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Dear John,
When I was growing up, my father used to tell us how as a little boy he was carried on his father’s shoulders to a rally where Eugene V. Debs was speaking. My grandfather was a worker on the Rock Island Railroad and Debs was a founder of the American Railway Union. Later, my father was a union organizer for the then CIO in Detroit. We were always told in my house that “If you cross a picket line, don’t bother to come home.” Saying someone was a scab was the worst kind of insult. My brother continued the tradition working for United Farm Workers founder Ceasar Chavez from 1968-1971.
In those years, organized labor was an indisputably important force in American politics and society. No one doubted that; it was simply a part of how America worked. But as Reaganomics and trickle-down economics began to transform our economy in the 1980s, the demonization and suppression of organized labor was one of the primary weapons of assault on America’s middle class.
I remember riding in a car with a friend in the 1980s, when we saw a picket line in front of the store where we were headed.
“Oh,” I said. “We can’t go in. There’s a picket line.”
”No, that’s okay,” said my friend. “You can just go around it.”
I stared at her in disbelief, realizing that she honestly didn’t know what she had just said. It wasn’t simply that she hadn’t been raised in a home like mine. It was that the United States had changed. She had not grown up in an America where the rights of workers were considered sacrosanct. She simply had no understanding, really, of why labor was important in any larger sense.
Yet, now, there is a revitalization of labor. And not a moment too soon. Just as organized labor was established in the late 1880s as a response to the first Gilded Age lasting from 1880 to 1990, today we are living in a new Gilded Age and it has spurred an awakening of the sleeping giant of organized labor. Forces of unfettered capital must be met by an equally powerful counterforce, or capitalism becomes a weapon used to exploit and suppress working people. You don’t have to be a Marxist (I am not) to realize that that’s simply the way it is.
The first Labor Day was celebrated in the 1880s, and on every Labor Day we should revisit its meaning. The rights of working people can never be taken for granted; in fact, they must be vigorously and continuously defended against overreach by those who would abuse those rights .
As President, I will do exactly this .
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Today, large corporations constitute a matrix of corporate power whose business model is not job creation, as promised by the minions of trickle-down, but rather job elimination. The last fifty years have seen such a massive transfer of wealth ($50 trillion) away from the bottom ninety percent of Americans, that the majority of Americans work paycheck to paycheck and with constant economic stress.
The repudiation of this madness — the ending of this aberrational chapter of American history — cannot happen without the advent of New Labor . With celebrity union icons like Sara Nelson and Christian Smalls, baristas unionizing Starbucks and the WGA-SAG strike and more — and most importantly, the fact that over two thirds of Americans now say they support unions — we’re in the middle of a labor renaissance that’s one of the few bright lights on our current horizon.
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You can read my complete Labor Platform here. [[link removed]]
All Americans deserve a job, no matter their education. Every employee should be able to thrive in their workplace, no matter the work. All work should have respect, and all workers should have dignity. A national holiday gives us a chance to reflect; this year, a deep reflection on the meaning of Labor Day leaves us with much to be thankful for, and much to recommit to. People in the past have struggled mightily for the rights of labor; we in our generation should give no less of ourselves to see those rights protected and expanded.
Happy Labor Day to you and yours. By all means, let’s keep it real.
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Thanks for your support,
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