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By THE NEW MEXICAN
September 2, 2007
ˆWhen Labor Day was first celebrated, 125 years ago, the idea of working
people uniting in demands for higher pay, shorter workdays and better
working conditions was a threatening one to the corporate owners squeezing
profits from low costs.
The Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Communist Manifesto, issued just three
decades before, included language that was menacing not only to captains of
industry, but also in places was antithetical to human nature — especially
when it came to unrestricted statism and abolition of property holdings.
Other parts of the manifesto, however, have since become part of our
culture: the graduated income tax, child-labor laws and public education
among them.
But they were fighting words in industrial-age America
— and when echoed by mobs of muscular working men, they were ominous.
So when the Knights of Labor staged a parade through New
York City on an early-September Tuesday of 1882
during a union-declared day off, it was a time of tension amid high spirits
and picnicking in parks.
From that event came a movement to make it an annual affair. And after
the violence of Chicago’s Haymarket Riots in 1886, President Grover
Cleveland figured it was better to recognize a September day than to
commemorate the deaths and injuries of that communist May Day uprising. So
in 1887, September got his support. By 1894, a majority of states had
adopted it, so that same year Congress made it a nationwide legal holiday.
Decades would go by before organized labor became a political power. By
then, the workers of many trades found themselves part of the bourgeosie —
and their unions were looking more and more like bureaucracies.
Having gained so much for so many, organized labor went into a decline.
But labor-management tensions continued, and Corporate America looked
beyond our borders for workers to exploit. Today, ironically, they’e in
communist China.
As for organized labor, in our country some of its most effective
exponents are in the public-employee sector where job security already was
well entrenched.
But yesterday’s unions still hold influence today: Here in Santa Fe,
with a sizable service industry whose workers were paid the pittance that
is the federal minimum wage, organized labor linked up with community
activists to persuade the City Council to create minimum salaries of $8.50,
then $9.50.
It was to have reached $10.50 at the beginning of next year — but city
leaders are beginning to heed business-community warnings that the camel’s
back, if not broken by those earlier raises, is feeling severely sprained.
They’ve come up with a compromise: No $10.50 minimum, but yearly
cost-of-living-adjusted raises starting in January, 2009. And the
“living-wage” ordinance no longer would apply only to businesses with 25 or
more employees; all employers in the city would pay the Santa Fe minimum.
That could be tough on mom-and-pop operations who’d have to pay higher
wages. A series of public hearings this fall could — and we think, should —
lead to more careful consideration of this proposal.
The Santa Fe initiative, and its ongoing process, serves as a model for
other communities to follow in this new era for American labor.
In the meantime, today’s workers, on this holiday especially, should
give at least passing thought to the courageous forebears who first called
for a well-deserved day off.
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