ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Happy Labor Day, we say on our way to score bargains at the mall. Happy Labor Day, we think, exchanging summer shorts and sandals for back-to-school and work uniforms. Happy Labor Day, we hear from political candidates professing concern for American workers.
But what do we really think about labor?
Western culture has always had mixed feelings about work. On the one hand, it sees the need to work for a living as the unhappy outcome of eviction from Paradise. “By the sweat of your brow will you eat bread”, says Genesis. Elsewhere, Scripture is replete with advocacy and praise for the value of hard work.
In fact, the very existence of a federal holiday for workers is an expression of American ambivalence toward workers. Let’s remember the holiday’s origins.
Labor Day came into being as atonement for the deaths of workers who were on strike. In 1894 the unskilled factory workers who built Pullman railroad cars tried to unionize. The Pullman Company refused to recognize them or to negotiate, so they called a strike against all trains that carried Pullman cars. When the strikers defied a federal government injunction to stop interfering with trains that carried mail cars, President Grover Cleveland called in the army. Violence ensued in which workers were killed.
Six days after the strike was ended, in an effort toward reconciliation, Congress and the President designated Labor Day a new national holiday.
Labor Day is still with us, but labor unions themselves are largely gone. American workers are on their own now; with stagnant wages, and few benefits during their working lives, they are also alarmingly unprepared for retirement.
But all is not grim for working people. Today’s global labor market is diverse in ways that the 19th and 20th century labor leaders could not have imagined. Along with unskilled and skilled laborers, highly educated technical and professional people also work in a global environment, and that can make for unexpected – and promising – working relationships.
Take project Sesame, for example. According to The Guardian newspaper, it is a $100 million project to develop the Middle East’s new particle accelerator, which will have participating scientists from Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Egypt and Jordan.
Located near Amman, Jordan, the project (called Synchrotron-Light for Experimental Science and Applications, or Sesame) has members from Iran, Pakistan, Israel, Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan and Bahrain. The group is highly challenged diplomatically – Iran and Pakistan don’t recognize Israel, for example, nor does Turkey recognize Cyprus – but they cooperate anyway.
Can the opportunity to work together build scientific and cultural bridges where politics and diplomacy fail?
That is indeed a hope and wish for this happy Labor Day.
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