A Day to Celebrate Workers

It is Labor Day here in the United States and Canada today. We celebrate the contribution of workers to the general well being of the economy and the development of the world.  

Labor Day was founded today by the New York Central Labor union in 1884. Much of the rest of the world celebrates workers on May first, May Day, to commemorate the Chicago Haymarket riots in 1986. The Second International Conference (of socialists) named May 1 International Workers Day in 1889, capitalizing on the ancient May day/ Beltane/ holiday of dancing round the maypole with the flower crowned Queen of May.

The US and Canada declined to follow a world holiday aligned with socialists and pagans – really?

My father and grandfather were union men, members of the ITU, the International Typographers Union, printers, newspapermen with “printers ink in their veins.” The ITU was one of Americas first labor Unions strong proponents of the 48-hour work week in 1897 and the 40-hour work week in the 1930s. It was one of the first unions to allow women membership (1869).

Labor Unions and Me

My grandfather learned the linotype machine  a mechanized hot metal typesetting machine, in the  in the late nineteenth century machine and probably joined the ITU in Milwaukee. Milwaukee proved to cold for his wife, my grandmother and so Harry moved the family to Florida in 1912 when my father was eight. His linotype skills were his ticket to a job. Ultimately he founded Culler Printing in Lakeland Florida.

I’m not sure when my father Ray learned the linotype or joined the ITU, but those skills were his ticket to a job at the Boston Herald Traveler in 1944 when  he sold Culler Printing because “we just couldn’t get help. Printing was still a male trade and all the men who weren’t drunks were in the war.”

 My first experience with unions were when I was thirteen. My father took me to then Herald Traveler on a Saturday to “show up” for contract labor to help get the Sunday Papers on the trucks. I was hired because my father was a union guys.

My job was to move a hand truck to a red line near the press area across the loading doc to a yellow line at the edge of the loading dock a distance of about thirty feet. Everything went great till the morning coffee break. All work stopped.

Well, I didn’t drink coffee then so I went looking for something to do. There were many stacks of papers in the area next to the presses that just hadn’t been put on the red line yet, so off I went with my hand truck and picked up a bunch of them and ran across to the edge of the loading dock. There wasn’t anybody at the yellow line so I just rolled the cart onto the truck and stacked the papers. I didn’t hear the whistle, and was well on my way to my third stack when someone grabbed me. I heard the foreman say to a phone “Culler, you better get down here and talk to your boy.”

“ Alan the red line is the Pressman Union’s line and the yellow Line is the Teamsters line. In the middle is a free zone to be worked by other unions. You can’t cross those lines because you are taking work away from other unions.”

“That’s dumb!”

“It may seem dumb, but those are the work rules and you have to follow them.” I don’t remember if they let me finish out the day, but it was clear that I would never be invited back.

So my opinion of unions started with this somewhat negative personal experience. I don’t remember when, but I remember I was married, so post 1969, but hadn’t gone to business school yet (1979), I went with my father to an ITU meeting, probably a local for the newspaper, or perhaps a Boston local. My father was concerned. His wife was a computer programmer and he had seen some computer typesetting machines.

He spoke passionately, starting with a little history about moveable type, and the invention of the linotype and what changed. He said his wife worked in computer programming and ‘computers were coming to setting type” and the “union could either get out ahead of it or we won’t have jobs or a union anymore.”

His union brothers laughed at him.

“Come on, Reb!” His southern accent never left him. “Come on, no computer is ever gonna replicate the human eye in terms of line justification. You know how long it took you to learn that.” Some even made some crude jokes about my mother and her profession. Ray was steamed but he didn’t lose his temper. He just kept trying to make his case till the gavel came down.

It was just a few years later when the newspaper composing room linotype machines were silent and newspaper writers typed directly into computers. That didn’t help my view of unions much either.

Then I went to business school during the Thatcher years and entered the political orientation period that mother of my children calls “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.”

After this conservative swing I had a discussion with my father. By this time, computers had displaced the linotype and the ITU was defunct along with my father’s pension. I was ranting against unions when Dad interrupted me, “You may be right, Alan. Unions may have outlived their usefulness, but we have unions in this country because management was killing workers.”

“Come on Dad, you’re exaggerating. “ I said though I had studied enough history to know he was right.

“No! Workers died from unsafe machinery, unsafe chemical use, unsafe railcars. Every piece of worker safety legislation unions pushed for over the protests of management and owners. They are the reasons we don’t have child labor. They are the reasons that workers don’t work those 100 hour weeks that that consulting firm has you working.”

He shut me up and over time my view of unions has become more sanguine.

The thing that turned me around completely was a project at a food manufacturer. It was a cost cutting exercise where we tried to engage the workforce to find ways to save money. It was a union shop but the union was under threat because as workers left or retired they were replaced with contractors, who earned three quarters the hourly rate of union workers and were limited to twenty-five hours. They were paid no benefits, no healthcare, no pension, no paid sick leave or vacation. This was the 1980s.

It was an older workforce. Many were retiring, and so because of the contract worker strategy, the union was approaching the fifty percent breakpoint where the union contract would be broken.

Here I was facilitating “quality circles” to reduce cost by cutting maintenance and inventory levels and reducing waste. The news broke that the CEO, Mr. O. had just received a thirty-seven million dollar bonus.

Our project was called Focus On Productivity, but that day it became known as Fatten O’s Paycheck. There was a strike and a lot of ugliness around it. Our project was cancelled and the union was decertified for a time. They have since been reinstated.

What turned me around was the vitriol I saw on the part of “management,”  first line- supervisors, and middle management, ad ministrative staff that didn’t have some of the same benefits and were working ridiculous hours and could have used an organization negotiating on their behalf. These folks sounded like what I imagined the Pinkertons who broke the Homestead strike wood sound like. They called their neighbors names. In one case, I watched a secretary spit of workers in a picket line and call them communists.

So Thank You!

So I changed my view on unions and on Labor Day I say thank you for:

• Minimum wage laws
• Child labor laws
• Safety regulation
• Shorter work days and weeks
• Benefits like paid sick leave, paid vacation and holidays, overtime, health and welfare insurance.
• Pregnancy and parental leave

And many other benefits that make working life less onerous. That and the work they do.

A friend who works in private equity said to me. “Labor Day? Is there a Capital Day?”

“Yep,” I said.  “It’s called Every Day!”