Quote of the Day (Martin Luther King Jr., on Truths Forgotten About the Labor Movement)

“History is a great teacher. Now, everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed levels of production. Those who today attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.”—American civil-rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), address to the AFL-CIO in Bal Harbour, FL, Dec. 11, 1961, in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James Melvin Washington (1986)

Martin Luther King’s leadership of the civil-rights movement hardly stopped with his successful campaigns against segregation and for voting rights. He recognized that a living wage was just as essential for African-Americans.

Nobody should forget that he reminded his audience at the AFL-CIO and the larger American public that unions, by raising wages, had created a mass market for industry in the postwar era.

His belief in the necessity of unions was so powerful that he was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers when he was assassinated in April 1968.

One person today who has forgotten the “simple truths” that King identified 63 years ago—as well as that he lost his life while advocating for justice for striking workers—is Donald Trump. 

Then again, as a leader who sought to create coalitions for change through non-divisive rhetoric, Dr. King would have been appalled by Trump’s demagogic references these last few weeks to “black jobs.”

Even that doesn’t constitute a truly bizarre, unforced error by the GOP Presidential nominee. Instead, try his endorsement of firing striking workers in his recent X interview with Elon Musk—a mistake all the greater considering that union member votes may be more up for grabs than at any time since Labor Day was declared a federal holiday 140 years ago.

The GOP nominee’s observation unleashed widespread condemnation from union leaders. A typical denunciation— that Trump’s remarks constituted “economic terrorism”—came from Teamster head Sean O’Brien, who had addressed the Republican Convention only the month before.

The electronic Trump-Musk dialogue also prompted the United Auto Workers to file unfair labor practice charges against the GOP presidential nominee and the X impresario, alleging interference with workers who may want to exercise their right to join a union.

Even before the conversation between the tetchy ex-President and the tech billionaire, Trump had compiled a problematic labor-relations record dating back to his days in New York real estate, including a $1.4 million settlement for underpaying undocumented Polish workers who demolished the Bonwit Teller department store to make way for Trump Tower.

Without the Wagner Act of 1935—the so-called “Magna Carta” of organized labor—Trump would never have been called to account for that violation. 

Now, his loose remarks to Musk blatantly undercut another central tenet of this landmark legislation: that “no person shall be denied employment because of membership in or affiliation with a labor union."

That same legislation had previously benefited my father and maternal grandfather.

As Irish immigrants, their entry into the American middle class was eased by the benefits of union membership. When their way of life was threatened, it came via layoffs from bosses every bit as contemptuous (if not crude) as Trump.

If they were alive today, I’m sure they would have scoffed not just at Trump’s remarks but also his larger pretensions to being a working-class hero.

This Labor Day weekend, even with high-profile union victories in the last year involving the United Auto Workers and the Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes, it’s easy to forget that the position of most American workers remains tenuous.

But, if this country is serious about addressing income inequality and worker safety—and yes, as Dr. King noted, ensuring an adequate market able to pay for the products of American industry—then it will stop undercutting labor unions.

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on Hard Work)

"Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do."--Oscar Wilde, "The Remarkable Rocket" from The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)

Except, perhaps, if you're a writer like Wilde who, at the height of his career, before his terrible fall, churned out plays, short stories, a novel, and poems, one right after another. 

Quote of the Day (Noah Smith, on Technology and Labor)

“What do we do if and when our old mechanisms for coping with inequality break down? If the ‘endowment of human capital’ with which people are born gets less and less valuable, we'll get closer and closer to that Econ 101 example of a world in which the capital owners get everything. A society with cheap robot labor would be an incredibly prosperous one, but we will need to find some way for the vast majority of human beings to share in that prosperity, or we risk the kinds of dystopian outcomes that now exist only in science fiction.”—Noah Smith, “The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots,” The Atlantic, January 2013

(The image accompanying this post is from, of course, Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s last embrace of silent film—a movie about the disruptive effects of new technology, made nine years after sound had rendered obsolete a whole style and generation of film personnel.)

Quote of the Day (Wendell Phillips, on ‘Incorporated Wealth’ as a Threat to the U.S.)

“I confess that the only fear I have in regard to republican institutions is whether, in our day, any adequate remedy will be found for this incoming flood of the power of incorporated wealth.”—Wendell Phillips, address in The Music Hall, Boston, October 31, 1871, in Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures and Letters: Second Series (1891)

Today marks the bicentennial of the birth of Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), who was enormously famous in his own time, considerably less so in ours. I have no doubt that if he were alive today, Bill O’Reilly would call this Boston blueblood (a Mayflower descendant with enough inherited wealth, between himself and his wife, to leave his job and concentrate on public speaking) a “patrician pinhead,” or perhaps even worse. 

