LABOR DAY 2003

Ever since President Grover Cleveland signed an act in 1894 making the first Monday in September a legal holiday to honor America’s workers, Labor Day has been a holiday of conflicting themes, 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 designed to honor work 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.”

It is a gap filled with gusto. Americans, whether watching the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, a worthy event to be sure, or stock car races or – strikes notwithstanding – baseball or, better still, enjoying the last real summer weekend out-of-doors with family and friends, seem always to enjoy themselves. Where once there were parades, picnics now rule the day.

Keeping in mind Mr. McGuire’s intent, today also provides the opportunity to assess how far the labor force has progressed, or regressed, since the last Labor Day. The trend clearly is toward regression.

In the mid-’90s, there were crippling strikes, such as at United Parcel Service, General Motors, Northwest Airlines and the Communication Workers of America. The turn of the century brought an acceleration in plant closings, massive layoffs and formerly good jobs being shipped overseas to become bad jobs. This year, downsizing, outsourcing and offshoring are joined by corporate malfeasance and its devastating effect upon investments and pensions, as if the downward spiral afflicting workers inevitably had to draw in retired workers as well.

The once-contentious issue of wage parity, the extent to which hourly pay should keep pace with CEO salaries, now seems quaint – workers no doubt would welcome a return to the days when their biggest complaint was that the boss made 100, or even 150, times more money that they did. Last year, there were 17,000 WorldCom workers laid off – no severance packages, their retirement packages empty – while the executives who ran that mammoth corporate Ponzi scheme still enjoy the fortunes they accumulated by cooking the books. This year in Congress and at the White House, all the talk is of restoring trust in the economy. The actions taken so far – accounting reform, CEO liability for financial statements, longer jail sentences for corporate crimes rarely prosecuted – only address issues of illegal conduct.

Most Americans know, however, that trust requires something far beyond merely not breaking the law. The next steps Washington must take deals less with specific regulation and more with the recognition that companies should exert the same effort in overseeing executives who illegally ship a million dollars offshore as they do watching workers to make sure no one walks off with a crescent wrench. Such a culture change in Congress, in the boardroom and among stockholders won’t be easy. But honoring the American worker, after all, was never intended to be a picnic.