"The Spiritual Side of Labor Day"

Every sermon has a back story: the research and thought that goes into the creating of it. A sermon on Labor Day obviously needs to open by taking some note on the origins and history of Labor Day. A click on Google told me that it was created by the Labor Movement in 1882 as a national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity and well-being of our country. Across time, the first Monday of

September morphed into a day recognizing the right of working people to have a voice in negotiating wages and working conditions - and this, eventually, included the right of workers to organize and have labor unions.

We shall examine this right - controversial even today - but to enable us to do so I found that I had to go back to my college days - to Economics 101. There I came upon the concept of "surplus value" which Marx considered the essential key to his analysis of economic theory. It goes, very briefly, like this: When owners of capital, that is, those who own assets of various kinds, seek to put those assets productively and profitable to work, they create businesses (in our day corporations) which are expected to be profitable (to pay back the capital that has been invested), and they hire workers or employees - people whose labor and skills add value to the money and materials owners invested to produce a commercially valuable product.

The workers - both blue collar and white collar - must receive wages in order to live and they must do their work in units of time and under conditions which, ideally, are safe and humane (unlike those described by Thomas Hood). The workers, like all overhead expenses, are costs in the process of production. But it is their time and effort and skills, their sweat and labor, that creates product or output and added value or profitability to the enterprise. Of course, the owners of capital , the investors, have to pay all the many and varied costs of production that are at play in the world of commerce - cost of materials, advertising, transporting - and all sorts of other overhead - before any profit is realized. But the workers have created added value for the business and the difference between what they have been paid, their COSTS, and the added value their labor CREATES for the investors - is the surplus value. Economics 101.

The perennial conflict between labor and owners and management has been, to put it simply, recognizing and justly rewarding the surplus value created by workers. The investor fertilizes industry with his/her capital and enterprise; the worker creates value through his/her labor. For there to be justice, a formula must be found for both to share in the profits. Tension arises as the investor seeks to maximize his return (seeing the cost of wages and benefits as a threat to that return) and as the worker seeks to maximize his wages and benefits.

Here we run into one of the deepest and most pervasive issues in the history of conflicts between competing economic interests: who has the power to make economic decisions, or, put more democratically, how is economic power to be distributed?

We get a preview of this dilemma by looking at the founding documents of this nation. The founding fathers had clearly in mind the necessity of a division of power among those in government who made the laws, executed the laws and adjudicated the laws. They had had their fill of absolute monarchs and wanted a clear division of powers in their infant nation. But while they brilliantly crafted a POLITICAL democracy protected by a division of powers, they did nothing to craft an ECONOMIC democracy with a division of powers. The constitution deals exclusively with the political rights and powers of the people, not their economic rights (such as a right to a living wage) or their economic powers (such as the power to bargain with employers for wages and working conditions).

So in economic life, how is decision-making power to be distributed between owners and managers of capital, on the one hand, and employees and workers on the other. Clearly the power does not lie with the individual worker; the single voice, or even a few voices from the factory floor or the white collar work stations cannot exert effective bargaining powers for just wages, humane working conditions and other employee benefits. The individual worker is essentially powerless compared to the power of management: the power to hire & fire and define benefits. There is no economic democracy until there is some more equalizing division of power. Only if workers organize and speak collectively through their union or guild or professional organization can they begin to match the power of owners and management.

And need I remind you that adjusting the scales of power is precisely what the owners of capital have militantly and sometimes violently resisted since the beginning of the industrial revolution - or remind you that the suffering of the lower economic classes is overwhelmingly the result of this mal-distribution of power This is not the occasion for reviewing the history of conflicts between industry and its labor force, a history marked by an often brutal repression of the labor movement, a repression often backed by federal troops. It is enough to say that eventually the government was forced to pass legislation opening the door to labor organizing and labor rights - bills such as the Wagner Act and the National Labor Relations Act. But, even so, laws aimed a balancing the scales of power between labor and management have not been sufficient to deter the unrelenting, militant, financial forces against unionization - forces which also have been politically influential and powerful. The results are clear to see.

In 1954 there were 17 million union members in this country, 35% of the workforce at that time. This was the highpoint of unionism in this country and was also, not coincidentally, the time when a robust American middle class was flourishing and growing. Union wages create a middle class.

Fast forward to 1978. About that time unions sought to push through Congress a labor-law reform bill that would have made it easier for workers to organize by streamlining the process of holding elections under the oversight of the National Labor Relations Board - and by imposing stiff fines on companies that fired labor activists or refused to sign negotiated contracts. Business interests mounted a multi-million dollar campaign that included a massive lobbying effort to pressure Congress. In the end the bill was filibustered to death. Union membership has steadily declined ever since. Today unions represent only 12% of the American labor force, not 35%. Fact is, for the past thirty years worker productivity and corporate profits have risen - while wages have remained flat in terms of adjusted dollars.

