An Explosion That Still Reverberates on Labor Day

The U.S. celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday in September. Yet, much of the world celebrates their version of that holiday each year on May 1. The reason for the difference has a lot to do with a deadly explosion and hangings in the center of Chicago in the late 1800s. We take a look at the history of Labor Day in the latest episode of Get Hired with Andrew Seaman. Vanderbilt University 's Dr. Jefferson Cowie also walks us through the history of the U.S. labor movement, what to make of current organizing efforts and what you should think about this Labor Day.

You can hear it all on the latest episode of Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

TRANSCRIPT: An Explosion That Still Reverberates on Labor Day

Andrew: We know Labor Day in the United States as a time for mattress sales, barbecues, trips to the beach and saying goodbye to summer. But that's far from the origin story of the holiday involving a strike, a protest, an explosion, deaths, and hangings. Today we take a look at why we celebrate Labor Day in the US, why it doesn't align with other worker holidays around the world and the state of the modern labor movement in America. From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired. A podcast for the ups and downs of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's managing editor for jobs and career development.

Labor Day was officially made a federal public holiday in the US in 1894, but that's not really the beginning of the story. A federal holiday wasn't even necessarily the outcome the first labor activist had in mind.

Jefferson: So you have all these competing ideas swirling around in the late 19th century, there're socialists and pure and simple trade unionists who just want to bargain for better conditions. And then people trying to overthrow the system and there're anarchists, and there's very dramatic contest of ideas. Do we work within the system, out of the system? Electoral politics, shop floor politics, how is this going to work?

Andrew: That's Dr. Jefferson Cowie, a labor historian and author of a number of books, including Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. And today, he's going to join us to walk us through Labor Day's history and how we got to where we are today. Now, Labor Day was designated a September holiday as a direct counterpoint to another holiday, Mayday or International Workers' Day, which is celebrated in many countries on May 1st.

Jefferson: In many places, when I started traveling, for instance, in Central America. In the 1980s, people started telling me about Mayday as International Workers' Day. Well, it turns out that started in Chicago.

Andrew: Let's go back to Chicago on May 1st, 1886. Workers are growing increasingly upset and vocal about the conditions they're forced to endure. Long days, low pay, unsafe conditions and more. So they went on strike. On that Saturday, tens of thousands of workers left their jobs and were joined over the next few days by even more. The group was a mix of people, including extremists and anarchists. Over in the next few days, workplace specific protests broke out, including at the McCormick Harvester Works that made farming equipment. So what were the workers demands?

Jefferson: These radical, crazy anarchists of Chicago wanted an eight hour day, which at the time seemed pretty out there.

Andrew: A clash between the striking McCormick workers and police broke out on May 3rd, resulting in two of the strikers being shot and killed. Angered over the deaths, pro-labor organizers put out a call to gather the following night in Chicago's Haymarket Square near the center of the city.

Labor Organizer: Attention working men, great mass meeting tonight at 7:30 at the Haymarket, Randolph street between Des Plaines...

Andrew: The city's mayor who attended the rally, told the police to let the meeting occur. But as the rally was winding down, the police marched in to disperse the meeting and an unknown person tossed a bomb into the chaos. One officer was killed instantly by the explosion, several other people, police, and at least one attendee were killed after gunfire erupted, dozens more were injured.

Jefferson: It ended up with a lot of the leaders of the anarchist movement of Chicago being rounded up, and then they were hanged. And it was a public kind of furor over labor radicals and things like this.

Andrew: The fear was real. Among the eight men put on trial for what's now known as the Haymarket Riot, some had left the rally before the bomb was even thrown. It didn't matter. All eight of the men were found guilty and seven were sentenced to death. From cell number 29 in the Cook County Bastille on August 20th, 1886. Newspaper editor and labor activist, Albert Parsons wrote to his wife.

Albert Parsons: “There was no evidence that any of the eight doomed men knew of or advised or abetted the Haymarket tragedy, but what does that matter? The privileged class demands a victim and we are offered to sacrifice to appease the hungry yells of an infuriated mob of millionaires who will be contented with nothing less than our lives.”

Andrew: Parsons and three of his co-defendants were hanged on November 11th the following year. Anti-labor government started crushing local unionization efforts using the Haymarket incident to tar all pro-labor activists with the same violent brush. Yet the labor movement marched on and, especially outside the US, used May 1st as a time to recognize workers and pay tribute to the strikes and those convicted surrounding the Haymarket Riot. After a successful movement at the local and state levels of government to honor workers, the federal government acted. President Grover Cleveland signed a law on June 28th, 1894 making the first Monday in September a national holiday celebrating laborers, in other words, Labor Day.

