Is 'Happy Labor Day' an Oxymoron in 2017?

Hope everyone had a happy Labor Day — and here’s hoping such a greeting (“happy” and “Labor Day”) doesn’t sound like a contradiction in terms.

We mark this holiday as a celebration of the American worker. Yet that worker continues mainly to tread water against a heavy current — out-sourcing, automation, political pressures, corporate greed – which belie statistics showing unemployment is at historically low levels.

Here are some other figures, released the other day by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which millions of American families know how to interpret just as clearly as the unemployment numbers:

Workers’ average hourly earnings last month rose by only 3 cents – or 0.1 percent.
Over the past year, they’ve risen by only 2.5 percent.

At the same time, as former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers points out in the Washington Post that profits of the S&P 500 are rising at 16 percent a year. Let’s see, 16 percent vs. 2.5 percent – does that sound anything like fairness?

This, at a time when President Donald J. Trump wishes to foist a tax plan in which the richest of Americans will get the biggest of tax cuts – because, as everyone knows, nobody suffers through tough economic times the way billionaires suffer.

In President Ronald Reagan’s time, this kind of thinking was known as “trickle-down economics.” Give the big corporations enough tax breaks, and eventually their increased profits will trickle down to the hirelings.

Here we are, more than three decades later, and we can call trickle-down by its true name: fraud.

I had dinner a few nights ago with a couple of old pals from my days as a daily newspaper reporter. As everybody knows, times are tough all across the newspaper business. At my old paper, the newsroom’s got only one-third the reporting staff that they had before the massive downsizing of the past decade.

“Do you know,” one of my old friends said, “we haven’t had a raise in the last dozen years?”

He’s happy he’s still got a job, but despairs that he’s doing it at wages from 2005. What’s the problem? It’s not just tight-fisted corporate management – it’s the lack of a labor union that once had at least a fistful of muscle, and now has absolutely none.

And that’s not just a problem for newspapers. From the time Reagan first went after unions – remember the air traffic controllers? – until now, the number of private sector workers has declined by two-thirds. Today, only 6.4 percent of private-sector workers belong to a union.

So who’s left to fight for the working stiff when it’s a collection of lonely individuals up against corporate conglomerates? And who’s left to say “Happy Labor Day” without it sounding like a contradiction in terms?

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Top Photo: “Lunch atop a Skyscraper,” Charles C. Ebbets, 1932