Labor Day: Justice is Never Given

Labor Day finds us unprepared. Our country is in the midst of a debate as to whether or not it has a place for organized labor. Despite soaring corporate profits and sagging wages, working Americans have not made up their minds. When contemplating the fate of organized labor, the American mind is clouded by misstatements, fear, and resentments, and organized labor is cowed by decades of defeats and internal struggles. And so on Labor Day, 2011, those who wish to disenfranchise the American worker speak with one clear, full throated voice, and must argue only against muted static. Today, then, we must remember the origin of Labor Day, and recall that respect for working people is not given, but must be demanded.
Labor Day’s roots lay in the rail yards, which, in the 1890s, were America’s beating heart. No highways had been laid, and industry, commerce and agricultural needs were all fed by rail. The robber barons who made the steel and ran the rails owned that heart. One such man was George Pullman, owner of the Pullman Company, which built and staffed railcars. Pullman, like his cohort, offered no dignity to those who labored to finance his success.
Pullman’s abuses went deep. In the 1880s, Pullman built a company town outside of Chicago for his workers, Pullman, Illinois. There, workers labored and lived under their employer’s total control. Pullman owned the houses, the schools, the churches, the shops and the libraries. Wages and expenses simply looped in and out of his hands, and, as one employee said, “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell." Pullman left no part of his workers’ lives out of his control, from lifestyle to name. Pullman banned alcohol from his town. All the porters who Pullman hired to staff his cars were African-American, and Pullman dictated that they all answer to “George,” his name, when working (of course, harkening back to America’s then recent abolition of slavery, where slaves were forced to adopt a master’s name).
In 1893, like today, the economy took a drastic hit. Pullman slashed wages, but left prices for rents and goods untouched in his company town, and still demanded employees work standard 16 hour days. Workers organized, and demanded audience with Pullman, which he refused. The organized workers shut down Pullman, and in June of 1894, nearly every railway worker refused to handle Pullman cars, in sympathy with their fellow workers. The country ground to a halt, and the strikers swelled with power. Industry mobilized: corporate functionaries were deputized by the Federal government, and the military and US Marshalls were sent to break the strike, attacking the strikers and sending 13 strikers to the morgue and 57 workers to the hospital.
Outrage was so severe, and voice of labor was so united that the government sought to assuage the labor by Codifying a day of national of honor for American organized labor and its achievements; “legislation was rushed unanimously through both houses of Congress, and the bill arrived on President Cleveland's desk just six days after his troops had broken the Pullman strike.” The rails were the first to organize industry-wide, and they still enjoy unique protections in safety, labor regulations, and union density. In later years, actions by the Porters, still then named “George,” developed into not just victories for labor but civil rights, growing power, leadership and consciousness that blossomed in the 1960s, when civil rights made unparalleled strides.

This year, on Labor Day, the future for American organized labor is unclear. As we celebrate, we must remember that this day was earned through great collective action. The Pullman Porters serve as but one reminder that American labor has had to—and must continue to—fight for every victory. As the leader of the later Porters’ Strike, A. Philip Randolph said, “Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.” Labor Day is no gift; get out there and fight!