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America's Labor Day Lowell Ponte Here's food for thought as we celebrate Labor Day weekend. In Europe, since the Second International proclaimed it in 1889, the holiday honoring workers there has been May 1. This was the day the Soviets paraded tanks and rockets in Red Square. This was Beltane, the ancient Celtic pagan holiday of comparably phallic May Poles, sprinklings for the May Queen, and frolic. It was named for Bel, the Celtic sun god, and was also called the day of fire. Beltane's celebration began at sunset on the final day of April, and that night was known in Europe as Walpurgisnacht, or the night of witches consorting with the cloven-hoofed one. Europe's day for workers falls in springtime, a season for planting seeds in barren fields and hoping for success after the cold darkness of winter. America's Labor Day on the first Monday of each September, by contrast, is celebrated in a season of harvest and feasting, of workers enjoying the fruits of their successful labor. America's Labor Day came first, celebrated with a parade in 1882 in New York City. In 1887 it was made a state holiday in Oregon, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. Twenty-three states had enacted Labor Day by 1894, the year President Grover Cleveland signed the bill making it a national holiday. Story Continues Below
"Labor Day differs in every essential from the other holidays of the year in any country," proclaimed American Federation of Labor founder and president Samuel Gompers. "Labor Day ... is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation." When asked what his members wanted, Gompers famously replied: "More!" Unlike Europe's International Workingman's Association, which aimed to politically impose ideological socialism and Marxism, American organized labor generally strove pragmatically to win more for its union workers. Few were collectivists bent on forcing everybody into One Big Union or Hillary Clinton's totalitarian village. Many efforts have been made by ideologues and politicians to co-opt the American labor movement for their own purposes. Despite Gompers' efforts to keep unions free from corrupting ties to government and political parties, the labor movement has generally allied itself with the Democratic Party. But to its credit, organized labor in the United States has largely avoided the socialist, Marxist, and political excesses of labor in Europe and much of the rest of the world. (Or at least it did so until a few years ago, when John Sweeney, a proud card-carrying member of Democratic Socialists of America, became AFL-CIO president ... and recently, with the breakaway of even more radical unions such as SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, from the AFL-CIO.) By not killing or unduly expropriating the capitalist goose that laid golden eggs, industrial workers in places like Detroit were lifted from what Marx called the proletariat working class up to the middle class. They could afford to buy nice homes and send their children to college. And upon becoming middle class, they acquired middle-class concerns such as a dislike for high taxes. Today, up to 40 percent of union members vote Republican. But nearly 100 percent of union dues coerced from workers used for political contributions go to elect Democrats without ever taking a preference vote of union members. One of the first acts of the "pro-choice" Clinton-Gore administration in 1993 was to order removal from the nation's workplaces the notices informing workers how they could withhold union dues spent on politicians with whom they disagreed. And now organized labor is being politicized in another way. Today in America more people work for government than are employed in manufacturing, making things like cars and toasters. For decades the thrust of organized labor has been to unionize this growing public sector of the "work" force. John Sweeney is the first head of the AFL-CIO to come from a union the majority of whose members are government employees. Only about 15 percent of American workers are union members, and the only significant growth in unionizing is among government workers. The fat cats running the AFL-CIO and other key unions now see their future power in white-collar government employees, not blue-collar industrial workers. Twenty-five percent of the delegates at recent Democratic national conventions came from officials and members of teachers unions, among the largest unions feeding at the taxpayer trough. At Democrats' 2000 convention, Democrat-imposed quotas meant that 45 percent of delegates (three times their proportion of America's population) were union executives and members, a majority of whom came from unions with government employee members. Decades ago a blue-collar union movement might have favored low taxes for its workers and government policies that kept private industry prosperous. Today the AFL-CIO favors whatever will make government bigger. Government health care, higher taxes, and a waning private sector all create more government jobs – jobs that already are or soon will be unionized without a vote of the "workers." The old symbiosis between labor and the Democrats was that government would coerce employers into unionizing. Democrats would then be rewarded with a big cut of coerced union dues. The new symbiosis is that Democrats expand the size of government and unionize the new government jobs. Government unions then reward Democrats with a fat share of coerced union dues. But in this new paradigm, the union dues come not from the private marketplace but from dollars coerced out of taxpayers. In effect, government unionization is a money-laundering operation to transfer tax dollars into the coffers of the Democratic Party. It's a kickback, bribe, and payoff to the very politicians entrusted by the public with responsibly employing and regulating government workers. And that coerced union and taxpayer money is used by the hundreds of millions of dollars to buy re-election for Democrats. Husbands and wives both now must work and turn their children into latchkey kids because of the family-crushing taxes the Democratic Party has imposed to fund its undemocratic re-election machine. In more than half our working families, the husband or wife works just to pay these direct and hidden taxes. Happy Labor Day.
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