Time to Celebrate Work and Workers

We came so far, but then we lost our way.  Perhaps we moved so quickly that we neglected to build lasting foundations beneath what we had accomplished.  Now, with Labour Day upon us, it is time to reconsider what we have neglected.

I’m talking about work, meaningful work, that could not only build products, but build lives, send kids to university, redesign a fairer society.  It also provided us with the tools required to construct the world we wanted.

For millennia – since the earliest days of civilization really – workers (those with little) provided the physical infrastructure for those with a lot, who had the money, lands, armies and even certain religious leaders on their team to suppress the masses and elevate the few.  This was all humanity ever knew.  As recently as 1800, over 90% of the world’s population was poor and that was just the way it always had been.  It was a civilization, so the hard things needed to get done, but there was no way the wealthy landowners, robber barons, industrial magnates, etc., were going to take on that physical labour personally.  So, they conspired to keep average people from rising.  That was just the way of humanity and it was accepted too easily.

But then a new awareness began permeating the minds of more enlightened men and women.  If they were doing the hard work, why then couldn’t they enjoy a better share of their labours.  In its own way, industrial capitalism helped show them the possibilities of how wealth could be generated on a larger scale than they had ever known and they wanted an increased share of the bounty.

Labour unions eventually emerged as a way for the disgruntled workers to press for that better share.  And they had powerful allies – politicians, progressive religious supporters, and a few enlightened business leaders.  Recessions, endless wars and abject poverty eventually stripped away any moral authority the elites hoped to maintain.  They were failing at running their world and new movements emerged of average people who believed they might be able to build something better.

And it turns out they did. During the 1930s and 1940s, Western governments passed laws permitting the establishing of unions in all sorts of sectors.  There was opposition, naturally enough, but the wealthy capitalists had overseen so much poverty and destruction that there was a willingness to permit workers to have a say in everyday life.

All this led to the Golden Era (1945-1970) where the sheer capacity of society mushroomed, products got better, affluence expanded, politics got closer to the ground.   In a short period of time emerged dental and health plans, pensions, worker training, maternity leave, more limited work hours, labour representation to management, solidarity and a collective sense of worth and dignity.  And then there were all the ancillary benefits – more volunteerism in communities, more accountable politics, rise of female influence, better public transport, etc. Together, these were huge and ultimately created the thriving middle-class that is now receding into history.

Somebody had to pay for all of this sudden material and social advancement.  It wasn’t just the corporations or owners who had to do a more equitable job of sharing their amassed wealth, but workers who spent, donated, invested and paid taxes.  From all that new wealth and generosity, we got universities, more schools, colleges, hospitals, and entirely new fields of opportunity.

A significant part of the story was the work and influence of unions.  It has become popular in recent years to denounce labour representation, just as we have politics, institutions, even older generations, but we are now paying the price for that “baby with the bathwater” mentality.  Much has been lost in the process as has been recounted in numerous research projects in recent years.  The theme running through all the studies?  The researchers find that as unionization rises, inequality tends to fall, and vice versa.  That’s an important countermeasure to the overall decline modernism is facing. 

As work itself has become more meaningless, so have feelings around the celebration of Labour Day.  We need to reverse that thinking and get back to organizing ourselves in ways that cause workers to be a central part of the prosperity equation of the future.  It’s not just about Labour Day, but “organized” Labour Day.

Even the corporate sector’s Bloomberg Newsrecently offered this advice from a writer:

Supporters of free markets should rethink their antipathy to unions. As socialism gains support among the young, both economists and free-market thinkers should consider the possibility that unions — that odd hybrid of free-market bargaining and government intervention — were the vaccine that allowed the U.S. and other rich nations to largely escape the disasters of communism in the 20th century.

This is the weekend to rethink labour unions and their benefits to our collective state because, after all, we aren’t doing a very good job of organizing ourselves without their leadership.