A Labor of Love
Today is Labor Day, which has been a national holiday since 1894. Even though it falls 2-3 weeks before the formal calendar transition from summer to fall, America always considers it the end of summer and the start of “back-to-school” season. It’s one of these times when everyone seems focused on their business before the holidays kick in at the end of November. Strangely enough, the hardest working folks in my world of finance are also those who barely get started with this nose-to-the-grindstone time when they have to set aside two consecutive weeks for the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur … and if you are particularly observant, those are followed by Sukkot. But Labor Day is both special to us and more mundane than most national holidays.
Labor Day is supposed to be a day when we remember and honor the men and women who input that crucial element of production into the equation, human labor. Its origins in the Second Industrial Revolution of the late Nineteenth Century was when that labor mostly took place in factories. That was somewhat dehumanizing work which was increasingly specialized and repetitive. Unlike farming, which was always more holistic and connected to the end product, though no less taxing, factory assembly line work was considered the bedrock of the labor movement. Today things are quite different. Despite the heralded return of manufacturing to America, the vast majority of what we would consider laborers are service workers. The dehumanizing aspect of that work seems to focus on the act of having to serve others. Rather than putting widgets on flanges for eight hours a day, workers are doing jobs that other people are to busy or unwilling to do for themselves. This can almost be thought of as excessively humanizing work.
We are seeing some wholesale changes in both the nature and the attitude towards labor these days. Everyone has a different perspective on labor unions based on their own personal experiences or friends and family that are members of a union. When I was building the New York Wheel in Staten Island, we hade a very early decision to go all union. There were two reasons for that. We needed so many different trades working on that job and some, like the steel workers, would necessarily be union members. Once you have some union workers on site, it is simply too problematic to have non-union workers on site at the same time and you need to do crazy things like setting up demising walls to keep them apart. Feeling run deep in the union and non-union worlds. The other reason was the nature of Staten Island. While Staten Island is the only Borough of New York City that is predominantly Republican, it is also the most union-intensive county in America. Fully 37% of the population of Staten Island belongs to a union. The reason for that is heavily dominated by the fact that the various city employees, most notably police and fire department folks, have to live in the five Boroughs and Staten Island is the closest thing to a suburban lifestyle you can find in New York City. Therefore, many, many fire and police union members reside on Staten Island. Whenever we had a meeting in the Island (usually with the people building the sister project of the Outlet Mall) the union members would come and heckle and boo the Mall folks and cheer for me. It felt good to have union support.
You can’t take the position that the Biden/Harris administration has taken about reestablishing the dominance of the Middle Class in America without being pro-union. Biden famously became the first U.S. president to ever walk the picket line with the United Auto Workers, so it was no surprise that they and many other unions endorsed Biden and now Harris for the presidency. It’s interesting to see how people feel about unionization. Where for many years union membership was in decline, that has now reversed itself and unions seem to be again on the ascendancy. When you look at the trend over the last 40 years, you see union membership declining steadily from 20% of the workforce to 10% now. In the last two years we have seen that rise by about 2% with the addition of about 400,000 new union members. It is hard to say this is a trend that will continue to grow, but I think recent polls show more support for unions than we have seen for many years.
I have never been a union member and I have never been on a management team that has fought to keep unions down or out of our business, so I have a rather agnostic view. What I do sense when I listen to people like Elon Musk talking about unions, is that there is a cavalier attitude by some very successful businesspeople about what it costs to live a normal life in today’s society. The concept of replacing minimum wage with living wage is one that appeals a great deal to me and seems to be gaining traction overall in the public opinion. In the past forty years, as unions have fallen as a percentage of our workforce, the general public opinion about unions has improved. What used to be a 50% approval rating has now risen to a 70% approval rating. That’s actually a very impressive level of approval for most anything. It was only higher than that in the 1950’s. And even more important, the disapproval rating is down to 23%, which is the lowest level it has enjoyed in fifty years. And that is despite the fact that 85% of the respondents say that no one in their household is a union member. 43% of all Americans say that they want to see unions have a greater influence in the colonic picture in the future. That its because 77% say that they feel unions mostly help the economic landscape. That said, 82% of respondents do not think people should be forced to join unions. They are generally supporters of the right-to-work laws that are being passed in many states.
So, the bottom line seems to be that we are in a place now where people see the value of unions and generally believe that workers should have the right, but not the obligation to organize and create a collective bargaining advantage for workers against corporations that are getting bigger and bigger. This probably goes hand in hand with the general public attitude suggesting that anti-trust legislation is helpful in braking apart monopolies and oligopolies and thereby improving the competitive environment.
The way I read all this is that Americans remain strong believers in capitalism, but also believe that it doesn’t give license to companies to grow as large as they want and to push their workers around as they might be able to in the absence of unions. I find that a very healthy and balanced economic instinct qnd perspective that gives me great hope that the American competitive spirit is alive, well and rationally positioned to benefit all of the constituents and thereby creating benefits to labor and capital alike. Perhaps its time for the American public to be given a lesson in just how instinctively well-balanced they are in their views of being pro-business and pro-union all at once. Let’s keep celebrating Labor Day for many years to come.