Ironies on Parade

Growing up in Detroit gave me the sense of irony an appreciation of Labor Day demands. Back when there were still automobile industry jobs to be had in the city, members of the United Auto Workers and other unions would start marching on two separate boulevards that converged downtown, where the dual flanks would merge, as if to symbolize labor's gathering force. That part of town would always be desolate on weekends, so few spectators would see this act of collective wishful thinking. One year when I lived near part of the parade route I wandered over to watch. This would have been between my brief stints in the United Food and Commercial Workers (as a grocery store bagboy during high school) and the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981), which I joined when I resided in New York after I (like so many others) left Detroit. Someone handed me a sign and I ended up joining in for a while, walking past closed businesses facing empty sidewalks. The placard concerned a specific struggle involving a union, and an industry, other than my own. Carrying it felt faintly fraudulent. Marching alone in the Labor Day parade, with no banner to stand behind or organization to represent, didn't feel like solidarity. I gave my sign to someone who belonged to a group and made my way back home.

The ironies of Labor Day go much deeper than my ambivalent personal experiences with it as someone from a place where the waxing and waning of organized labor's power are a massive part of local history. The ironies-and there are several-reach to the holiday's very roots. One is a relatively minor matter of date selection. Local celebrations of workers' collective strength in the United States predated the declaration of May Day, its international equivalent, and while May Day never took hold in the United States, the day's selection for a global event resulted from the earlier scheduling of an American one. Others have deeper significance. The president who made Labor Day a national holiday did so soon after sending federal forces to end a major strike, precisely the maneuver he'd opposed while campaigning for office around the time of another labor action with a bloody ending. The leader whose union that president decimated had initially backed his electoral campaign. For his involvement in the strike, the unionist ended up in jail, from which he emerged as a national figure who became one of the most prominent third party presidential candidates in the nation's history. May Day and Labor Day share decidedly secular origins, but workers grafted religious elements to their holidays. Unions in the city that first celebrated Labor Day eventually saw their members preferring to use the day off from work that their efforts have won for activities other than a parade, which they eventually held on another day, if at all.

May Day and the Original Labor Celebrations

The convocation of socialist parties and unions known as the Second International in 1889 passed a resolution calling for a simultaneous, worldwide demonstration in favor of law limiting the working day to eight hours and since such a rally had already been planned in the United States for the following May 1, the body decided to use that date. As it fell on a Thursday, unions in various countries found themselves having to decide whether members should go on strike in support of the cause. Cautious parties and unions opted to demonstrate on the first Sunday of the month instead. However, historian Eric Hobsbawm insists that refusing to work made May Day meaningful. In a paper on it in Uncommon People, he writes:

It was the act of symbolically stopping work which turned May Day into more than just another demonstration, or even another commemorative occasion.... For refraining from work on a working day was both an assertion of working-class power—in fact, the quintessential assertion of this power—and the essence of freedom, namely not being forced to labour in the sweat of one's brow, but choosing what to do...