Labor Day 1999

Sky-high food prices predicted as a New York City truck drivers’ strike spreads across the river into New Jersey.

Holiday weekend death toll reaches 124 on the nation’s highways.

What appear to be contemporary news flashes actually ran on Page One of this newspaper 51 years ago, proving that the more things change, the more … Well, you get the message.

Ever since President Grover Cleveland signed an act in 1894 making the first Monday in September a legal holiday to honor America’s labor force, Labor Day has been a holiday of recurring themes, and an odd mixture of the somber and the frivolous. Even 19th century labor organizer Peter J. McGuire, credited with conceiving Labor Day, admitted the holiday was timed to “… come at the most pleasant season of the year, nearly midway between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and would fill a wide gap in the chronology of legal holidays.”

Where once there were parades of union workers, many places like Bangor now have picnics like the one yesterday at Cascade Park. Celebrants not glued to their TV sets watching the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, a worthy event to be sure, or stock car races seem always to enjoy themselves, having a chance to bring their families along and enjoy the food and weather.

The more serious minded in America take stock in how far the labor force has progressed, or regressed, since the last Labor Day. One aspect of the recent sale to Inexcon of the Bowater mills in Millinocket and East Millinocket is what effect the new owner’s contracts will have on workers at other paper mills when their labor contracts expire. This bears closer observation in the coming months and years.

One thing is certain, however. Despite a robust economy and record unemployment, workers and their families could be doing better. “The State of Working America,” a book published in 1998 by the Economic Policy Institute, indicates the wage of the median worker and the income of the median family has not met expectations.

“Even groups whose wages grew in the 1980s, such as middle-wage women, white-collar workers, and young college graduates, have faced real wage losses in the 1990s,” it notes.

If the skittish stock market turns bearish by Labor Day 2000, that situation could worsen. Both labor and management might improve the situation by opening the lines of communication and agreeing to a spirit of compromise that would truly make Labor Day the holiday of substance Peter J. McGuire intended it to be.