Labor

... at this great new website from our friends at American Rights at Work.

Some Labor Day history:

The movement for a national Labor Day had been growing for some time. In September 1892, union workers in New York City took an unpaid day off and marched around Union Square in support of the holiday. But now, protests against President [Grover] Cleveland's harsh methods [in crushing the Pullman strike] made the appeasement of the nation's workers a top political priority. In the immediate wake of the strike, legislation was rushed unanimously through both houses of Congress, and the bill arrived on President Cleveland's desk just six days after his troops had broken the Pullman strike.

1894 was an election year. President Cleveland seized the chance at conciliation, and Labor Day was born. He was not reelected.

In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called it "the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed...that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it."

Most countries celebrate Labor Day on May 1, so why is it on the first Monday of September in the United States? According to Wikipedia:

The Knights of Labor organized the original parade on Tuesday, September 5, 1882 in New York City. In 1884 another parade was held, and the Knights passed resolutions to make this an annual event. Other labor organizations (and there were many), but notably the affiliates of the International Workingmen's Association, many of whom were socialists or anarchists, favored a May 1 holiday. In 1886 came the general strike which eventually won the eight-hour workday in the United States. These events are today commemorated as Labor Day in virtually every country in the world, with the notable exceptions being the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. With the Chicago Haymarket riots in early May of 1886, President Grover Cleveland believed that commemorating Labor Day on May 1 could become an opportunity to commemorate the riots. Thus, fearing that it might strengthen the socialist movement, he quickly moved in 1887 to support the position of the Knights of Labor and their date for Labor Day.

From Dean Baker:

The stronger than expected job growth reported for March is good news for the labor market, but it implies another quarter of weak productivity growth. Barring some large downward revisions, it looks like hours growth for the quarter will be a bit more than 1.0 percent. With the consensus estimate of GDP growth at 2.2 percent (seems high, given the weakness in investment and housing), we're looking at another quarter with productivity growth in the 1.0 percent range. Productivity growth has averaged 1.6 percent since the third quarter of 2004.

The Wall Street Journal has been way out front on the evidence of a productivity slowdown, having run two major pieces in the last half year. Thus far, this topic has been largely ignored in the rest of the media. Productivity is the main long-run determinant of living standards. The productivity upturn in 1995 was rightly huge news. The evidence that it may be coming to an end is also huge news.

Margy's Mobility Agenda project (which I'm an advisor on) recently completed a national scan of emerging state and local-level ideas to improve low-wage work, and more generally, make the economy work better for everybody. The complete findings aren't written up yet, but a summary is available.

One of the more interesting ideas that we're still learning about involves portable accounts that fill the gap created when employers do not provide a tax-deferred retirement option for workers. Workers would be able to open an account with a sponsoring state agency and make contributions that employers and states could match.

Dean Baker at CEPR has just released a new paper on the idea—I've only read the executive summary so far, but it looks extremely useful. Dean has been one of the most effective opponents of Social-Security privatization, so his ideas on the subject of how to do portable accounts right are almost certain to gain the inclusionist.org Seal of Approval.

Over the last few years, books like Barabara Ehrenreich's Nicked and Dimed and Beth Shulman's The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans—and foundation initiatives like The Fairness Initiative on Low-Wage Work—have laid out a blueprint for a new approach to anti-poverty policy, a paradigm-shifting approach that focuses primarily on improving the pay and conditions of low-wage work and making the economy work better for everyone, rather than on the characteristics and deficiencies of narrow slices of the population.

Louis Uchitelle has a good piece in today's NYT on the debate among progressives between what economic populism and "Rubinomics." Uchitelle, like Harold Meyerson, who wrote about this debate in the WaPo earlier this week, notes that the populists are finally getting organized institutionally and seeking to became a counterweight to the Hamilton Project:

Just as the populists have organized, tentatively calling their group Shared Prosperity, so has the Democratic establishment. Its counterpart is “the Hamilton Project,” formed last spring to elaborate policies in anticipation of a Democratic Congress and, in 2008, a Democratic victor in the presidential election. Mr. Orszag, who was a senior economist in the Clinton administration, directs the project. The financing comes from wealthy Democrats, among them Mr. Rubin.