The Labor Day Comma

On September 6th, the United States observed Labor Day. “Observed” doesn’t really mean celebrated. It was just another holiday or, as The New York Times said in the editorial “Labor Day, Now and Then,” “this line in the beach sand between summer and whatever comes after summer but before true autumn. Labor Day feels like a comma in the year.”

Every era gives rise to its own heroes. At one time they were Sacco and Vanzetti. Steven Slater is proclaimed the hero of the working people of America in 2010. What was the special thing that Steve did? The JetBlue airline flight attendant got fed up with passengers’ whims, cursed them out over the intercom, grabbed a couple of beers and slid out of the landed airplane via the emergency evacuation slide. Steve was fired, but he immediately became the working America’s hero, its symbol. However, he is the symbol not of resolution, but of desperation.

Rummaging through my archives from the early ‘70s, I keep stumbling upon articles about the strike movement in the U.S. That decade began on a combative note, and most importantly, in the atmosphere of hope.

In 1970 alone there were 2.4 million people engaged in strikes. Fortune magazine wrote about “angry, aggressive and acquisitive” mood of the working people. The strike movement in those years had one rather important characteristic: The workers went on strike not so much for increasing their pay as they did for improving the quality of their labor. The media called that the “Lordstown syndrome.” In Lordstown, Ohio, workers at a General Motors plant went on a three-week-long strike in 1972. The predominantly young workers demanded not an increase of their wages, but control over the assembly line — the fastest one in the world in those years. Newsweek magazine compared the Lordstown strike to Woodstock (“Industrial Woodstock”). The strike caused the Senate to open an investigation into the phenomenon of “alienation” among workers.

But what was hailed as the beginning of the revival of the working class movement turned out to be the beginning of its end. Big business successfully repelled attacks against the unsatisfactory quality of workers’ labor and then dismembered and destroyed unions. Inflation, not unemployment, was proclaimed the number one problem, and workers bore the costs of the fight against it. The strike movement died out. Economists of the psychological school maintain that it became channeled into the realm of inner emotions. There’s even a term for that, “inner class war.” Ford plant worker Dewey Burton said, “Something’s happening to people like me. More and more of us are sort of leaving our hopes outside in the rain and coming into the house and just locking the door — you know, just turning the key and… ‘click.’”

Today, when America is just barely climbing out of crisis and 80 percent of Americans think that the economic situation in the country is bad, General Motors workers are not dreaming about control over the assembly lines. They are dreaming that those lines don’t get completely relocated to China or India, leaving them empty-handed.

If the working class of America celebrated Labor Day on September 6th, 2010, they did it behind the closed doors of their homes that have storm clouds of unpaid mortgages gathering above them. Inner class war at home while celebrating Labor Day. My home is my castle. Or is it my prison?

It is very symbolic that the only act of active protest was the hysterics of flight attendant Steven Slater, who cursed at passengers and slid out of the plane via the emergency slide. What else can one do when there’s no other way out?