Thinking about working

Of Labor Days past, present and future

Monday, September 1, 2014

LABOR tends to be more celebrated than practiced. It is no accident that work should be honored by a day off, or that the defenders of labor would attempt to raise its value by limiting its practice. Things were no different in the 19th Century, when a National Labor Union was organized to campaign for the eight-hour day. ("Eight hours for work,/ Eight hours for sleep,/ Eight hours for what you will.") For a short time, the labor union even had its own political party, just as Britain still has a Labor party. But both the party and the union collapsed when their presidential candidate in 1872--Judge David Davis of Illinois--withdrew from the race, and no figure of comparable appeal could be found. Personalities still count for a lot in politics.

There is something in the New World that does not take to the idea of labor as a permanent class. Here labor has been something we do, not who we are. Unlike our European cousins, Americans tend to view labor as a means to an end, perhaps a stage that one passes through on the way to becoming just another capitalist. The first American labor unions tended to be collections of skilled workers who were as interested in controlling their apprentices' demands as in securing better terms for their own work.

As for Marxist ideas, they didn't apply very well (they seldom do) to the kind of "laborers" who owned their own means of production, like saws and axes, and hired workers who were expected to become masters themselves some day. When the journeymen carpenters of Boston went on strike in 1825 for higher wages and the 10-hour day, their masters urged them not to challenge the system by which "apprentices and journeymen, accustomed to industrious and temperate habits, have, in their turn, become thriving and respectable masters, and the great body of our mechanics have been enabled to acquire property and respectability, with a just weight and influence in society."

Such an assumption was characteristically American, and still is. It may explain why, among many other things, the country's two major parties remain relatively free of class ideology--at least compared to European parties. Although that kind of animus does make inroads from time to time, especially in hard times.

The Great Depression was a boon for the Socialist and Communist parties--and their equivalent on the right, which offered their own kind of panaceas, like Huey Long's Every Man a King club. Desperate economic conditions are the seedbed of both Communism and fascism, which have a way of mirroring each other. While both may have attracted Americans from time to time, they tend to lose their attraction as the economy improves. There is no force like prosperity to make people wary of changing the system, whatever system.

Americans may get carried away now and then under the pressure of events, and begin flirting with the theoretical, but basically we remain a pragmatic people. What else would you expect of a frontier people who had to live with reality--or die? Ideology fells no trees, plants no crops, raises no barns--or families. That takes work--and faith. No wonder the frontiersman had to know how to plow, shoot and pray.

EARLY labor unions in this country resembled producers' cooperatives. Not until the American Federation of Labor took shape did the idea of a permanent labor force acquire a measure of respectability. That was largely because of the AFL's emphasis on skilled labor and high standards--not class identity. When its president, Samuel Gompers of the cigarmakers, was asked what labor wanted, he did not draw a vision of the New Society or of a New Man or any other utopian figment. His response consisted of just one word: "More!" How refreshing, and assuring. A simple--and attainable--goal beats an unobtainable utopia any time.

The AFL in turn would be challenged by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), with its emphasis on the industry-wide organization of labor, and the two unions would finally merge. Now organized labor, like business, finds itself buffeted by ever more rapid change--as well as the undiminished individualism of the American worker. The old dream of the worker as entrepreneur is still very much alive in the American psyche, and it is not likely to go away.

Labor unions, like corporations, become suspect outfits when they abuse their power, but that doesn't mean people pooling their economic resources or political power is a bad idea. It can be quite a constructive one. But with power goes responsibility. And if the powerful cannot restrain their tendency to establish monopolies in restraint of trade, government may have to do it for them. Which is why a free market needs rules and regulations to assure that competition is fair, not rigged.

By the turn of the last century, as the American economy grew more industrialized, Americans' economic interests grew more differentiated--and hostile. Finley Peter Dunne's fictional Irish barkeep, Mr. Dooley, described the change this way: "Capital still pats labor on th' back, but on'y with an axe. Labor rayfuses to be threated as friend. It wants to be threated as an inimy. It thinks it gets more that way. They are still one happy fam'ly, but it's more like an English family. They don't speak."

Now, almost a century and many a clash and collaboration later, labor and capital have been joined in their struggles by management, now an all too independent force. All have come to recognize a common interest in preserving their--and the country's--competitive position in the world. One great aid in the American bid for world markets is what has become known, sometimes only in retrospect, as the American work ethic. The pride and care Americans take in their work, and the responsibility we take for it, need to be fostered. For on the bad days, quality seems to have disappeared from American workmanship. And when it reappears in a product or service, it may not only please but surprise. That's not a good sign.

THERE IS a kind of labor, really a caricature of it, that degrades--pointless, unproductive, wasteful make-work that cannot be described as anything but an insult to human intelligence. "Most men would feel insulted," Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall; and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now."

The ever perceptive Mr. Thoreau must have been describing the kind of meaningless work Nathaniel Hawthorne meant when he said that "labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized." Now there are oh-so-modern, highly sophisticated forms of rote labor that come complete with pretentious verbiage ("a paradigm shift that will get us thinking outside the box") but are no less brutalizing.

If mindless, unproductive work is a curse, the rewarding kind of labor is one of the great blessings of life. "When I go into my garden with a spade and dig a bed," Emerson wrote, "I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands."

This is the sort of labor to encourage even at a time when Americans are told we can now sit back and let machines do our thinking for us. Labor is so inseparable a part of life that to assign it to others, including our "thinking" machines, would be to let them do not just our thinking but our living for us, too. That labor which serves man best ought to have an element of play, or even art, to it. The drudge may make the worst of workers. The best are worthy of their hire, and, more important, of their own self-respect.

Editorial on 09/01/2014