Labor Day

["hoov" <hoov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

forwarded by Michael Hoover

>                          Whose labor day is it really?
>
> by Fred Gaboury
>
>    from the September 1.1995 issue of the
>    People's Weekly World.
>
>    Who founded Labor Day -- and what difference does it make?
>
>    Probably not much -- or does it? It's been 113 years since 25,000
>    workers from 53 unions marched through New York City's Union Square in
>    the nation's first Labor Day parade on September 5, 1882. And it's
>    been 101 years since President Grover Cleveland signed legislation
>    making Labor Day an official holiday.
>
>    Most of us were taught -- to the extent that we were taught anything
>    about labor history -- that Peter J. McGuire was the founder of Labor
>    Day. But in 1968 the International Association of Machinists (IAM)
>    challenged that version of history.
>
>    The headline article of the Sept. 5, 1968 Machinist said, "It's time
>    to toast the real Maguire," and went on to document the claim that
>    Matthew Maguire, a machinist from Paterson, N.J., was the real father
>    of Labor Day.
>
>    W. Willard Wirtz, then secretary of labor, settled the matter at the
>    next IAM convention. "There is no question as to who is the father of
>    Labor Day," he told the delegates, " ... so far as the Department of
>    Labor is concerned, he is Matt Maquire, the machinist."
>
>    But what difference does it make? Isn't it enough that there is a
>    Labor Day -- a day that recognizes the contributions of the millions
>    of working men and women who create the nation's wealth?
>
>    If all that's involved is setting history straight, we could end here.
>    But there's more to history than great men and women. There are also
>    ideas -- and history is the clash of ideas just as it is the battle
>    between classes -- between those who work for a living and those live
>    off those who work. And that helps to explain why, for nearly 75
>    years, Peter J. McGuire was passed off as the father of Labor Day.
>
>    According to Murray Zuckoff, whose research did much to straighten the
>    historical record, Maguire was a socialist -- a special kind of
>    socialist. As Zuckoff put it, Maguire was "a man deeply imbued with
>    the ideas of Marx." In today's world he would probably be a member of
>    the Communist Party.
>
>    That -- Maguire's deep commitment to socialism as a follower of Karl
>    Marx -- was enough to send shivers up the spine of America's ruling
>    elite and their supporters in the leadership of the labor movement.
>    Thus, as they saw it, the need to find a "founder" for Labor Day:
>    someone not "tainted" as an advocate of socialism -- a society based
>    on common ownership of the means of producing wealth and distributing
>    it, a society where those who create the wealth share equitably in the
>    fruits of their labor.
>
>    That person was Peter J. McGuire, conservative head of New York's
>    Carpenters Union, who once urged "the propriety" of setting aside a
>    day for labor at a New York Central Labor Union meeting. After that it
>    was easy -- and McGuire stood beside the president as Cleveland made
>    it official in 1894.
>
>    Only the capitalists -- the class workers call "the Bosses" or "Big
>    Business" -- benefit from division in the ranks of workers. Thus the
>    development of "divide and rule" -- a tactic the capitalist class here
>    has refined to the nth degree.
>
>    Part of that tactic is to keep the U.S. working class and its unions
>    separated from the world working class movement and from the ideas of
>    socialists and Communists. That is why, when the powers that be
>    finally acceded to the workers' demands for a national holiday
>    recognizing labor, they set it for September while workers in other
>    countries celebrate their holiday on May Day.
>
>    In this way, American workers were further separated from their
>    brothers and sisters in other countries -- a tragedy made even more
>    tragic because it was AFL President Samuel Gompers who asked the
>    international labor movement, at that time led by associates of Karl
>    Marx, to establish an international day of labor solidarity to
>    commemorate the May 1, 1886 strike by American workers for an 8-hour
>    day!
>
>    Another essential of "divide and rule" is to deny people their
>    heritage, to convince them that things have always been the way they
>    are and that nothing can -- or need -- be done about it.
>
>    Another way is to deny or distort the contributions that syndicalists
>    like "Big Bill" Haywood, socialists like Eugene V. Debs and Communists
>    like William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Gus Hall made to
>    the struggles of American workers. And, when it comes to Labor Day,
>    create and perpetuate the myth that someone -- anybody but a socialist
>    -- was the father of Labor Day.
>
>    Without the men and women who shared a vision of a just society, where
>    no person could profit from the work of another -- without the
>    struggles they led and the ideas they fought for -- the American labor
>    movement and, for that matter, American society would be much
>    different from what it is today.
>      _________________________________________________________________