fruits of enterprise to include both the entrepreneur and the betterment of the community as a whole.
On the other hand the movement like the September celebration itself has been subject to marginalization and cooption pretty much from its beginnings. Today the American labor movement has been decimated through a conspiracy of persistent right wing hostility to the very idea of social responsibility and pervasive shortsightedness, steadily decreasing competence, and glaring pockets of corruption on the part of too many of the unions themselves.
Here’s a fact too many are unwilling to face head on. We are and we have always been an oligarchic republic. In good part, not completely, but in large part ours is a government by and for the upper classes. Much of this has been hidden by our resistance to even admitting there are classes. Hence everyone is some kind of middle class, perfect camouflage, hiding the real stratification within our community. It makes the lower classes feel good, and upper classes feel safer.
And, at the same time, the way our system has evolved there is genuinely if hesitantly a responsiveness to populist concern. A mixed bag as our history can attest. At its worst populism has been in service to that perennial human favorite when things are rough, hostility to the outsider, often encouraged by parts of the moneyed classes seeking to distract people from their own various oppressions (think slavery, and Asian and other race based exclusions). But at the same time that populism has included some pretty wonderful things, concerns for those who are not rich, and at times even in support of the very victims of that targeting as outsiders (think race, gender, and sexuality) and, increasingly expressing concern for the environment, late to that table, and maybe too late. But it is happening.
As I reflect on these things I think of Winston Churchill’s “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” But I fear with an emphasis on the “worst.” We live in, as the Chinese curse goes, interesting times.
As noted, today our American labor unions have been decimated. And attacking them has proven a useful tactic in appealing to the poorer. While it appears that the unemployment rate has dropped to five percent for the first time since the Great Recession, itself a glaring example of both the dangers of unwatched and under regulated business, the new employment landscape has left the country with an even greater divide between that tiny percentage truly rich, a still substantial class of information manipulators who are extremely well compensated, but who live the most precarious of lives, and a growing, growing underclass where the difference between unemployed and employed is ever less distinguishable.
And then there’s the environment. Actually it is here I begin to have a tiny sense we do not have to follow the currents that appear to be taking our society down.
Twenty-five years ago my spouse Jan and I left California so I could serve a congregation in Wisconsin. We left the Bay Area and drove south to visit family in Los Angeles before turning East. As we peaked the Grapevine on Interstate Five and dropped into the Los Angeles basin, the foulness of the atmosphere was plainly visible. We could see green and yellow tendrils lapping over the mountain. And as soon as we dropped in our eyes began to hurt and we found ourselves coughing. A quarter of a century later we have returned to retire near that family in LA. The air is clean. My take away is that we human beings can change things. It is hard. I do think it might even be too late. But, I’m not at all sure of that. And it is in our human nature to try to survive. So, I have a measure of hopefulness.
And it extends to the rest of our shared culture as Americans. I believe we can turn from the excesses of the market economy to which we are devolving, where the majority have been tricked into thinking they profit from a lack of regulation and socially informed direction. One of my heroes John Steinbeck famously observed how “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” That, and there have been demagogues who have successfully turned the lower classes among us against each other over and over again.
But we don’t have to go that way down into a new darkness, where a tiny number do very well while the vast majority live lives of servitude, all the while the world is poisoned. Maybe we will. But, we don’t have to.
This Labor Day, maybe people will pause, and look,and reflect.
And, maybe, just maybe, we might consider what people are selling us that may not be good for us either as individuals or as a community. If we do we will still be an oligarchic republic, with an interest in enterprise and creativity, but with that energy turned largely to the good of all.
Think of what it might be like where those who want to make a ton of money and have the skill and energy to do it are respected. And. at the same time. If we all had access to decent educations, whoever are parents are. That working conditions were always safe and where wages provided a decent life, with ample time for those who work to have other interests. Where no one need fear for their safety or life or livelihood because of their color or whom they love. That we all had reasonable access to the range of health care. That it was thought a human right to have decent shelter. And those who are unable to work for any of the many reasons that occur in the life of a person were cared for with respect and dignity. And that we respected the limits of our planet and environment.
A fantasy list? Maybe. But, it really doesn’t have to be.
This could be our country. This could be our world.
And this more than most is a day to consider it, and how to achieve it.
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