Phillips deserves to be better remembered. As the United States continues to wrestle with questions involving racial and economic equality, his causes and his method of promoting them—full-throated, uncompromising advocacy—remain as pertinent today as they did when he unsettled the conscience of 19^th-century America.

For a short but provocative analysis of Phillips’ life and thought, you can’t do much better than Richard Hofstadter’s brilliant The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948). Indeed, it’s one of the strongest chapters in that history. As Nation columnist Jon Winer wrote, in a post for the blog History News Network: “even today, when the left famously dominates academia, who would have the chutzpah to put this abolitionist and socialist on the same plane as Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR?”

Unlike many of the other 11 portraits in the book--notably, Jefferson, William Jennings Bryan, and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt--the chapter on Phillips doesn’t really take this agitator to task. In fact, he’s celebrated as a voice for “resistance and rebellion.” Moreover, Hofstadter contended, there was something hypocritical about castigating Phillips for “standing always for extremes that public opinion would not sustain”: “Somehow the same historians who have been indulgent with men who exaggerated because they wanted to be elected have been extremely severe with men who exaggerated because they wanted to free the slaves.”

To be sure, Phillips could be intemperate in his rhetoric—comparing the South, for instance, to a giant brothel for its subjugation of female slaves. And his refusal to endorse Abraham Lincoln for a second term--even after the President had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and the only conceivable alternative was a Democratic Party and candidate (George McClellan) with no real interest in doing anything about slavery--makes you wonder if he was willing to lose all in an effort to gain all--a stance that will seem quite familiar to those on left-wing Democrats today so sorely disappointed with Barack Obama that they're thinking of throwing their votes away in the next election. (Even as Phillips mourned Lincoln’s assassination, he reflected that perhaps his death had removed one of the most formidable foes of a universal franchise for freedmen--a thought that turned out to be unbelievably mistaken when the President’s successor, Andrew Johnson, turned out to be not merely considerably worse but positively reactionary. There is an excellent chance, of course, for the same outcome in 2012.)

Yet the movements that Phillips supported, considered decidedly fringe at the time--abolitionism, women’s suffrage, Irish independence, and the rights of labor--would in time carry the day. Unlike many in the Republican Party, he did not abandon the struggle for equal rights when the Civil War was over, but pressed on to strike at the gap between rich and poor that was already opening up at the dawn of the Gilded Age. “The social civilization which condemns every third man in it to be below the average in the nourishment God prepared for him, did not come from above; it came from below; and the sooner it goes down, the better,” he told the International Grand Lodge of the Knights of Saint Crispin in April 1872.

He used another argument, in this same address on “The Labor Question,” that echoes strongly today: “Let the debts of the country be paid, abolish the banks, and let the government lend every Illinois farmer (if he wants it), who is now borrowing money at ten per cent, money on the half-value of his land at three per cent. The same policy that gave a million acres to the Pacific Railroad, because it was a great national effort, will allow of our lending Chicago twenty millions of money, at three per cent, to rebuild it.”

It’s not hard to think of what Phillips would say today: If we can bail out Wall Street, can’t those Americans who have seen their homes foreclosed be helped, too?

Quote of the Day (Pope Leo XIII, on "Helpless" Labor)

“…some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”—Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), May 15, 1891

The white collar might have replaced the blue collar in many instances, but the yoke around the neck remains similarly heavy 120 years after Pope Leo XIII wrote this deeply influential encyclical on the proper relationship between labor and capital. In its solid grounding in scripture, its understanding of the deterioration of the family created by adverse working conditions, and its ability to avoid the worst extremes of confiscatory socialism and unchecked capitalism, it did more than form the bedrock of modern Catholic social teaching. “Without being either a democrat or a radical himself,” writes Eamon Duffy in his history of the popes, Saints and Sinners (1997), “Leo opened the door to the evolution of Catholic democracy.”

Recall the position of labor in the United States only five years before Leo sent this open letter to the upper echelon of the Roman Catholic Church. Chicago’s Haymarket Riot in May 1886, in which seven policemen were killed, not only set back the movement for an eight-hour workday, but proved the undoing of the Knights of Labor, who were blamed for the incident.

