The American labor movement is another lie.

Okay, I'm back after almost a month of not posting anything. But I decided to do so by mentioning that today is Labor Day here in the soon-to-be-former United States, as well as in our new enemy Canada, too. For those who don't know, Labor Day is celebrated on the first Monday of September to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers to the development and achievements in the United States. The same is true in Canada to an extent. As the trade union and labor movements grew in the 19th century, trade unionists proposed that a day be set aside to celebrate the workers. "Labor Day" was promoted by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor, which organized the first parade in New York City. By the time it became an official federal holiday in 1894, thirty states in the U.S. officially celebrated Labor Day. There are other traditions associated with Labor Day, such as not wearing white after Labor Day. Explanations for this tradition vary; the most common is that white is a summer color and Labor Day unofficially marks the end of summer, though the actual autumnal equinox doesn't occur for roughly another three weeks.  There are also several barbecues and people often travel for the weekend. Many fall activities such as returning to school and sports such as gridiron football, also begin around this time. And since America is built on capitalism and greed, retailers take advantage of large numbers of potential customers with time to shop, Labor Day has become an important weekend for for many retailers in the United States, especially for back-to-school sales as well as to put all their summer merchandise on clearance to make room for new fall and winter merchandise. 

Of course, organized labor has been in decline since at least the 1970s mainly with support from people like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes and Donald Trump, but some of these wounds are self-inflicted as there is corruption in many unions. Fortunately, we are starting to see a resurgence in the labor movement in the past decade as many new union members are actually millennials and Gen Z.  In 2022, the National Labor Relations Board reported that the amount of union representation petitions filed with the board increased by 58% in the first three quarters of fiscal year. There's also a rise in unionization in the food service industry, with employees in several states forming unions at chains like Starbucks, Trader Joe's and Chipotle. The high tech industry is seeing a rise in unionization as well.  Amazon workers at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York City voted in favor of a union, becoming Amazon's first unionized workplace in the United States. And even with Trump's illegitimate return to office, the union movement will hopefully continue to rise again as the people begin to fight back against oligarchy. 

At least that's how it should be. Of course, as we all know, like everything else in America, it's a complete lie. I recently read the book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai. He points out that the class system in the United States is built upon the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans and that the white working class in the United States constitutes a privileged labor aristocracy that lacks class consciousness. Arguing that the white working class possesses a petit-bourgeois and reformist consciousness, Sakai posits that only the colonized peoples of the United States constitutes its proletariat and that the white working class benefited and thrived at the expense of minorities who struggled to survive and were offered no chance at upward mobility. Indeed, there has long been a history of racism in the American labor movement, as early as the First Civil War in the 1860s when white workers striked to protest the hiring of black workers. But this exclusion became more poisonous with the rise of pseudo-scientific eugenics, In his book Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard opined that so-called economic progressives played a pivotal role in establishing things like minimum wage and maximum hours laws, workmen's compensation and antitrust regulation, but they deliberately left out people of color. Under eugenics, the health of the nation would be upheld by supporting white male heads of households and suppressing blacks and immigrants through unemployment. In fact, it was this movement that gave rise to the idea of the minimum wage and everyone from Woodrow Wilson to W.K. Kellogg to John Maynard Keynes were writing explicitly about improving the “quality” of the American stock through various economic and policy schemes. 

Near the end of the 19th century, new industries, larger factories and denser population centers created fertile ground for rapid union growth. A greater concentration of skilled workers in one place allowed traditional craft unions to grow, and large factories put multiple trades under one roof, enhancing the potential for federated structures like the one that would become the American Federation of Labor. The skilled trades still were overwhelmingly native-born white Protestant males in the 19th century; and because they earned relatively higher wages, they were able to pay dues for strike funds, sick pay, unemployment assistance and other rights. They were also reluctant to organize unskilled Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants, but people of color fared the worst, of course. The AFL were vocal and widespread supporters of Chinese exclusion. They promoted the racist idea that Chinese and other Asian laborers were an economic threat to white workers. In the early 1900s, labor groups on the West Coast formed the Asiatic Exclusion League to campaign for immigration bans against other Asian groups, including Japanese and Korean laborers. 

There have also been acts of violence by white laborers against non-white workers as well. Instead of uniting against a common enemy(the Wealthy Elite Fat Cats), many white workers felt threatened by whom they viewed as an "other" who they felt would take their job. I'm not going to post them all here, but there have been a lot of them and the victims were almost always black, Asian or Hispanic. 

So there you have it. Even one of the most progressive ideas, the American labor movement, which was designed to allow workers to have a better life, is built on racism. Much like the United States itself, it was designed from the ground up as a parasitic and genocidal entity, built on the theft of Indigenous lands and of African slave labor, on the robbery of the northern third of Mexico, the colonization of Puerto Rico, and the expropriation of the Asian working class, with each of these crimes being accompanied by violence and bloodshed. Of course, many white Americans are being exploited as well. But they still suffer from their delusions of superiority and white privilege and refuse to even acknowledge that the world does not revolve around them and that there are other people who deserve the same rights, dignity and chances at success that they do. But that will never happen as long as the United States continues to exist.