Wall Street Journal - August 29, 2003
DE GUSTIBUS
As It Turns Out, Solidarity Is Not Forever
By TUNKU VARADARAJAN
I don't mean at all to be a killjoy here, and mean even less to suggest that the holiday be abolished, but I can't help thinking that Labor Day -- in its origins no better than a kind of blue-collar Kwanzaa -- ought to be regarded with a dash of skepticism.
Labor Day is really now (and some would say that it has ever been thus) no more than a species of cultural punctuation, a point in the calendar that marks the termination of the holiday season. "End of Summer Day" would be a more accurate name -- though, on reflection, that might be a touch too literal, too utilitarian.
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That said, my point is that the day, as currently anointed, is meaningless, imbued as it is with a false romanticism, one that connects not at all with the way we live now.
The words "Labor Day" evoke images from proletarian theater -- of class struggle, solidarity, righteous riots and marches. But there is no tradition anymore in the U.S. of harking back to (and still less of celebrating) the Great Moments in Labor History, when the Union was one's mother-and-father, or the Guild one's temple. That is more a part of Europe's dramaturgy -- Old Europe, of course, not New, where memories of the Soviet Workers' Age are neither sepia-hued nor sentimentalized but still felt as scars.
The average American -- if there is such a creature -- lives now in a competitive, postindustrial, service-dominated world. Rosie the Riveter is now Rajyalakshmi the Techie Guest-worker, and "jobmates" and "apprentices" sound more like words from "Harry Potter" than staples of the workday vocabulary. Besides, today's unions are no longer proud standard-bearers of a craft, or metier, or even of an economic class: Instead, they are vast political engines, in the service mainly of the Democratic Party, dinosaurs that thunder into view whenever there is an election.
The class-struggle has pretty much withered away in America -- and what Alexander Berkman would make of that is Henry Clay Frick's own guess. Hell, workers with their 401(k)s, pension plans and mutual funds are all capitalists now. ("Mutual funds," how solidaire that sounds, how much, ironically, like a communal kitty for strikers' families!)
Berkman (playing for the proletarian team) shot and stabbed Frick (capitalist pig extraordinaire) in the course of the "great" Homestead Strike of 1892. Frick survived, as did the tendency -- in that Golden Age of Labor -- to preface every working-class upheaval with the word "great." The great Pullman Strike, the great Haymarket Riot, the great Paterson Silk Strike.
Each episode was a notable historical moment, of course, contentious and politically charged; and part of the world we work in today was shaped by those events: our civilized workweek hours; our wages; the basic rules on overtime and child labor, and on the prohibition of insalubrious working conditions.
But lest we forget, on each of these great occasions there was bullying and militancy on both sides -- the Pinkerton Boys vs. chaps like Berkman. And for every hard-hearted capitalist one could care to name, there were anarchists bent on mayhem and sabotage. After the Bolshevik Revolution, American Capital had also to do battle with Union-acolytes of Moscow, part of the reason why a nationalist-proletarian tradition failed to take root here.
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In Britain, by contrast, or in France, labor has a more operatic sense of itself -- in part, one might suggest, because it defines itself as "working class," unlike the American "blue collar" segment of society.
The latter phrase has none of the grandeur of the European label -- and let's face it, "working class" does have a certain stentorian appeal, which explains why a British stockbroker, say, ensconced in his Essex manse, might still assert that he is "from the working class" because his dad was a bus-driver. "Blue collar," on the other hand, is more than faintly pejorative as a cultural indicator.
On the positive side, America's preference for "blue collar" suggests a widespread belief that bottom-of-the-heap need only be a transient state. Why ossify a group into an enduring class when the aim of most individuals in that group is to leave it? Come to think of it, that's American labor's great march. Onward, and upward. Workers of America unite, you have nothing to lose but your blue collar.