The pontiff who issued this clarion call for the dignity of the worker could easily have furthered or deepened the reactionary tendencies encouraged in the Church by his predecessor, Pope Pius IX. Anyone at the 1878 papal conclave who voted for Leo in the hope that the already aged man (68) would not have time to exacerbate the kind of mischief created by Pius were already finding themselves in for a rude shock: Leo would occupy the papal throne for 25 years and live to be 93, issuing 86 encyclicals—a record no other pontiff has approached.

Moreover, Leo was insistent on his privileges as head of the hierarchy. You can see it in the anecdotes about him (e.g., not allowing Catholics having an audience with him to sit at any time during the interview), and even more in the rhetoric in Rerum Novarum that mixed eloquent appeals for the betterment of workers with the assurance that any solution was useless “apart from the intervention of religion and of the Church”:

“It is We who are the chief guardian of religion and the chief dispenser of what pertains to the Church; and by keeping silence we would seem to neglect the duty incumbent on us. Doubtless, this most serious question demands the attention and the efforts of others besides ourselves -- to wit, of the rulers of States, of employers of labor, of the wealthy, aye, of the working classes themselves, for whom We are pleading. But We affirm without hesitation that all the striving of men will be vain if they leave out the Church. It is the Church that insists, on the authority of the Gospel, upon those teachings whereby the conflict can be brought to an end, or rendered, at least, far less bitter; the Church uses her efforts not only to enlighten the mind, but to direct by her precepts the life and conduct of each and all; the Church improves and betters the condition of the working man by means of numerous organizations; does her best to enlist the services of all classes in discussing and endeavoring to further in the most practical way, the interests of the working classes; and considers that for this purpose recourse should be had, in due measure and degree, to the intervention of the law and of State authority.”

In the light of this triumphalist tone, it amounts to a kind of miracle that Leo offered to the world a document that advocated a living wage and union rights, attacked conscienceless capitalism and called on the state to take steps to assure the dignity of labor.

Duffy locates the inspiration for the encyclical in Leo’s meetings with pilgrims led by the industrialist Lucien Harmel, who had tried unsuccessfully to enlist other Catholic employers in his enlightened practices of model housing, saving-schemes, health and welfare benefits, and workers’ councils.

But it might be that the seeds for his vision were planted a full five decades before his encyclical, when, appointed papal delegate (and later archbishop) for Perugia, Leo began a small savings bank that provided small tradesmen and farmers with loans at low interest. The conditions he observed led him to cry out, even before becoming pope: “And does not the sight of poor children, shut up in factories, where in the midst of premature toil, consumption awaits them—does not this sight provoke words of burning indignation from every generous soil, and oblige Governments and Parliaments to make laws that can serve as a check to this inhuman traffic?”

Over the years, subsequent popes revisited the issues raised by Leo, and these have not always been greeted with hosannas. (Of Pope John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical, Mater et Magistra , or “Mother and Teacher”, William F. Buckley Jr. announced, in the pages of his National Review: “Going the rounds in conservative circles: 'Mater si, Magistra no.'")

Yet, across the span of more than a century, it was the critique of the conservative Leo that remains the most challenging to today’s conservative Catholics. They will have to answer if even the slightest step taken to assure the health and lives of workers is truly, as so many right-wingers contend, the onset of socialism; if the hand of God exists in corporations that move functions outside their host countries; if sidelining 50-and-over able-bodied workers really recognizes the ongoing worth of people; and if enormous differences in compensation between the highest- and lowest-paid at corporations are truly authentic parts of Catholic social teaching.

Quote of the Day (Martin Luther King Jr., on the Dignity of Labor)

“Whatever your life's work is, do it well. Even if it does not fall in the category of one of the so-called big professions, do it well. As one college president said, ‘A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.’ If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.’”—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Facing the Challenge of a New Age," address at the Institute of Non-violence and Social Change, Montgomery, Alabama, December 3, 1956

Quote of the Day (Fanny Wright, on Labor)

“The industrious classes have been called the bone and marrow of the nation; but they are in fact the nation itself. The fruits of their industry are the nation’s wealth; their moral integrity and physical health is the nation’s strength; their ease and independence is the nation’s prosperity; their intellectual intelligence is the nation’s hope. Where the producing laborer and useful artisan eat well, sleep well, live comfortably, think correctly, speak fearlessly, and act uprightly, the nation is happy, free and wise. Has such a nation ever been? No. Can such a nation ever be? Answer, men of industry of the United States! If such can be, it is here. If such is to be, it must be your work.”—Utopian reformer Fanny Wright, address at the “Hall of Science,” New York City, December 5, 1829