No Such Thing as a Bystander: Labour Day and the Lessons of Resistance
I have always loved Labour Day. Part of it is the change in air here in Northern Ontario - yes, the nights are getting cooler. It happens at the beginning of September, bringing back memories of new goals and adventures as kids head back to school.
But Labour Day is about something deeper.
For working-class people it’s a time to reflect on the state of workers' rights, job security, wages, and the push for a better society. Needless to say, this Labour Day, the situation is troubled.
Canada has lost 45,000 manufacturing jobs since Donald Trump began his attack on our economy. Things aren't any better in the United States. The guy who promised that the economy would sparkle within a hundred days has only delivered chaos. Recent polling shows that more than half of American workers state that they are feeling increasingly stressed by both job insecurity from the Trump tariff wars.
But these are the short-term snapshots. What about the broader arc?
In my recent book, Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed, I examined the long-term impacts of Ronald Reagan's war on the unionized working/middle class in the early 1980s.
Between 1946 and 1980, you see a steady upward trajectory in terms of wages, job security, pensions/benefits and upward mobility. In 1980, that trajectory hit a hard wall, and the trend has been downwards ever since.
The result? The hollowing out of the middle class, the rise of job precarity, people unable to afford a dignified retirement, and growing political instability. There was nothing accidental about any of this. It was part of the larger goal – and that larger goal was to crush the power of organized labour.
As Paul Mason lays out so clearly in his book PostCapitalism:
"The destruction of labour's bargaining power … was the essence of the entire [right wing] project: it was a means to all the other ends. Neoliberalism's guiding principle is not free markets, nor fiscal discipline, nor sound money, nor privatization and offshoring—not even globalization. All these things were byproducts or weapons of its main endeavour: to remove organized labour from the equation."
In the early 1980s, the right wing in the United States delivered a devastating one-two punch to working-class families. They went after job security and union rights while stripping the regulatory guardrails from finance, investments, and banking. This led to the rise of a new generation of robber baron oligarchs, while millions of jobs were offshored to Third World countries.
This full-on assault on the American dream has given rise to the rage, politics, and fascist leaders of today.
And you don't need to take my word for it.
In 2020, the Rand Corporation (hardly a bastion of progressive idealism) conducted a major study to identify the connection between the growing economic gap in an age of oligarchs and the rise of political instability in the United States.
They traced it directly to the looting of worker wages happening since 1980.
For example, in 2018, a working-class Black man was earning $26,000 less per year than he would have if income patterns before 1980 had remained constant. A college-educated worker earned between $48,000 and $63,000 a year less.
The authors of the Rand report tracked these lost wages to the bank accounts of the 1 percent. They valued the loss of income for every worker at $1,144 per month for every year over the last four decades. The final price tag for this looting of the American worker comes to $50 trillion in accumulated lost wages and benefits.
That money funded the rise of the oligarchs. And now those oligarchs have their strongman president. Trump is the conjured beast of a political system that had grown increasingly disconnected from the needs of the average worker.
But there is another side of the story.
We are in an era of unprecedented activism. One has only to look at the recent Air Canada strike, where airline attendants vowed that they would go to jail rather than be forced back on the job by the Canadian government. They won.
We’re also seeing young workers organizing gig workers in coffee shops, Uber drivers and against oligarchs like Jeff Bezos.
The pushback is real and it’s growing.
What we need now is to be sharing stories and lessons of resistance. And one such lesson comes from right here in Northern Ontario.
In the early 1940s, the gold mines of Kirkland Lake were fantastically rich, but life was very cheap in those deep mines. The wealth from the mines had driven the provincial economy through the depression. When the workers went on strike in 1941, the Premier sent 500 police with the objective of breaking the strike. They told the miners that if they dared picket or march in public, they would face severe consequences.
When the workers went on strike, the Premier sent 500 police with the objective of breaking the strike. They told the miners that if they dared picket or march in public, they would face severe consequences.
The next day, the women and children marched through the streets. The police did not dare move on them. This act of brave resistance, dating back 84 years, speaks to our time.
Today, as the American presidents sends the National Guard against unarmed civilians, we need these lessons of resistance more than ever. Because in this day and age, there is no such thing as a bystander; there are only resisters and enablers.
On this Labour Day, I pledge to do my part to help the resistance.
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Many people have never really understood the true meaning of Labour Day. Thank you for the reminder Charlie 🙏🇨🇦💪
Thanks for noting why today is a “holiday”. This seems to be lost on print media. But why should this matter to them, their corporate masters have no interest in people, community or social cohesion. Profit, and ONLY profit is what drives this country.