5 things American workers want more than a Monday off in September

In the U.S. over my lifetime, Labor Day has served chiefly as a three-day weekend bracketing the ending of summer break from the beginning of the school year.

I myself never gave much thought to the holiday until I started researching its origins. All across the country, all throughout the industrial era, the history of labor was fraught with bloody conflict that I don’t ever remember being taught about in school.

A national holiday honoring American labor is a nice gesture. But it is in fact just a gesture. There are far better ways to support the nation’s workforce than a federal holiday. I can think of at least five.

1. Respect. Let’s set aside the issue of being constantly monitored or micro-managed. None of us should have to worry about being verbally abused by supervisors, coworkers, customers, or the general public for simply doing our jobs. Or physically assaulted. Or sexually harassed. It seems like every day brings more news stories of overworked, underpaid people being victimized by fellow human beings behaving very badly.
   
2. Safety. Even when everyone is on their best behavior, there are plenty of workplace hazards. Some jobs are inherently dangerous. Other jobs are made needlessly (more) so, through employers’ negligence or willful disregard. It seems that we’re all being asked to do more with less, and to work harder faster. Though maintaining a safe workplace can be costly, it’s usually more cost-effective in the long run than exposing workers to unnecessary risks.
   
3. Fair Pay. With few exceptions, employers in the United States set wages at the lowest amount that the law and the market will let them get away with. Some don’t even go that high – wage theft is a very real thing. I get it: human resources are expensive. But employers need to shift their perspective away from seeing compensation as a cost to minimize; instead they should view it as a necessary investment in value-creation. It takes a lot of human effort to transform raw materials into useful goods and services and then deliver them all the way to customers.
   
4. Flexibility. By global standards, American jobs are notoriously inflexible for workers. We receive considerably less paid time off for everything from illness to vacation to family leave. Too many of us are forced to work either far more or far less than we prefer – and are then fired or forced to quit when our personal life makes our job untenable for even a single shift. Even work arrangements touted as more flexible, such as temporary and contract work in the growing ‘gig economy’, heavily favor the profit needs of capital over the sustenance needs of labor.
   
5. Voice. For many employees the primary way to express our dissatisfaction with our job is to quit. For some it’s the only way; they’re in a take-it-or-leave-it situation. But there are a lot of unhappy American workers who don’t want to – or can’t – leave their job. They’d rather stay and feel heard by their employer when they speak up. But giving workers real voice necessarily involves sharing power, something traditional corporate hierarchies are reluctant to embrace.

I don’t think that any of these outcomes – respect, safety, fair pay, flexibility, or voice – are attainable in the absence of a strong labor movement. It’s a mistake for working people to expect anyone else to stand up for them if they don’t first stand up for themselves.

And they must stand up for themselves together. Individual workers get squashed every day. The single largest source of worker power resides in their sheer numbers.

The collective power of workers is downright frightening to Corporate America. This is why every effort to unionize is met with extreme, well-funded resistance: companies spend millions trying to keep their workers unorganized.

Though they’re far from perfect, labor unions are the only organization ever devised to represent the collective interests of workers. And they’re making a comeback.

The right to organize and bargain collectively in the United States was not granted until 1935. By 1954, less than twenty years after that right was won, more than one in three American workers was represented by a labor union. Ever since then, however, the share of unionized workers has declined precipitously. By 2021 that share had fallen to about one in ten.

But the pandemic brought a shock to the entire economic system, upending many workers’ lives – including mine. In our hyper-connected 21st-century society, increasing numbers of American workers have begun to find each other and feel their collective power.

American labor is on the upswing. Organizing activity is up. So are work stoppages, large and small. Unions are seeing gains in worker interest and favorable public opinion. High-profile victories at Amazon and Starbucks have given unions new energy.

Predictions of a new heyday for labor may be overly optimistic. But hey, I’m an optimistic person by nature. If you can’t have anything else, you can always have hope.