Labor Day 2000

Sky-high food prices predicted as 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 52 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. 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. Strikes at Verizon and Bath Iron Works and the underlying issues of pay, benefits, job security and mandatory overtime suggest regression may be the dominant force.

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. Further, the gap between executive pay and workers’ wages continues to widen, and disgruntlement grows. 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.