Labor Day, Uh-hum-m-m-m

Not unlike any other birthing, Labor Day became a celebrated U.S. holiday out of the struggle of labor unions in the 19th century. A working class celebration in the U.S. and other democratic countries on the first Monday of September, it has also become an end of the summer long weekend for those in the northern temperate zone. Other countries sympathetic to the socialist cause of the historic working class in the European tradition celebrate Labor Day first of May.

The CNMI traditionally celebrates the day highlighting the efforts of public sector employees. Government has been the primary employer of the local population since the U.S. Trust Territory days. There is a working class in government in the sense that the executive, managerial and supervisory positions are usually occupied by those who run for public offices, the privileged class. Members of their extended families get the clerical, administrative and menial positions. Members of the working class are those who get to turn off the lights when CUC gets around to pushing for austerity measures to conserve energy, especially after failing to collect consumption bills from public sector offices.

The working class in the garment and tourism industries is an altogether different matter. Those industries and their services rely on imported contractual workers who neither have the wherewithal, the legal base, or the flexibility to organize a unified labor force. Certain ethnic groups are favored employees for docility in matters of organized labor. Others are shunned for union organizing, I was told. Add to that a generally belligerent bent towards organized labor, a social trend since the 1960s, and the prospects of Unions in these isles lie more in the realm of wishful thinking than the setting up of Union halls.

To be sure, the advances gained by organized labor in the last century has come to benefit the working class in general. But unlike the mid-1950s when almost 50 percent of the working class belonged to Unions, membership in 1995 was down to 15 percent and declining. Many corporate bodies have since learned that the concerns of the workers must be an active ingredient in determining the policies of an industrial and commercial concern. Enrique Zobel of the famed Ayala Group of Companies in Manila in the 1980s invited into its company board a labor representative. As human resource offices are awakening to the reality that labor’s welfare is an active ingredient in the making of good management practices, increasingly the need to organize labor in some sectors is losing urgency.

It is the nature of life that it is lived on the “backbone” of others. The food chain from the simple microbes to complex life forms is an interactive series of dependencies and interdependencies where survival is possible because one form is given up so that another form may endure. Fundamental to most historical religions is the notion that life is lived best when it is expended on behalf of another. The current Chinese movie “Hero” currently playing on island is instructive in how one may be strategic in making personal decisions for the sake of the general welfare.

We remember that 40 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech during a late August march and public demonstration on the Washington Mall in the District of Columbia. What we do not remember is that MLK Jr.’s speech included a call for accountability on the nation regarding its performance on the promissory note that President Lincoln, whose memorial was the backdrop for the speech, gave a century before. The March itself was for “Jobs and Freedom,” particularly as it applied to the children of the emancipated slaves. When commemorating Dr. King’s speech, we choose to remember the freedom part; conveniently ignore the part on jobs.

The considerable sacrifice of other life forms to get food on our tables in the 21st Century witnesses to this interdependence of life upon life. In the same vein, the effort that goes into educating the population, particularly our young is considerable. The task itself is formidable. It requires contexting the youth to the cultural milieu from whence they sprung. It demands developing in them skills that empower them to drink deeply and widely from the gloriously complex and diverse present that is their received, even if not claimed, inheritance. It entails honing their discernment to anticipate, predict and plan the form of their future existence. Truly, this learning to live and living to learn is a womb to tomb undertaking. At the core of this enterprise is the critical lynch pin that teachers provide in ushering the young into the world of adulthood.

In our time, the teacher as surrogate parent and parole officer, at once loving and disciplining, is a worker for whom the reality of worker’s stress and strain is standard fare for breakfast. As a human resource in a corporate endeavor, they are also units of labor, subject to the rights and responsibilities attendant to social covenants and contracts.

As a novice in the Public School System, I joined my colleagues in a daylong training for new teachers in Science and Social Studies this weekend. We were exhorted to take our profession as a noble and special calling to which not everyone is called. Nor everyone called, Praxis qualified. We were encouraged with the promise of awards and rewards if we strove for excellence. With a bit of cynicism, a colleague characterized the event as an evangelical revival service married to a Mary Kay Cosmetics’ convention. Perhaps, not an altogether fair

characterization, but it does reflect a perspective that combines the spectrum of sublime enterprise on one end, and the reality of salaries, grievances, benefits and disservice, on the other.

Members of the Board of Education want to initiate more dialogue between itself and teachers at the school level. Some teachers are losing patience and are getting poised to engage legal assistance to establish a “collective bargaining” panel as a structural additive to the vertically organized PSS. The top-down BOE route is tedious, uncertain, and time consuming. The litigious route is volatile and patently divisive. In an island culture that is highly sensitive to disrupted social relations, confrontational tactics might have quick but destructive lightning powers that those of us who are here for the long haul are reluctant to employ. There is something to be said about the task of diligently firing up a teachers bottom-up movement to begin meeting and advocating for their own requirements. But then, that’s for the enlightened to facilitate, and for those awakened teachers to decide.

But what am I thinking. It is Labor Day, time to fire up the three Cs: charcoal for the b-b-q at the beach. Cholesterol and calories, here I come.