I’ve long believed that many U.S. holidays should be commemorated instead of celebrated.
Are you comfortable greeting people with “Happy Memorial Day” or “Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day”? Even if you’ve switched from Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day, does it feel right to precede it with “Happy,” considering all of the atrocities European settlers committed against native peoples?
It’s the same with Labor Day. Oregon and other states established a Labor Day beginning in 1887, and the federal Labor Day proposed by Congress to celebrate the achievements of workers in this country was signed into law in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland. (No fan of unions, he sent federal troops earlier that year to break up the Pullman strike organized by Eugene V. Debs. At least 30 strikers were killed.)
Almost 17 years later, 146 workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. The dead included 123 women and girls – some as young as 14 – and 23 men. The fire started on the eighth floor of what was then the Asch Building (still standing and now called the Brown Building, owned by New York University).
Highly flammable fabric remnants caught on fire, possibly from a cigarette or match not fully extinguished, and raced through the lint and fabric on that floor and the two above it.
Some were able to escape to the roof or on two elevators that continued to work for a time. But exit doors were locked – to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks or stealing garments, the one rickety fire escape soon failed, and the people who didn’t leap to their deaths from the windows died from smoke inhalation or burns.
That 1911 fire spurred a wealth of workplace reforms, championed by Frances Perkins as executive secretary for the Committee on Safety of the City of New York. Perkins later became Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and continued to fight for workers’ rights.
And yet poor working conditions persist.
For the first decade that I worked at the Knoxville News-Sentinel (when it still had a hyphen), I saw no reason to join the union, the Knoxville Newspaper Guild. I thought our industry was enlightened and that journalists and management had a common sense of purpose and mission. I was naïve.
I decided at last to sit in on contract negotiations between management and union leaders, and I was stunned. People that I’d worked with for years – some of whom I’d known since childhood, and one I knew from church – were sitting across the table from employees with hatred in their eyes, literally frothing at the mouth, bickering down to pennies and minutes what seemed like reasonable requests to me. I truly believe I felt evil in that room.
It was a revelation. I’d seen articles in corporate magazines talking about new styles of employer-employee approaches – teamwork, esprit de corps, all that stuff. This behavior was the dirty little secret. I quickly joined the union in protest. And when the newspaper discarded me like yesterday’s edition after nearly 30 years of loyal, above-and-beyond service, it was the union that had my back.
All these years later, it pains me that so many unions have become weak under the constant stress of unethical corporate behavior and changing technology. I look at the Amazon workers who’ve fought for the right to organize and the Frito-Lay employees who had to go on strike to get as basic a right as a day off.
During the pandemic, I’ve seen hundreds of calls to show appreciation to “essential workers” and then triple the number of complaints about how workers don’t appreciate having jobs and are greedy for wanting a living wage. Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are taking joyrides in space, the Walton family is drowning in dough, and their employees are having to work two or three jobs and still draw food stamps to survive.
So no, I’m not happy this Labor Day week, and I won’t be until the people who do the work in this country get their proper compensation.
Betsy Pickle is a veteran reporter and editor who occasionally likes to share her opinions with KnoxTNToday readers.