Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
When the man who feeds the world by toiling in the fields is himself deprived of the basic rights of feeding, sheltering, and caring for his own family, the whole community of man is sick. Cesar ChavezUnlike much of the rest of the world, the first day of May typically comes and goes in the United States without mention. May Day, as it is called in many other countries, is a holiday to celebrate workers rights. It was started in honor of workers who died in the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886.
What does labor want? . . . We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge. Samuel Gompers
It was a peaceful rally in support of the then novel concept that the workday should be eight hours long. The police came to forcefully break up the demonstration but some unknown person detonated a bomb that killed seven policemen and four protesters. Trumped up cases were brought against eight of the labor movement's leaders. Seven were sentenced to death. The governor stepped in and, under international pressure, commuted the sentences of two of them. One committed suicide in prison rather than face a public hanging but the other four were hanged in a public spectacle.
A few years later, as May Day was becoming internationally popular, President Grover Cleveland decided to make the first Monday in September a national holiday to honor the progress won by labor unions, in part to satisfy the demands of labor and in part to keep socialists and communists from using May Day as a recruiting opportunity in America.
For most of my life, Labor Day has simply been a low attendance Sunday in church as families take a three-day weekend at the end of summer for one last trip. As an adult, though I have often been speaking on the stage at Labor Union organized picnics, that audience has almost always been comprised of either politicians running for office or representatives of the dwindling number of labor union members.
A couple of years ago, labor union membership hit a century low, and most of those who are still members of unions are public employees working for fire departments, police departments, schools, or highway programs.
The stronger unions that gave us both the 40-hour workweek and the eight-hour workday are nearly gone. The organized efforts that raised salaries, made pensions, and health insurance, and safer working conditions a part of the ascendance of the middle class have been silenced.
Eric Liu wrote in a piece for Time Magazine: Unions lift wages for non-union members by creating a higher prevailing wage. Even if you aren't a union member, your pay is influenced by the strength or weakness of organized labor. The presence of unions sets off a wage race to the top. Their absence sets off a race to the bottom.
This generation of workers will not get to retire after 35 or 40 years of hard labor. They have no real prospect of a comfortable retirement, and many of them continue to fight against even national health care programs that they personally need.
Some of that is because of the failure of the church to speak up on behalf of working people. Some of it is the fault of workers who have allowed themselves to be manipulated into anti-union sentiments that make them act in ways that hurt themselves and their own children. And, of course, there are the ever-present corporations that want to drive down wages and labor costs as if the people who work for a living were not their prospective customers that corporations need to survive!
I am not from Missouri but I have a growing appreciation for one of Missouri's favorite sons, President Harry Truman, who guided America from the end of WWII into the early 50's, when labor union membership was at its zenith, and when American agriculture became the most advanced in the world, and our middle class spread prosperity to a larger and larger portion of our nation.
Still, the techniques used in our day to manipulate voters and workers to bow to the power of the wealthy were present in his day. I want to share a couple of minutes of a Labor Day speech delivered in 1949 by Harry Truman with you now:
Harry Truman's Labor Day speech.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/labor-day-address-at-allegheny/id257999228?i=60680272&mt=2
11:35-14:57
Truman's argument that the people are being tricked into giving up a fair wage, decent housing, and a fair deal for workers is the same plight we face now in the twenty-first century.
In spite of the fact that we sit here in this church illuminated and air conditioned by socialist electricity, we drove here on socialist roads, after bathing in socialist water, in a community protected by a socialist police force and fire department, and defended by a socialist army, navy, and air force. Virtually all of us have benefited greatly by socialist school systems and semi-socialist healthcare and banking systems and yet, in this election year, we are supposed to cringe at the word "socialism."
Men and women, in our technologically advanced nation, blessed with labor saving devices, we no longer live in a time when everyone needs to work all of the time to survive. There are resources enough for everyone in this nation to live fairly comfortably, have a comparatively short career, and enjoy an honorable retirement.
Manufacturing and agriculture simply do not demand the number of labor hours they used to and if we are willing to live sanely, without huge profits at the top of the economy and crushing poverty at the bottom, everyone can live a decent life in this century.... Everyone!
In a way, I struggle with charity... I struggle with the fact that we keep taking groceries to Crosslines and hot food to Bill's Place because this country shouldn't have so many poor people that such charities are needed. There should not be homeless shelters and soup kitchens in every city of our wealthy nation. Especially in a nation where there are still churches on every street corner. Where is the message that black lives matter? That children matter? That workers matter? That teachers, and public servants, and the people who cook our food and mop our floors, all matter?
If they matter, why can't they get jobs? A living wage? Health care? They don't get those things because, in America, all lives do not yet matter. We can fix this but the first step of changing this democracy into a civilization is all of us have to stop being afraid.
That is my primary wish for everyone who will hear my words today.... Just stop being afraid.
