When wages command labor, as in non-slave holding States, there necessarily takes place between labor and capital a conflict, which leads, in process of time, to disorder, anarchy, and revolution, if not counteracted by some appropriate and strong constitutional provision. Such is not the case in slave holding States. There labor and capital are identified. There the high profit of labor but increases the means of the master to add to the comfort of his slaves, and hence in all conflicts which may occur in the other portions of the Union between labor and capital, the South will ever be found to take the conservative side. John C. Calhoun, 1846.

John C. Calhoun, "Speech on His Slavery Resolutions in Reply to James F. Simmons", in PJCC, XXIV, 190.

The years following the civil war seemed to give credence to Calhoun's words. The formative years of the labor movement were often bloody, involving on one side workers tired of being so overworked, so underpaid, so hungry and so ill treated that they were willing to risk their very lives for some improvement in their condition, and on the other side; thugs hired by management, law enforcement agents, national guard and federal troops. As with many holidays, Labor Day appeared early as a state holiday but the impetus for the national holiday may have come out of the violence of the Pullman strike in 1893.

George Pullman had created a feudal village around his manufacturing center that seemed to prosper, but in 1893 layoffs and pay cuts without reduced rents and costs led Pullman workers to owe their soul to the company store and George Pullman. A strike ensued and, under Eugene V. Debs, grew. Pullman cars were burned and president Grover Cleveland declared the strike illegal and sent in the troops. Following the killing of two men in Kensington Illinois by U. S deputy Marshals, the strike was declared over On August 3, 1894. Debs went to jail and Pullman workers had to sign a pledge saying that they would never strike again.

Since it was an election year, legislation for a national Labor Day went unanimously and immediately through congress. Cleveland signed this act of appeasement to labor but was not re-elected.

Back to Calhoun and his "strong constitutional provision": without belaboring history, one can point to the Taft Hartley Act on the national level and the Right to Work laws in the individual states, legislation denying class action law suits and equally important, one can point to the lack of enforcement of existing laws when it comes to protecting the rights of workers; the immigration laws being but one example.

Under Virginia's right to work laws and the lax to non-existent enforcement of immigration laws, Hispanic workers on Virginia's Eastern Shore pick 33-pound baskets of tomatoes at 45 cents each basket. Some workers make up to $100 a day. Do the arithmetic: three and a half tons of tomatoes at about a cent and a half a pound. Estimates of illegals in this workforce runs as high as seventy percent. Yet this is at a time of supposedly heightened security when others have been sought out and detained in the name of national interest. The great economic theory is the more scarce a commodity, the higher the price. In theory, growers should be paying local workers enough to come to the fields and we should be paying higher prices for tomatoes. In practice, no one will pay that much for the cardboard tomatoes in today's green grocers.

No, what has been done historically is just what is being done today, when labor gets scarce, open up the boarders; Irish, East Europeans, Russians, Chinese. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses willing to work cheap. Now Hispanics are taking their place among those who would live in chicken coops, metal roofed sheds, backs of pickups, and do without heat, air conditioning, sanitary facilities, education, health care and the protection of the law. Hispanics and other migrant workers may do our scut work and keep our goods cheap, but can never think of themselves as equal. Those in power will tell workers, "We lifted ourselves by our bootstraps", but for many workers bootstraps are illegal.

America is a free land,
Free without a doubt,
If you hasn't got your dinner,
You is free to do without.

Certainly these workers are free. They are free to work or not to, free to go back across the boarder and seemingly free to return. A man or a company may not own them, but they may well owe their soul to a life not of their choosing.

The leadership of this country is more afraid of organized labor than they are of terrorist. That is why these labor laws exist and other laws are ignored. That is why ever piece of legislation proposed by the present administration has union busting provisions, including the airport security act. In the 1950's nearly fifty percent of the American Workers belonged to unions, today it is fifteen percent. There is power and pride in worker solidarity, but for now the Calhouns are winning.

This Labor Day have a picnic, grill a steak, have a few slices of tomato on the side, and think of old John C. Calhoun.

Wilson McIvor, Member, Communications Workers of America (electronic mail, August 30, 2002)

Sources:

Jim Lehrer, Online NewsHour, Sept. 2, 2000, THE ORIGINS OF LABOR DAY

Pamela Stallsmith and Alexa Welch Edlund, The Richmond Times Dispatch, August 24, 2002, " Hidden Harvest".

(Copying from one source is plagiarism, copying from two is research.)