ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 2, 1996 TAG: 9609040047
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: AN ESSAY BY KEVIN KITTREDGE
REMEMBER LABOR? Straining muscles, streaming sweat. Hard hats. Blue shirts and union halls. Steelworkers, coal miners, truck drivers.
There is work, and there is labor. People who sit at computers are not labor. Ditto anyone who jogs, eats bagels or owns a foreign car with windshield wipers on its headlights.
Laborers are the ones with the lunch pails and union cards - the ones with grime on their faces. They have shoveled the world's coal, laid its railroad tracks, hammered its steel. Think of the village smithy in the poem, with his hammer and his bellows and his biceps, banging a hunk of orange-hot iron into shape.
That's labor.
This was a labor town once.
Down at the Roanoke Shops a couple of generations ago, hot, soot-covered men made Norfolk and Western's prized steam locomotives - behemoths that breathed smoke and were the size of dinosaurs.
That was labor.
Others drove them, stoked them, guided them, repaired them - and that was labor, too.
At recently as 1970, the railroad still employed some 5,700 people here, according to Virginia Employment Commission figures. NW employment in Roanoke is little more than half that now.
Meanwhile, American Viscose, a vast plant that made rayon on some 225 acres sprawled near Riverland Road, employed another 5,000 people, men and women. NW and American Viscose. Together, to old-timers, the two of them spelled "Roanoke."
Blue-collar town?
You'd better believe it.
"I can remember as a child in Roanoke having glorious Labor Day celebrations in the working districts," said Marshall Fishwick, now a communications professor and observer of cultural trends at Virginia Tech. "Roanoke was a big labor town."
"Now," Fishwick noted, "the Viscose plant has closed, and the railroad offices have moved to Norfolk."
Some famous laborers:
Casey Jones. Florence Nightingale. Paul Bunyon (and Babe). Lou Gehrig. Everybody's grandparents. Jesus.
On this Labor Day, say a prayer for labor.
Union membership is down, way down - from a peak of more than 30 percent of the work force 40 years ago to 15 percent today. Wages have - well, we all know what's happened to wages.
Worse is what's happened to the jobs - dragged off to Mexico or the Philippines or Kuala Lumpur, any place where people will work for a buck an hour.
"We are producing less and less in terms of industrial goods," said Jerold Robinson, a business professor and specialist in labor-executive relations at Virginia Tech. "We simply are not competitive."
But it is more than that.
The truth is, labor is not in fashion anymore.
The whole notion of working for grace, to nourish the soul, is passe. "Labor-saving" is the catch phrase of our time, both as a corporate policy and personal ambition. As if labor were some evil to be shunned.
We dream, not of lives of labor, but of early retirement and the joys of idleness. Of the golf course and the good life.
Labor Day was never about the good life.
It began in the 1880s, an era of robber barons and great worker discontent.
The idea for a national holiday for laborers came from one Peter J. McGuire, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.
McGuire believed the country needed a day to mark "the great industrial spirit, the great vital force of the nation." Congress agreed, noting the intent of the new Labor Day was to ensure that the "nobility of labor be maintained.'"
It is fitting that the idea for Labor Day came from a union man.
Labor history is the world's history - but the history of labor in America is in large part the history of unions, once a great and vital force themselves.
Unions here date to the early 1800s, about the time people stopped buying their pots and pans and candles from itinerant peddlers, and began to buy things made relatively far away. Middle-men - shopkeepers - emerged, and inevitably, comparison shopping. Employers attempted to slash wages in order to keep prices down. Employees started unions to make sure they failed.
You might say they've been going at it, management and labor, ever since.
In 1827, building-trade workers on Philadelphia went on strike to demand a 10-hour workday. Management countered that the leisure time would only get them into trouble.
The little tiff led to the creation of the Mechanics Union of Trade Associations - apparently the first citywide organization of labor in the world.
As the 19th century marched onward, the country's manufacturing base exploded.
So, frequently, did labor. In the 1870s striking West Virginia coal miners were assisted by the Molly McGuires - a clandestine group whose bargaining tools included murder. Ten eventually were hanged.
There were other clashes. At the turn of the century, Western miners battled mine operators in the Cripple Creek area of Colorado. This colorful spat included train wrecks and mine explosions. On one occasion a group of miners at a gathering was mowed down by machine gun.
The miners went on to band with a group of socialists and workers from various other unions to form the Industrial Workers of the World - otherwise known as the Wobblies.
The Wobblies had a song that summed up their own negotiating strategy:
"Tie 'em up! Tie 'em up! That's the way to win.
Don't notify the bosses 'til hostilities begin."
It's a different world now, of course. To tie up the bosses, you'd have to find them first - no mean trick when they're all busy shuttling their factories to other countries.
Work has changed as well. "The laborer used to have a pick and shovel, but now he works at a computer or mechanical toy," Fishwick said. "I think it diminishes the importance of labor, because one backhoe, one cherry picker can do the work of 50 people."
"Much has changed, so much that it's hard to even keep up with the pace," said Kent Murrmann, a management professor and labor relations specialist at Virginia Tech. "I think there is a growing sense of uncertainty and concern about employment on the part of workers, because of the amount of change and competition."
If Roanoke was once a labor town, it also was a union town.
Both American Viscose - allegedly the world's largest rayon-making plant - and NW were union.
American Viscose, which made synthetic silk, closed in 1958 - about the time Norfolk and Western switched to diesel power and ceased making locomotives in its Roanoke shops. Layoffs followed, and unemployment in Roanoke in those days soared over 10 percent.
Forty years later, it's a different world - and a different Roanoke. For many here, unions aren't the answer any more.
The numbers are stark: only 6.7 percent of hourly and salaried workers in the state belonged to unions in 1995 - which ranks Virginia 47th in the country for union representation.
And in Roanoke, the Roanoke United Central Labor Council - to which belong some 90 percent of the area's labor unions - numbers only about 8,000 members, or 5.6 percent of the valley's workers.
In the new, post-modern America where manufacturing jobs go to third-world countries and automobiles come from Japan, clearly it is every man for himself.
Labor Council President Walter Wise believes this a mistake.
"Everybody understands 'United we stand, divided we fall,' but they don't understand it as applied to the workplace," he said. "If you're drawing a paycheck from somebody, you're a worker and you're an employee - and you can benefit from collective bargaining."
Experts say it is tough to organize a workplace when workers live in fear of losing their jobs. "It's very unlikely an employee is going to cross his employer these days," Tech's Robinson said.
But Wise and others claim organizing is the worker's best bet - still.
"I think the working man is going to have to make the decision himself, that if he wants a better life, he's going to have to stand up for it," Wise said.
Good or bad, it is a perfect sentiment for Labor Day.
LENGTH: Long : 153 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: File photo from Norfolk and Western Shops in Raonoke.by CNB