In many other struggles, women likewise led the way, often with creativity they knitted on the picket line, ran soup kitchens, sunbathed for photos on the roof of union headquarters, donned vintage garb to declare, "These costumes are over 100 years old, and so are the ideas of our employers." Still, the era ushered in a long decline. Over a million and a half workers - truckers, miners, longshoremen, auto workers, garment workers - marched in some 2,000 strikes Florence Reese's anthem "Which Side Are You On," born of the bloody battle of miners against coal barons in Kentucky's Harlan County, was their voice. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."īy the 1930s, organized labor was at its zenith, from minimum wage to 40-hour week wins.
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Thus did banners in the first Labor Day parade in New York City defiantly proclaim, “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” "The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor.” Already, noted the Chicago Tribune, “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation." Ten years later, Grover Cleveland warned, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, (one) the very rich and powerful, (another) the toiling poor. Still, in a ceaseless, shifting fight between those with the overweening power of "a rich men's club" and those seeking a sliver of it, the bottom line stays constant: "The only effective answer to organized greed is organized labor."Įven by 1882 in a rapidly industrializing, greedy young empire, writes Heather Cox Richardson, "Factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government toward men of capital," and away from the rights of workers.
Given the relative universe that is organized labor's long, hard, hurdle-strewn history, this is " a good year to have a Labor Day," with a string of organizing wins, a pro-union president, soaring jobs and even rising support from a public long immune to acting in its own best interests.
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