Editor's Letter: Labor Day

last updated 8 January 2015

On my way to work, I occasionally see a rat. At about 15 feet tall, with a sourpuss snarl, it’s hard to miss. For years, a union local has pumped the rodents—there are actually two, I learned from The New York Times—full of air and left them squatting in front of buildings owned by managements the union wants to shame. Sometimes, a few union members hand out leaflets explaining their grievances. Other times, the rat appears to work solo. Either way, the sight makes me think how far the American labor movement has fallen.

It’s a familiar story. In 1983, one in five Americans still belonged to a union. Today, one in eight does—and the majority work in government rather than private industry. In once heavily unionized Michigan, where in their heyday the auto industry and the United Auto Workers partnered to boost thousands of blue-collar, predominantly male workers into the middle class, the bottom has been falling out for decades. It still is. Between 2005 and 2008, median income among men in Michigan fell an astonishing 12 percent. Technological innovation has driven manufacturing productivity to new heights while sending manufacturing employment into a nose dive. And once the nation’s leaders, Democrat and Republican alike, charted the course of globalization, factories that didn’t reduce head count and go high-tech simply went elsewhere—including under. All of which has left Labor Day feeling increasingly like summer’s other bookend, Memorial Day. It has acquired a wistful, elegiac air, its parade steeped in past glory and present anxieties. The rats stay home; labor’s worries are too weighty to be conveyed by cartoon.