Jefferson: But they put it all the way at the other end of the season to make it a little more tame.

Andrew: So while most other countries celebrate their version of Labor Day on May 1st, the US celebrates it in September as a way to honor workers while also shedding ties with violence, bloodshed, socialism, anarchism, and communism. But even with federal and international recognition of the workers' movement, unions persisted and for good reason. Remember, this was a time before labor laws. The Mayday protestors were just fighting for an eight hour Workday. The Jungle, which is Upton Sinclair's famous muckraking] novel, detailing horrific conditions in meat packing plants, was written just a few years later in 1906. Calling the first Monday of September Labor Day was nice, sure. But it didn't fix exploitative workplaces, but as jobs became more specialized, workers saw the value of organizing themselves and banding together to demand better conditions.

Jefferson: Let's say 1900. If I'm an employer, I can fire all my hod carriers and go down to the docks and pick some more up coming in from Southeastern Europe. But if I have skilled workers and they decide to withhold their labor, I have a harder time. If I need iron puddlers or glassblowers or something that requires a certain amount of skill, they have a little leverage on the job.

Andrew: We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, we'll tell you how the Great Depression gave organized labor its biggest boost.

Andrew: We're back with Dr. Jefferson Cowie on the history of organized labor in the United States. After the turn of the 20th century, a number of things start to impact the change in how organized labor functions. The invention of the assembly line by Henry Ford, for one, huge restrictions on immigration for another.

Jefferson: It's a very complicated series of things that allowed for a massive breakthrough. You have this kind of churn, churn, churn for decades in this explosion during the New Deal where suddenly the industrial labor movement rises to become the most important thing by the middle of the 20th century.

Andrew: The New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's landmark legislation, meant to bring the United States out of the Great Depression and later shore up the war effort was huge for labor unions. In 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act allowed unions to collectively bargain with employers on union members' behalf. And even more crucially, 1935's National Labor Relations Act also known as the Wagner Act named after New York Senator Robert Wagner, required employers to sit down with unions. It also created a government body for regulating and supporting unions. It's called the National Labor Relations Board, otherwise known as the NLRB. And you've probably seen it name checked in recent union headlines. Empowering workers was all part of the government's macro plan to stimulate the economy and get out of the Great Depression.

Jefferson: What the New Deal leadership, especially people like Wagner, realized was if we're going to get out of this depression, what we need to do is get some money in worker's pockets so they can buy some of the stuff from the idle factories. So there's both a kind of rank and file version, where people are making demands from below. And then there's a technocratic version from above that's saying, in order for this to get out of this massive economic crisis, we need to redistribute wealth. We will allow people to organize what's not going to cost the government any money because it's going to come out of the pockets of the capitalists. And we will get out of this mess.

Andrew: Obviously, the United States did eventually pull itself out of the Great Depression and the rise of codified organized labor was a key feature of the country's recovery.

Jefferson: Arthur Schlesinger Senior, one of the great historians, was asked in 1950, what the most important events were in the first half of the 20th century. And he said, "World War I, World War II, and the rise of labor." To be a steelworker in the early forties was to be in poverty. By the 1950s, you're thinking about a cabin at the lake. It's a completely different world and what we call the middle class and the affluent America is really an affluent working class for the first time in American history.

Andrew: The system – an affluent middle class and strong unions – persisted for a couple of decades. Of course, this access to affluence and good jobs was often limited to white Americans and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s aimed to correct this.

Jefferson: When the sixties came along and there were social movements, the anti-war movement, Civil Rights movement, women's movement. Labor wasn't really at the forefront of that. And so it lost a major opportunity to really go into new sectors, new people, new types of workers. So this begins to hit the skids in the 1970s and everything that was kind of built in the thirties has its bookend sort of unraveling in the 1970s.

Andrew: The 1970s saw a rise in stagflation. That's a large scale inflation at the same time as widespread unemployment. So everything was more expensive and people were struggling to get good jobs and make ends meet. There were also social forces at play.

Jefferson: The Democratic party, which labor has sort of wedded itself at the hip, is facing a crisis over Vietnam, over civil rights, over busing and all these things in the 1970s. Cultural values are becoming more important than economic values to a lot of people. And in rides, Ronald Reagan and of course his most famous act in the first summer of his presidency was to fire the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, PATCO.

