Labor Day’s true meaning
When the first Labor Day was celebrated in 1882, the American job market and an individual’s place in it seemed, and in many ways really was, relatively predictable and orderly.
Most credit the carpenters’ union for that holiday, although some hold out for the machinists’ union, and a man — and they were all men — who practiced those crafts at the turn of the century could expect to do so for the rest of his working life. Women were not generally employed outside the home, but simply running a 1900 household was a grueling and unrelenting physical marathon. There was no concept of retirement; that man and woman would work until they could work no more.
The workers who came to that first parade and picnic in New York — and for them it was a rare day off — did so by trolley or train if they didn’t walk. The day’s futurists saw progress as pretty much of a straight line; the trolleys and trains would get faster, more comfortable and reach more places.
Instead, an undreamed of transformation of transportation and travel was around the corner. The Wright brothers would become airborne in 1903 and Henry Ford’s first Model T would roll off the assembly line in 1908. The first commercial radio station would go on the air in 1920, and eight years later it would be possible to buy a television set, even though there was nothing really to see. The children and grandchildren of those families happily gathered under the banners of the New York Central Labor Union would one day work at jobs that didn’t even exist, weren’t even imagined, in 1882.
In the intervening years between that first Labor Day and the most recent one, the American workplace went through phases where it seemed stable, almost permanent: Son following father into the steel mills and assembly lines; the Organization Man with a white-collar job in a large corporation that would go on forever.
However, blue collars were replaced by white; the mills became shopping malls; and something that would have been incomprehensible at that first Labor Day, the service industry, now dominates the economy. In the 1990s, bright young men and women eagerly hopped from job to job in fields — computers, the Internet, wireless telecommunication — that hadn’t existed 20 years earlier. It seemed then as if the workplace would be like this, if not forever, at least another generation or so. But the millennium brought another of those wrenching transformations that make the United States such a dynamic society.
No more than those carpenters and machinists and their families enjoying that day off more than a century ago, today we can’t imagine the sorts of jobs our children and grandchildren will be performing. The only constant is the respect we give to honest work well done.
That includes the generations who have marched in and out of the Boeing plant in Ridley Township. And the hundreds of jobs saved when Delta Airlines decided to get into the refinery business, buying the facility in Trainer and setting up Monroe Energy. And all those who lost their jobs when Sunoco decided to get out of the refinery business and shutter its iconic refinery in Marcus Hook. That area now sees a new life - and new future as a destination for Marcellus Shale products. They will be delivered by the Mariner East 2 pipeline, which has already created hundreds of construction jobs, both retrofitting the plan and building the pipeline. Yes, there are concerns, but no one can doubt its economic benefit. We salute the thousands of workers who still toil ever day under the umbrella of the Crozer-Keystone Health System, even as they deal with a new, for-profit owner. We welcome the 150 new employees who will soon arrive at the SAP North American headquarters at its Newtown Square campus.
The Delaware County economy looks bright. And it is the local workforce - whether they carry a lunch pail or a laptop that is crucial to its success.
We hope your Labor Day is happy, whatever your labor happens to be.