Today is Labor Day and I will not be working. It isn't that I don't have work to do or, even that I don't want to work. I am not working because of my grandfather, Harry Levin, who was a card-carrying member of the International Typographical Union (ITU). The ITU disbanded in the late 1980s and is now part of the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters and the Communications Workers of America, but was one of the first unions to allow women members. My grandfather was not always "for the union" as he owned a small business,. However, when his partner took off to South America with the business proceeds that he embezzled in the 1940s, it was the ITU that helped my grandfather keep his shop open and his handful of union workers on the job. They did him a solid; labor needed jobs, my grandfather had jobs--end of story.
My grandfather was a proud man, an orphan as a child and used to getting by on his own steam. It meant a lot to him that the ITU kept him afloat. He apprenticed at the Chicago Tribune and saved his money. Eventually, he ran a small lithographic business on Wells St. in Chicago where he, my grandmother, Sylvia, and guys with names like Don and Chester set type for local business publications, the ITU newsletters, pamphlets, and the like. Later, he took to selling printing presses and Linotype. He even helped his son-in-law, my Dad, to start his own print shop in Calumet City. He owned that business, Midwest Matrix, until the late 1960s when he passed it on to my Uncle Dick who later sold the business and the building became condominiums.
That is the nature of things. Businesses are built, fortunes are made and lost and then they are gone. But not labor. There is always the working person who comes in early and stays late to run the presses or press the clothes, empties the trash, or make the beds. Most of the time we barely notice, but our lives are better because of them.
So I am not working today, but I do pay attention to working people. I help college kids to start their careers, and I never forget the time I was was young and worked at places that did not have Unions. I remember how people I worked with were summarily fired on a whim by a boss. I think of my own Dad now 80 years old working for a big box store that rewards its managers by how few people they can get by utilizing. It is true that labor has shot itself in the foot by letting unscrupulous people run the show and to more than occasionally overreach.
It is surely a different time and there is no turning back the clock. But history has the amazing ability to furnish lessons that, if we don't remember or learn from, never fail to repeat. Currently, many working people have it bad. They are more productive than ever, but more likely to work for less and/or not be able to hold employment as previous generations did. At the same time, corporations have never had it so good. Bottom lines are great, CEOs have never been paid more, and large stockholders have never been so generously rewarded for their investments. Where busines used to pay $1.50 in taxes for every dollar its workers paid, now it is around $.25 to the dollar. There is a gash in the social fabric because of this lack of equity.
Labor is the constant. Work has to be done and laborers have to and want to do it. We may not remember why there is a Labor Day, but Labor never forgets. Labor is Julie who is in her late 70s and cleans the floor of the building that I work in and who never complains that she has to also clean other floors when budgets are cut or people are sick. Labor just goes back to work tomorrow and polishes your floors, makes our cars, builds our buildings, makes the music we like to hear, and does this despite the forces that would rather see it not exist.
Enjoy your Labor Day, people worked had for it.
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