Once upon a time, boys and girls, there were no holidays, at least in the sense that we know them today. That is, there were no legal holidays, days when businesses were closed but paid the employees who didn’t work that day. Indeed, employers could and often did fire employees for not coming to work on a holiday (or even if they were sick). What’s more, the bosses paid workers as little as they could get away with, and much of the time, it wasn’t enough to keep food on their tables or roofs over their heads, and whole families, including little children, had to work twelve and fourteen and more hours a day, seven days a week, to provide themselves with the barest necessities.
Doesn’t that sound mean? Even then, some people thought that was mean. In England, in 1843, a man named Charles Dickens thought it was so mean that he wrote a story about it. The story was called “A Christmas Carol,” and it was about a mean boss named Ebenezer Scrooge, who didn’t want his nice clerk to take Christmas off until a visit from some ghosts made him change his mind.
But even in 1843, there were people who thought that if everyone had to wait for ghosts to persuade bosses to be nice to workers, or to pay them a living wage, we’d “all be waiting ’til Judgment Day” (as the Almanac Singers sang in “Talkin’ Union” a century later). They thought that organizing to define things like holidays, paid sick days, and enough pay to live on as rights would probably get them a lot sooner—
And they were right. It cost the workers a lot before they won those rights. It cost them decades, even centuries, of organizing; it cost hundreds of them their lives. But by a century after Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol,” most working people in the developed world had paid holidays and paid sick days. And they got wages or salaries that, if they weren’t negotiated with bosses by unions, were kept at a living-wage level by the fact that so many workers were represented by unions. When people got too old to work, they got pensions. Eventually, they even started getting insurance to cover their medical expenses.
It was an era of gains for many categories of people, who had learned that they could win prodigious victories by banding together. It was the era during which Dr. Martin Luther King, one of the leaders of one of those struggles, declared that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.
But it didn’t last. That high standard of living for working people never applied to all workers, even in the North, let alone in the developing world. And there came a time when the Scrooges of the world, who had always resisted the workers’ gains, began to erode those gains—slowly, at first, and then more and more. Workers, even in the powerful government employees’ unions, began to lose the ability to hold on to what they had won. Union contracts began to be worse for workers instead of better. This year, New York State employees won’t have a day off for Christmas because it falls on Saturday. Scrooge is back, and he’s gaining ground.
And where are the ghosts that will teach him a lesson? Dickens, too, believed that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. But unlike Dr. King, Dickens thought the ghosts could bend that arc. Dr. King and all those union organizers knew, as their heirs have known ever since, that it’s not ghosts who do that, but those of us who give our hearts and souls and, sometimes, our lives, to work together to move the weight of the world so that it points toward justice.
Remember that, boys and girls—it’s the only way we can beat Scrooge.
© 2010 Judith Mahoney Pasternak