So, as we celebrate Labor Day 2009, let us remember two basic realities: The right to organize is the golden key that opens the door to economic democracy and a robust middle class - and, second, economic democracy must go hand in hand with political democracy if there is to be a just and prosperous social order.

Let us quickly add a very necessary footnote here, lest idealism distorts realism. Both political and economic democratic institutions can be, and invariably are, vulnerable to corruption. Labor unions have not always spoken with the voice of angels nor acted with the wisdom of Solomon. Union leadership has sometimes been greedy for power or corrupt - or both. The power of any organization is susceptible to abuse - something the founders of this nation knew very well. Unions, like corporations, are human institutions and prey to the frailties and temptations built into all human enterprises. But while it is a given that power can corrupt, it does not follow that labor should be powerless in the market place. Unless workers are organized they are essentially beholden to the kindness of employers. What is necessary is that both organized labor as well as corporate management abides by laws, both state and federal, that are fair and just. This is the necessary framework for labor relations in a democratic society.

I hope you won’t construe my talk with you this morning too narrowly. Yes, I am inviting you to identify with the needs and rights of the working class and to see the necessity for their collective power through unions to level the playing field in the economic arena. That is what Labor Day is essentially about: strengthening the groundwork for industrial democracy and economic justice. But even this must be placed into a larger context.

Throughout human history oppressed groups have forged various movements that worked for social justice, human rights and human equality. Their efforts created the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage, the labor movement and addressed many other arenas of inequality and oppression. The vision of such reformers and social activists, in the words of one of our hymns, was that "earth might be fair and all people glad and wise." Walter Rauschenbusch, a German Baptist minister who worked among the urban poor at the turn of the last century, unleashed one of these reform movements - known as the Social Gospel. As a Christian he was concerned about sin, but in his mind sin was much more than an INDIVIDUAL violation of God’s will. Rauschenbusch had a keen capacity to identify how evil and sin operated in SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC systems. He proclaimed, radically, that sin mattered not because it offended God but because it disrupted relationships of love and justice and equality in human affairs. He urged us to address transpersonal evil - collective sins of empire, militarism, nationalism, racial bigotry, religious chauvinism, and economic exploitation. And he summarized his social gospel by insisting that "spiritual oneness" and a consciousness of human connectedness is the essence of religion.

This was Liberation Theology ahead of its time: an appeal to the strong for feelings of solidarity with the weak. Justice, social and economic justice, is, after all, love that has been given legs - legs to go out into the world to do the essential work of love: empowerment of the socially and economically disempowered and solidarity with the brothers and sisters most vulnerable in the economic hierarchy. The Social Gospel, after all, IS gospel; it’s the good news of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount walked out into the competitive marketplace to do its redeeming work. It follows, accordingly, that Labor Day is, at its heart, a spiritual celebration - no less than Easter or Christmas, maybe more so. It is a celebration that rightly mandates us to care actively and pragmatically for fellow human beings.

Which brings me to the close of my Labor Day message - a close in the form of a ballad which, in effect, is the peroration of my message to you. Up to this point I have marshaled such logical and rational arguments as I could to make a case for industrial democracy and economic justice on this Labor Day weekend. But logical/cerebral arguments are feeble beside the emotionally compelling, soul stirring anthems of social reform. I have always been moved by the ballads of such folk singers as Pete Seeger, Arlo and Woody Guthrie, Dylan, the Weavers, Joan Baez and other activists and change agents - a subculture with its own music and social messages. Their ballads reach beyond arguments aimed at persuading the mind to ideals aimed at opening the heart and motivating action.

SOLIDARITY FOREVER is the anthem of the American labor movement celebrating the empowerment that unions can provide, just as WE SHALL OVERCOME is the anthem celebrating the ideal of racial equality. The words, composed by Ralph Chaplin, are a call for worker solidarity and empowerment of the economic underclass made possible by the union. Maggie and I sang this workers anthem when we were in college together in Texas and supporting local unions. We invite you to sing it with us now.

SOLIDARITY FOREVER

When the union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?
But the union makes us strong.

CHORUS: Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever! For the union makes us strong.

It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade,
Dug the mines and built the factories, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving ‘mid the wonders we have made,
But the union makes us strong.

(Chorus)

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn;
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.

(Chorus)

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of atoms magnified a thousand fold;
We can bring to birth a new world order from the ashes of the old,
For the union makes us strong.

(Chorus)

CLOSING WORDS

The people, yes, the people,
Until the people are taken care of one way or another
Until the people are solved somehow for the day and hour,
........................

The people, yes, the people
Move eternally in the elements of surprise

From UPSTREAM

By Carl Sandburg