Honoring the working class

Although our newsroom and press facility staff worked through Labor Day on Monday, we join most other businesses in returning to the work week today after a long holiday weekend.

Labor Day has come to mark the unofficial end of summer. It is a weekend traditionally filled with camping and fishing trips with family, or backyard barbecues with friends.

But we hope there was time during this long weekend to at least consider the history behind the holiday.

Established as a federal holiday in 1894, Labor Day is a celebration of working people and all that they do to keep our nation’s economic engine revved and ready. In the century-plus since federal recognition of the day, working people have seen tremendous improvements to their living and working conditions. It is no stretch to say that the prosperity enjoyed by the American middle class in the 20th century is unparalleled in the human experience.

But generations after the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, which gave rise to the labor movement, it is easy to take that prosperity — and the vacation time we have to enjoy it — for granted. The five-day, 40-hour workweek, paid vacation and holidays, health insurance, respect on the job — these are all aspects of our work lives that resulted from the realization among workers that their labor has value, and that collectively they were more powerful than any individual.

With union membership on a downward arc, it is prudent to reflect on where we came from. According to the Anchorage Central Labor Council, there is a strong correlation between union participation and standard of living. The higher wages, good benefits and secure jobs that Americans have become accustomed to did not fall into place over night, or without a lot of blood, sweat and tears.

Unfortunately for workers, during the last 30 years, wages and benefits have eroded along with union participation. In Alaska, where union membership remains stronger than in the Lower 48, working families enjoy a greater measure of economic security.

But there is no guarantee that this will remain the case. And remembering the workplace sacrifices of earlier generations, and honoring them by never taking our prosperity for granted, will help ensure that such prosperity will be passed forward to future generations.

In this modern era, folks with capital are valued above labor, the means of production. It’s popular to disparage labor, the working class and people especially who don’t make enough at minimum wage jobs to lift their families out of poverty.

Partly this is a math problem, folks making minimum wage don’t earn enough to afford the ever-increasing costs of rents, food and transportation. And partly it’s an education problem. To us, it shows a lack of education on the issues to assert that poor people are to blame for the low wages and high rents that lead to social costs for our community, such as homelessness and hunger.

Labor Day is a time for introspection, a time to evaluate our own actions and how they contribute to the cycle of poverty and student success.