Labor Day marks the end of summer. RIPR political analyst Scott MacKay reminds us that this holiday that honors workers once meant much more in Rhode Island.
Roll out the grill, fill the cooler, pile the tables high with stuffies and salads. It’s time for one of our beloved holidays, marked these days by a three day weekend devoted to giving summer a sweet kiss goodbye.
We are many years from the time, a century ago, when 10,000 gathered in Providence to view the annual Labor Day parade, then jammed the city piers near Dyer Street to board the steamboat to Rocky Point for a big clambake.
Today is the holiday that organized labor gave us. Along with the 40-hour week, paid vacations and workplace health care benefits. Not to mention social security, workplace safety laws and the strongest middle-class the world has ever known.
It wasn’t that long ago –up until the 1970s and 1980s- that Rhode Island’s economy thrummed with thousands of union manufacturing jobs. Factory toilers could afford to buy homes and send their kids to college. Many even had pensions that helped secure their retirement. In the middle of the 20th Century, about a third of Ocean State workers were union members. There was far less income inequality than , we see in the 21st.
Then came the seismic shift of manufacturing work, first to the American South, then overseas. Companies that remained took a much tougher view of unions. A federal government that once enforced labor laws loosened regulation. The result was a steep decline in private sector union membership, which is now less than 10 percent nationally and in Rhode Island. A byproduct has been a battered working class and wage stagnation. Wages have not kept pace with gains in worker productivity.
Unions have always been the voice for those who lack influence in our democracy. For generations, through wars, depressions and economic change, Americans marched and organized and joined unions. They got better wages and workplace protections not only for themselves, but for other workers. The reforms unions fought for, such as the minimum wage and overtime pay, rippled through the economy and helped their non-union brethren. All of that progress is marked by the union label.
Organized labor has been on its heels for generation or more, but union leaders are finally seeing signs of revival.
George Nee, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, which has about 80,000 members, says he’s more optimistic this labor day than he has been in recent years. The Rhode Island economy is picking up, albeit slowly. Construction projects have been hiring the building trades workers who were crushed by the recession.
Union organizing is up. Nee says unions have won important organizing elections at Butler and Women & Infants hospitals and at Eastland Foods in Cranston . And the National Education Association of Rhode Island just won the right to negotiate collectively for 500 part-time professors at the Community College of Rhode Island.
You think unions these days are merely `contracts are us’ organizations that care only about their members wallets. That isn’t the case – Rhode Island unions were in the forefront of lobbying campaigns for same-sex marriage and raising the minimum wage.
Nee says raising the minimum wage again will be a top priority of unions when the 2017 General Assembly convenes. On New Year’s Day, the minimum wage in Massachusetts will be $1.40 per hour higher than Rhode Island, which Nee says is unfair to Ocean State workers in such industries as big box retailing and fast food.
Labor’s gains have never come easy. Rhode Island’s legacy of labor strife is long and florid. In the great Textile Strike of 1934, a clash between strikers and the national guard left four dead. Child labor was rampant in the state’s factories. Children dropped out of school to work amid the mind-numbing clatter of a power loom.
Today is not only a time to wave bye-bye to summer with friends, family and backyard burgers. We should recall the sacrifices of generations of workers who organized unions and ushered workplace change.
Rhode Islanders have opportunities to grasp the true meaning of the day. At 10 a.m. at the Moshassuck Cemetery in Central Falls, the Rhode Island Labor History Society, the Institute for Labor Studies, the AFL-CIO and other labor leaders will commemorate the Saylesville Textile Strike, which led to social and economic change in Depression-era Rhode Island. Pat Crowley of the NEA will be the keynote speaker.
And today, the Museum of Work and Culture, the gem of a labor museum in Woonsocket, is holding its 18th annual Labor Day Celebration. This year’s interactive exhibit features the lives of mill workers. The museum is open from 9:30 to 4 and admission is free.
Have a safe and fun Labor Day. But don’t take for granted what unions have given our state and nation.
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard every Monday on Morning Edition at 6:45 and 8:45 and on All Things Considered at 5:44. You can also follow his political analysis and reporting at our `On Politics’ blog at RIPR.org
