Will we celebrate workers on the United States' 250th anniversary?

Retired professors Joshua Freeman has written numerous books on labor history in New York and the United States.

Josh Brown courtesy of Joshua Freeman

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As a retired distinguished professor of history and the author of numerous books on worker history in New York and the United States, Joshua Freeman has lived long enough to see threads of labor history develop before his own eyes. Just after finishing up his master's degree at Rutgers University, Freeman took part in celebrations for the United States' bicentennial in the summer of 1976.

Now 50 years later, with a PhD and decades of tenure at the School of Labor and Urban Studies at the City University of New York under his belt, Freeman fears the country may be missing the mark with the celebrations for its 250th anniversary.

"I think in general there seems to be a lot less celebration than there was 50 years ago," Freeman said in an interview this week where he reflected on 250 years of American labor history. He was quick to point out that the history of organized workers in the United States goes back nearly to the founding of the country,

Workers, whether enslaved or free, are crucial to telling the story, the history, of the United States, and their contributions cannot be waxed over or forgotten, Freeman said.

"Every day the United States functions only because ordinary folk get out bed, drag themselves to their jobs and do what needs to be done," he said. "I think that is the very core nature of what the United States is, and I think we too rarely acknowledge that."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Chief: You've been studying labor history in this country for a very long time. Do you have any reflections for the 250th anniversary here in the United States? 

Joshua Freeman:  One thing that I would point to is that organized workers, what today we call unions, have a history almost as long as the United States itself. It wasn't more than a few years after the independence of the United States that the first worker groups began forming. So over almost 250 years we've had an intertwined history of workers in organized form and the history of the United States and I think they have been very formative in how our country has developed. More so in some times than others but over this long history we've had they have played a decisive role. 

TC: Do you think this will be something that a lot of workers, a lot of unions will celebrate, America's 250th anniversary? 

JF: I think there will be celebrations and ways of marking it, but it’s a kind of sour moment right now I think for a lot of Americans. The economy is troubled, we're in a war, we have a president who is extremely unpopular and there's not much of a general celebratory mood in the United States. And, in addition, it seems like the 250th has been hijacked by a specific segment of the American political spectrum, you know, quite right wing, so I think in general there seems to be a lot less celebration than there was 50 years ago. 

I'm old enough to remember the 200th anniversary. In New York there was quite a lot of stuff. It was right after the fiscal crisis and I think it seemed like a moment where finally there was something fun and exciting to share as a city, or share as a nation, and it doesn’t feel that way this time around. 

TC: Do you think there will be enough of a focus on workers' role in those celebrations. 

JF: Well look. Literally, workers built this country. The economy was built on slave labor and it was built on factory workers, and railroad workers and transit workers.

Every day the United States functions only because ordinary folk get out bed, drag themselves to their jobs and do what needs to be done, and I think that is the very core nature of what the United States is, and I think we too rarely acknowledge that.

One of the moments we did acknowledge that was during the Covid pandemic when so many people were fortunate enough not to have to leave their homes to go to work and yet there were those people who were vital and kept us all going and rarely, for the culture, we acknowledged that.  

I think in the celebrations we're seeing ahead, there's not a lot of acknowledgements of that, there really isn't. In fact, almost the opposite, there's almost an effort to erase the idea that we ever had slavery, to erase the idea that the land on which we grew was available because we dispossessed the original inhabitants of that land.

So, I think we really minimize the role of workers. 

Sure, in advertisements for beer and cars you have a worker in a hard hat and a pickup truck. But beyond that trivial level I don’t think workers have been made central to our celebration of the anniversary of the republic.  

TC: Do you have any thoughts on the posture around immigration and how that becomes a labor issue in the United States? 

JF: The United States has had many forms of labor. When the republic was founded what we think of as the dominant form of labor, wage labor, was a very small segment of the economy.

A great deal of labor was unfree; slave labor, apprentices, bounded servants, children. So, we've seen a tremendous change in the form of labor, but I think a thread that runs throughout us history is the importance of immigrants and newcomers. 

JF: I don’t think of slaves as immigrants, these were forced kidnapped workers, and some people, for example the Irish during the famine, that’s immigration but its immigration fleeing disaster. But various forms of people coming to the United States, freely or not freely, and becoming part of the labor force has absolutely been central to the history of the country.  

Even in New York City today where we have a huge percentage of the population that was born in another country – 37 percent right now in New York City- that’s still not as high as it was 120 years ago. So, this is a long-standing story, there's nothing new about this. 

TC: Is there anything specific to New York you think you’ve seen that doesn’t affect the rest of the country, or is it a reflection of the rest of the nation when it comes to labor history and the role of workers here? 

JF: New York has been at the forefront of labor at some periods of time and in some respects. We have an economy that was built on trade, port activities and small-scale manufacturing. And a certain style of unionism that grew out of that kind of an economy, including the garment industry unions really were pioneered here in New York and in many cases copied elsewhere.  

Right now, just in terms of sheer numbers, New York is really an outlier. We have twice the density of union membership as the country as a whole. 

TC: Is that something that's due to historical factors? Political factors? 

JF: I think all of the above. We have had a decline in the percentage of workers who belong to a union in New York just as the country as a whole has. But we started at a high level. And because the New York union movement was quite varied, the disappearance of manufacturing did not have as a devastating effect in New York as it had in places that were more singularly focused on that kind of economic activity.  

So, I think some of it has to do with the nature of the economy in these different areas and their history, but also right now there's a kind of culture in New York that I think is more aware of and more supportive of unions than in many other places. 

Although nationally, unionism is extremely popular, so there's a disconnect between the number of people who are actually in unions, which is quite small nationally, and the percentage of people who look favorably on unions. 

TC: Since the pandemic, there's been a new wave of workers joining unions, and a lot more high-profile fights. But on the flip side, we've had a presidential administration that's maybe the most anti-union in history, that has busted up all of these federal worker unions. I'm just wondering If you have any reflections on that dichotomy, and on what the next couple years will look like.  

JF: It's very hard to predict. Historians have made fools of themselves trying to predict the future.  

We're in a situation that we've seen some precedence. The late 1920's was kind of like this, relatively low actual union membership but a lot of bubbling of new ideas and energy about unionization. In that case when the political and economic situation changed in the 1930s, we had explosive growth of unionism. 

Now, will that happen going forward from now? It's very hard to say. Because even if we have a change in Washington [D.C.] we have corporations today that have concentrated power and wealth that is without precedent and they are determined to stop unionization, so even companies that may not be even thought of as right wing like Amazon just totally dig in their heels using every weapon they have to stop unionization.  

So even with a lot of pro-union sentiment, the situation of the economy right now makes it a tough road ahead.  

TC: New Yorkers just voted to elect two UAW members in Democratic Party primaries for U.S Congress. Do you think that electing union members and elevating them to office, its happened before we have precedent for that, do you think that will help revitalize the labor movement?  

JF: It certainly can't hurt. And they bring a voice and a knowledge of everyday worker life and unionism into the highest levels of government that is somewhat unusual.  We've had precedent, it's not the first but it is unusual. And in their case what's really unusual is most of the labor movement opposed them! 

It also shows that the current labor movement is not united in its political outlook, but they come from a union that's been one of the most dynamic in organizing workers in the New York area in untraditional sectors, whether it's in the gaming industry or museums or higher education. So, I think this is a significant development.

In it of itself it's obviously not a game changer but it certainly suggests that there may be new winds blowing.