Yesterday was Labor Day. It hasn’t always been a holiday in the United States. but it has been a holiday for as long as I can remember. I know it seems hard to believe, but there have been a number of detractors in recent years. Some have tied them to Labor Unions and others to socialism.  My parents began teaching in 1967. They were married at the end of college in 1966. Dad continued in graduate school, but we will treat them like they were both public school teachers in Texas. The beginning salary for teachers then would have been somewhere between 4000 and 5000 dollars. We know the average teacher nationwide was 7.423 dollars in 1967. That would be the midpoint after 15 to 20 years of teaching and we know that Texas has always lagged behind most states and beginning teachers for considerably less.

The national average in 2023 dollars would be 44,558 dollars. The current national average salary is 66,745. That is due mostly to labor unions. My parents salary would have likely been somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 in 2023 dollars. The average starting salary in the area is actually closer to 50,000 here and higher in most other states.

They would tell us stories of how they collected Coke bottles to pay for groceries and how different businesses in town would give teachers steep discounts. They just understood that teachers were dramatically underpaid. Starting teachers aren’t being underpaid anymore. That’s due to unions and teacher associations. Furthermore, every teacher gets s a 45 minute conference period every day and gets a duty free lunch. These are legally mandated benefits that teachers fought hard for.

I am probably leaving some things out because I started teaching in 1997. A lot of the things I got from day one were probably not available to teachers like my parents. These are all due to unions and teacher associations. These associations also give teachers legal advice and services that are invaluable. They continually lobby the state legislatures for additional benefits, salaries, and legal protections. This is something teachers can’t do on their own. This is true of dozens of major industries. Workers fought hard for the 40 hour work week, minimum wage, child labor laws, safety regulations, another other benefits. Labor unions were invaluable in these efforts. Workers couldn’t have done this without organizing and collectively bargaining.

They paint the picture of unions fighting for unnecessary regulations and benefits so their workers can sit on their ass and do nothing. They paint the picture of unions driving up costs for consumers unnecessarily. They are communicating one message to most of us out loud and communicating another one under their breath. Unions helped the U.S. build a thriving middle class. They did this without succumbing to socialism. That’s the irony of this whole deal. European nations don’t need unions. They have already legislated so many worker protections and benefits that unions are scarcely needed. Unions keep those “onerous” regulations at bay. They prevent worker uprisings. We’ve seen them around the world, but for the most part we don’t see them here.

We’ve seen the impact of union busting. The middle class is shrinking and billionaires have seen a windfall. The sad thing is that people notice the stagnating wages and erosion of benefits, but they haven’t made the connection. Instead they are fighting culture wars, blaming immigrants, women, and people of color. They are blaming everyone but the people actually doing it. Instead they allow them to disparage Labor Day and call it a socialist holiday.

 

 

 

Immediately after World War II we had the most important choice in our nation’s history. It may not have seemed like it at the time, but the decision in how to proceed has governed our lives for the past 80 years. We could choose to invest in the people or we could build the biggest army the world has ever seen.

Make no mistake, we tried to do both for awhile. The post World War II economy was the greatest in the nation’s history. Any marker that you wanted to use to measure prosperity tells us this. The challenge of history isn’t about remembering what was. Fortunately, we still have people that can tell us first hand about the post-war boom in the economy.

The challenge of history is in determining why. Simply put, we as a country chose to invest in our own people. The GI bill has literally sent millions of people to college. Home ownership rates skyrocketed as America saw the development of a modern and thriving middle class. We owe all of that to those government programs and a strong presence of unions.

In the early 1990s we had a decision to make. The Cold War was over and we had ultimately won. The world will always be a dangerous place, but we had the decision of whether to keep investing in the American people or whether we wanted to keep investing in being a super power.

In 1990 the Cold War was more or less over. In 1990 we were spending 325.1 billion on defense. It reached it’s peak at 752.2 billion in 2011. The chart referenced only goes to 2019, but you get the general idea. Obviously, statistics can cut a number of ways. The same chart has the budget as a percentage of gross domestic product. Those numbers look very different.

Yet, one cannot help but imagine the possibilities. No one would suggest defense spending go to zero or even hold at 1990 levels, but we ultimately spent north of seven trillion dollars on the war on terror. Of course, that’s just one source. Different sources have different amounts. Sure, we killed Saddam Hussein and we killed Osama Bin Laden, but it is fair to ask how the world is a better place after 20 years.

It’s also fair to ask how America is a better place after the last 30 years. We could have retreated to a place of relative strength but one that was more or less an equal partner with the other nations in NATO. We could have heavily invested in our own people.

We could have a stronger living wage. We could have universal health care. We could have free community college at the very least. We could have invested in newer energies and prepared for the 21st century economy. We could have done all of these things and more. They will tell you that we can’t afford those things. Trillions of dollars on the war on terror says otherwise.

It has never been about whether we have the money. It has been about who should get the money. The right decided a long time ago that corporations and national defense needed that money a lot more than people did. They’ll tell you that we can’t afford to help poor people. They’ll tell you that they need to help themselves. They’ll tell you that we can’t afford a standard of living for every human being in the country. We know none of that is true. We choose not to.