Andrew: Contract negotiations between PATCO and the Federal Aviation Administration had stalled. So 13,000 members of the union went on strike.

Jefferson: I should say it was an illegal strike. Public sector workers are not allowed to strike, but other presidents like Nixon had found workarounds so they didn't have to kind of base that problem.

Andrew: Still, Reagan followed the letter of the law and around 10,000 air traffic controllers paid the price.

CLIP (Ronald Reagan): It is for this reason that I must tell those who failed to report for duty this morning, they are in violation of the law. And if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.

Jefferson: After PATCO, strike rates fall to almost zero. The strike, which is the ultimate weapon that workers have, the ability to withhold your labor until you get what you think you need is taken away. And this defangs organized labor, they no longer have this great weapon at their disposal. Cultural values are shifting. And what we see as a result is staggering levels of inequality that we thought the New Deal had sort of permanently addressed. Essentially, the president's on board, the federal government is saying it's okay to break strikes. And that is essentially just a bell ringing in the wilderness to a lot of these employers. So as a famous book that comes out of the Wharton School, how to operate during strikes, which is essentially how to replace workers and as all these major events and all these end with a very dramatic strike with all the workers being replaced.

Andrew: In the eighties and nineties, as cities that were once industrial hub saw factory shut down and workforce protections depleted, union membership dropped precipitously. The NLRB and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration were gutted and defanged and enough roadblocks were put in place that forming a union no longer seemed like such a good idea, which brings us to today.

CLIP: CNBC Host: First, four Amazon workers at a Staten Island warehouse have voted Friday to join a union.

CLIP: NYC Comptroller Brad Lander: The Conde Nast union are asking the company Conde Nast to voluntarily recognize the bargaining unit all across...

CLIP: WKBW Host: Starbucks workers in Western New York who voted to unionize for the first time…

Andrew: Maybe you've seen headlines about recent unionization efforts across a lot of sectors, in newsrooms and retail stores like Starbucks and even companies like Amazon. And I wanted to know what Dr. Cowie sees as the current state of labor in America.

Jefferson: There's kind of two dimensions of it. Workplaces have been getting progressively worse, hours are long and irregular and wages have been stagnant for, really, since the seventies, a little blip in the late nineties, but inequality has been going up. Any sort of occupational power you have actually on the job decreasing dramatically due to technology and evisceration of law. So you have a long term trend of jobs being bad, getting worse among wage earners. But then all of a sudden we got a tight labor market and nothing is better for organizing with the exception of the New Deal than a tight labor market. Because workers can leave, that they're willing to take a risk for organizing. If those Starbucks workers who are organizing today get fired for organizing, they're going to find something else. So taking a risk is reasonable. Plus, these young people working outside the traditional systems, working outside the traditional avenues, Amazon created their own union. It's not an old historic union. They made this thing up and they're doing new organizing tactics and these young people are essentially not bound by labor history. They're trying new things and it's really, really exciting. I'm just a little afraid that without the right policy and legislative structures, that energy may get zapped. But they're totally on the right track for everything that needs to happen, I think.

Andrew: So that brings us to today, to this weekend, actually. On Monday as we are enjoying our end of summer celebrations, what would Dr. Cowie want all of us to take a moment to reflect on?

Jefferson: Well, we've gotten into a lot of the technical aspects of the labor movement, but I think on Labor Day, the most important thing to remember is all work has dignity. And just think about how important it is to honor the fact that everybody gets up and goes to work and does a job. My dad was a high school janitor, worked the night shift and in Chicago. I think his shift ended at midnight and he would come home freezing cold, but those classrooms were clean. And there's pride in that, even if it's hardly the most glamorous job in America, the whole country. Indeed, the world depends upon everybody showing up and doing the best job they can.

Andrew: Thanks to author and historian Jefferson Cowie for helping us walk through an abridged history of labor in the United States. If you're lucky enough to have the day off on Monday, happy Labor Day. I hope you enjoy those sales and barbecues and make sure to thank the folks who have to work to help you enjoy them. As Dr. Cowie said, all work has dignity. Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue the conversation. You can also join my weekly Get Hired live show every Friday on the LinkedIn News page. And if you like this episode, leave us a rating on Apple podcasts. It helps people like you find the show. And of course we'll continue this conversation next week, right here, wherever you like to listen.

Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Michele O'Brien and me. Lucas Katler provided additional voices. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Florencia Iriondo is head of original audio and video. Dave Pond is head of news production. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn and I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.