Monday, September 1, 2014

20140901.0817

So it is Labor Day again in the United States, and I think I will be spending it better this time than I did last year. I doubt that I will be much on the grill or the smoker today--particularly the latter, as I would need to be already setting up for it--but I am with the two most important women in my life, and that is better than any cooking I can do. (That it allows me to continue to rest instead of having to work in the heat to cook meat and then to entertain until all hours of the night has its attractions also. I enjoy having people over, but I have not the endurance for parties that I used to have. Such is life.)

I will not go into the history of the holiday today. I do not need to, as there are many such histories already about that are better researched than my passing interest of a day will allow. (That of the US Department of Labor is one.) What I will go into instead is some discussion of my experience in the community that Labor Day ostensibly celebrates, a community that seems very much to be on the wane, so that the holiday may soon be more a day of mourning and regret than a day of celebration and hope.

For I was for several years a member of UAW Local 2110, and I did benefit from my membership. It was only because of the provisions of the collective bargaining agreement the union had executed with the school where I taught that I was able to make a living as an adjunct for my first few terms working there. It was only because of those provisions that I was able to put back what I could put back and pay down what I could pay down once I was promoted to full-time status. And while it was provisions of that agreement that led to my being on the short list for layoff, it was also sticklers for those provisions working on my behalf who ensured that I was recalled and so was able to support myself and my family through the summer until I left The City for Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain.

During that time, I saw the kinds of people against whom anti-union pundits rant. They are correct that there are people who exploit the entrenched seniority systems found in many union contracts to essentially collect pay for no work. They are correct that there are those who act as reflexively against management as they themselves do against unions. But I also saw a great many hardworking people who were able to make decent livings for themselves and their families through the sweat of their brows and the work of their hands and minds--solely and specifically because of the union to which they belonged. And, in an institution that was rife with problems I will not explicate here, the common bond of union membership was a source of morale and community, welcome however thin. It had its own problems, certainly, but it did far more good than harm for me and for others like me.

But such things are becoming rarer. Union membership continues to fall, and law and legal precedent continue to vitiate against the power possessed by what membership remains. Popular perception continues also to align against the union, shaped by mainstream media that can hardly be called liberal in their statements overt and tacit against organizing workers and their concerns. Unions are not yet dead, but they are hardly in good health, and the day may well be coming when they can do no more good in the world. Perhaps it is fitting on this day to consider what they still do for the workers who compose them and thus for the communities in which those workers live, to consider what will be lost on the day when they function no more, to consider what we will then have to mourn.

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