Summer’s End
No matter who you are, in the United States we all know summer starts on Memorial Day and ends on Labor Day. And the July 4th holiday is more or less mid-summer. That’s how we roll in the good old US of A. It doesn’t matter that colleges end in early May, and public schools end in late June. Most colleges start in late August, but at least most public schools start right after Labor Day. Tip-toeing through the annual calendar is always fun. There are only the briefest of windows that are full-on work times. September/October is one except for the very long Jewish holidays. The next one after that (mid-November and December are non-functional) is January-March, except for the skiers and the Spring Break crowd. April is tough due to Easter/Passover. May is cool, but June/July as 50/50 at best and just forget August altogether. Wow, that year goes fast and that’s before you take out any number of special events or gatherings (business or personal).
The Labor Day Weekend holiday was made a federal holiday in 1894 at the height of the American labor movement that started fifty years prior. In the seven years since good old Oregon made Labor Day a holiday, another twenty-nine states followed suit just to show the Feds the way. Those were days when labor as a capitalist tool was highly prized. Labor was key to growth, security, prosperity, productivity, legality, sustainability, persistence, and the general well-being of the country. In 2015 I moved to Staten Island. Richmond County is the most unionized county in America with a purported 34% of the households being union member households. That is largely a function of all the municipal union employees of New York City that must live in the City but want a suburban lifestyle and reasonable property costs. That is available on Staten Island. I was building a union project, so I was considered a good guy. I met with many of the Manhattan union big-wig union leaders as I was looking for their support for some pricing concessions. This group lives in the 1950’s from what I could see. I can say without fear of overstatement and based on living amongst the union crowd, that the union movement is well past its prime in America today. It may be at it’s summer’s end.
Nevertheless, we will “celebrate” the American labor movement this Monday. I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a Labor Day parade. Thanksgiving, St. Patrick’s Day, Veterans Day, Gay Pride, Halloween, Independence Day, Memorial Day, Columbus Day…I’ve been to all of those, but never a Labor Day parade. There is a West Indian Carnival parade with lots of scantily-clad giggling women, but that seems like someone in Jamaica seized on an otherwise open three-day weekend without other parades. I guess all the labor union guys are busy getting in their last few days at the beach. By the way, the Staten Island union guys don’t use the beaches on Staten Island, they go down to the Jersey Shore. Not sure why, but maybe it’s in support of New Jersey, one of the last states (the other being Oregon, first-in, last-out on Labor) in the union where you are not allowed to pump your own gas, since state law mandates that an attendant (that would be a union attendant) has to do what every man woman and child in American has learned how to do for themselves. They say the purpose of the law is to protect consumers and the station owners from accidents. What do you think? My guess is that forty-eight states’ worth of consumers and owners don’t give a damn. And just try to get your windshield washed while you’re getting your tank filled…good luck.
So, since there is no parade in our weekend plans, what will we do with all that time? We are having five friends up to our house and meeting up with our cousins (a.k.a. the country mice). The crowd is decidedly diverse. One Brazilian (who’s flying his plane up), two Delaware dudes (one a Cornell-degreed member of the Academy), and a Venezuelan brother-sister tag-team. There are few places to do more on a weekend like this than Ithaca. We will swim in the pool and barbecue. We will golf on our choice of local courses. We will farmers market and MacKenzie Child’s ourselves into checkerboard oblivion. We will take a sunset cruise on the lake for a few hours. And we will take in some finger lakes wineries for good measure (having skipped that part a few weekends ago). It will be a pleasant and relaxing weekend with good friends and new friends.
During my college days, the big socialist/labor event was Caesar Chavez and the farmworker’s unionization of the Central Valley in California. A more distant and different spot than that from Ithaca hardly exists. But there was an Ithaca Friends of the Farmworkers group at Cornell and the president of the organization was in my fraternity. His father was a member of the uber-liberal Economics Department at Cornell and ran the International Center for Justice (or some such thing). I studied in that Economics Department and leavened those courses with third world government courses. Right on! Cornell has the biggest school in the world dedicated entirely to Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) and my dear friend and work colleague Dale is a graduate and has spent her career in the field of Human Resources. She and I are two of the last great pinko liberals left in New York and yet, go figure, I made my mark on Wall Street in investment banking and she made her mark as head of HR for the New York Stock Exchange. So, it goes.
I can think of few better ways to end any summer’s end than to reminisce on the shores and high above Cayuga’s waters. In the late nineteenth century, while the labor movement was thriving, the rich and well-to-do would summer on the shores of Cayuga Lake. The Westinghouse’s and the Vanderbilt’s, the Corning’s and the Eastman’s, the Curtis’ and the Treman’s. And, of course, the early entrepreneurial tech wealth of the Western Union gang that included Ezra Cornell. They were all there, probably not thinking great thoughts about labor, but building up the country in other ways. It was so much a happening place that the aviation and silent movie business took their roots in the fertile Ithaca soil. So, it goes, indeed, and summer’s all come to an end as they will once more this weekend.