[Ahead of Columbus/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I wanted to dedicate a series to exploring such contested American holidays and what they can help us think about. Leading up to a special post on that most conflicted of all our federal holidays!]
On the
bare minimum for how we should celebrate Labor Day, and a couple important steps
beyond.
To keep
with the trend in this week’s posts, I’ll start by asking you to check out a
prior piece of mine—in this case, a Talking
Points Memo column from 2015 in which I traced the radical origins and
history of Labor Day. Take a look at that column if you would, and then come on
back for some additional thoughts on a holiday that means a lot more than the
end of summer.
Welcome
back! When I was growing up in Virginia, we didn’t have Labor Day off from
school, nor did my Dad as a professor at the University of Virginia—Virginia was
and remains a “Right
to Work” state, which is a particularly Orwellian phrase for states (26 of them as of this
writing; that’s from an overtly anti-union website, just FYI) that don’t recognize
public employee unions and thus don’t celebrate Labor Day (among many, many
other effects of that status). The histories of how such legislation developed and
which states have passed it are of course multi-layered and feature contexts
beyond this brief mention, but to my mind two things are not complicated at
all: every state in the United States both should allow public employees to
unionize and should celebrate this federal holiday dedicated to workers’ rights
and equality. I’m a big believer in conversation, so if you’re reading this and
disagree with either or both of those premises feel free to leave a comment and
we can chat further, but I gotta tell you I don’t think those should be (or
are) controversial positions to take.
While
celebrating Labor Day is thus to my mind a default, I’d also argue that, as
with Memorial/Decoration Day with which I began the week’s series, this is a
holiday that demands more thoughtful engagement with the histories that it commemorates.
For one thing, I’d say it’s pretty important for us to remember the incredibly
aggressive and violent ways in which big business and its political and social
allies attacked the Labor Movement—from defining
it as entirely un-American to imprisoning
and executing its leaders to dropping
actual bombs on its striking members. And for another thing, it’s equally important
for us to remember the incredibly aggressive and violent ways in which too many
labor unions and organizations excluded non-white workers, as exemplified by the
Rock Springs massacre. Do those two points seem contrasting and even contradictory?
Well welcome to the U.S. of A., and to Labor Day commemorations that can help
us engage with all our fraught and frustrating and vital histories while we
bbq.
Next
HolidayStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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