Message from the Mayor: Labor Day
Posted on: September 1, 2018 - 12:28am
Fellow Residents;
As we head into the holiday that marks the end of the summer holidays and a transition to the school year, it is easy to look past the roots of Labor Day, that provides us with that break. I have marked this day most every year, in part because of Hasting’s own history in the labor movement during the early 1900’s. Our Village, then, was primarily an industrial community with a series of factories lining the waterfront and thousands of (largely immigrant) workers who toiled in multiple shifts producing everything from paving blocks to, yes, poison gas.
We were a hotbed of union activity at the time, wracked a number of times by great spasms of strike-related violence. On more than one occasion, private militias, hired by the factory owners fought workers and their gunfire killed workers and innocent resident, a young Polish mother on Washington Avenue. The strikes, about a hundred years ago, were epic – thousands of stone-throwing strikers faced down a machine-gun nest defending a building, and scattered when the National Guard, with bayonets affixed, charged. The strikes made national papers, and drew the attention of outsiders including, at least some accounts indicate, Leon Trotsky, who was working on a newspaper in the Bronx, and came to speak to the crowds.
This period of worker ferment at the start of the century transitioned to a series of reforms and a strong union culture that helped to create our middle class, health insurance, the 40-hour five-day work week, safety regulations, and many other protections that individual workers had no chance to win for themselves, but did so in union with one another, and which most of us enjoy now.
It is to those who consecrated the soil here and elsewhere with their blood, who stood up and demanded to be counted and respected despite bayonet points aimed at their breasts and rifle stocks slammed against their heads, it is to them we nod in respect on Monday and say “Thank you”. In the words of a rousing Union anthem, “Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, solidarity forever – the union makes us strong”.
Sincerely,
Peter Swiderski