Kierra Enns, Bread and Roses, 2016
For most of my early adult life, I thought Labor Day was the day you got off to commemorate the end of summer. I may have briefly wondered why it was called labor day, and then filled in the blanks accordingly: we have this day to say, basically, “Enjoy that last gasp of vacation, suckers, it’s all school supplies and briefcases from here on out.”
If you had said the word “union” to me, I would have immediately pictured a hefty white man behind the wheel of a semi, wearing a Teamsters ball cap. I didn’t know there was an academic field called Labor History until I got to grad school.
But once I started reading labor history, I was entranced: here were all these writers, talking about how people came together to fight for their rights, and who had the power and how they used it, and what strategies worked, and what to do if you were defeated. I learned that you want the Teamsters on your side, because if you are organizing, they won’t cross your picket line. No deliveries for you, school, hospital, or corporation, unless you respect your workers’ rights.
The first federal recognition of Labor Day was in the summer of 1894, though there had been labor day marches and celebrations in cities around the country before that time. There’s a belief the federal announcement was created by President Grover Cleveland as a palliative gesture to try to calm a Pullman railroad strike that was generating not only mass protests, but violence in the streets, as police and hired strikebreakers fought back by shooting at the protestors in public.
I chose today’s image to commemorate a different fight, however, one begun by the mostly women and children—immigrants from Poland, Italy, Russia, Portugal, Armenia and Lithuania—who worked in the mill town of Lawrence, MA, near the more famous mill town of Lowell. Labor organizers had successfully forced mills and other industries to modify the 60 hour work week and give workers a day off.
The mill at Lawrence had responded to this benefit by increasing the pace of work to make up for the lost time. They also determined that since the workers weren’t working an extra day, the mill was entitled to cut back their wages. On January 11, 1912, when the women of the Everett Cotton Mill received their reduced paychecks, they walked off the job. By the next day, half of the town’s 30,000 mill workers had joined the action. By January 15, 20,000 workers had joined the picket line, a number that eventually climbed to 25,000.
After over two months of struggle and retaliatory violence, the strikers achieved a settlement agreement, including pay raises and over-time. The strike also called attention to child labor and workplace safety, as well as company towns’ poor sanitation and housing, issues that would continue to be the focus of organizing efforts throughout the U.S..
It’s this uprising that is named the Bread and Roses Strike, from the poem by James Oppenheim, published in 1911. The strikers carried signs demanding not only increased wages (bread) but also increased heart and dignity (roses).
Here’s the poem:
As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, For the people hear us singing, “Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.” As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men-- For they are women's children, and we mother them again. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes-- Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread; Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew— Yes, it is bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too.
As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days— The rising of the women means the rising of the race— No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes— But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.
Even though the strike that gave us Labor Day would make it seem that most organizing has featured white men and violence, in fact, organizing has always required people to come together across multiple forms of identity and difference, providing mutual aid to one another in the struggle.
Many fights for social justice are joyful affairs, because people come together to claim their power, and to acknowledge the ways they aren’t being fairly compensated. And often, the repressive actions taken by industry and corporations serve as a kind of validation, even as the tactics are often brutal: it really is crucial to organize; it really is true that corporations are afraid of the power of their workforce, because they are literally outnumbered when workers come together. So there is laughter, and art, and songs, and communion, even as there is repression, and gaslighting, and internal conflict, and exhaustion.
I love the slogan bread and roses, because of the rose. Every time I see a bread and roses protest sign—and there are lots of beautiful ones out there to check out—I ask myself: what’s the rose? What is it that should be enabled by justice, by people actually having time for themselves, their families and communities? What did they mean by “heart”?
It makes me ask myself: What isn’t being created, dreamt, envisioned, enabled, by the fact that people have to work so much? What would happen if people could work four days a week, instead of five?
Why are healthcare and retirement benefits still linked to people’s employment status? How are people subtly or more overtly being kept from meeting their other human needs by the threat of having these necessary aspects of existence taken away?
I think of labor questions for therapists: Could much of the current, epidemic levels of depression and anxiety be caused by loss of meaning, overwork, lack of time to cook healthy food, lack of energy to really listen to the people who matter, because at the end of the day there’s nothing left to give? What would happen to our addiction rates if people didn’t feel compelled to numb themselves out at the end of the day, or before work started?
I think the Great Resignation, and the pandemic, raised these questions again, and the Amazon and Starbucks union drives are one answer, and the conversations about remote work are another answer, and the efforts to reduce student loan debt are yet another answer. These answers seem to me to fall more on the “bread” side of the house. So how do we get more roses?
I think therapists are being recruited to salve the wounds of labor. That somehow, we’re supposed to be the roses. I think the explosion of apps and services created by tech companies trying to turn therapy into a service that is an adjunct of HR departments is evidence of the evacuation of care at both the familial and the structural levels. It’s an open opportunity for corporations to monetize these needs by creating a kind of therapy that isn’t, actually, therapy, but instead something vaguely termed “support” that can happen at the other end of a text message, late in the night.
I think the “mental health crisis” we’re hearing so much about isn’t, actually, a crisis of mental health, a phrasing that rationalizes the mass shootings, the name-calling and the rights stripping, the distrust and the tension, as the result of a kind of collective, hysterical implosion. So if everyone’s on the edge, it’s up to industry and corporations and better business bureaus to make sure there’s therapy on demand.
It’s a a way to acknowledge, in a sideways kind of fashion, that therapists are being asked to make up for the ways communion and love and meaning are being lost because individuals and families are too stressed, too overworked, too robbed of the experience of unstructured time, and of creativity and play, to meet their own needs. But it’s also a way to evade a conversation about structural violence, and the impact of oppression and exploitation on people’s dreams, people’s sense of futurity; people’s sense that they matter, and that their creativity and ingenuity are needed—not to make money, or profit, but to enhance Being, itself.
I think a lot of the talk about “work” right now is really talk about labor, and justice, and why we’re working so much in the U.S., and in other parts of the world. A study just came out documenting the fact that people underestimate by nearly half the amount of public support there is for government policies to address climate change—policies that would directly confront industry, production, and consumption on the part of the Global North, and have the side benefit of transforming human lives.
I think my difficulty answering the question “what’s a ‘rose’?” demonstrates the extent to which I have internalized the idea that my value is measured by capitalism. My value is in my paid work, in what I provide to others, in the skills I’ve acquired, in the trainings I’ve taken. If that’s my core sense of how I am valued by the external world, how will that belief influence how I organize my time? What will I do with pride, and what will I apologize for doing, or not doing? How will I justify my existence? Will I be able to frolic? Or play? Will I be able to end a day without accounting to myself how I “spent” it?
So I ask you, what’s your rose? What do you need to protect at all costs, because it’s what enables you to survive, beyond the literal needs of existence? What kind of work-life balance do you dream of, and what might it take to get there? Who has your back, in this struggle? Which fight will you join, to ensure that others have roses, too?
Let us know, in the comments section!
I’m writing you the day after the lion Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote passionately about labor rights—if you haven’t read Nickel and Dimed, you’re missing one fantastic book—died at the age of 81. The author Rebecca Solnit tweeted this quote from her book, and it’s so great that I’m reposting it here, in her honor:
When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for
example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and
conveniently then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has
made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The
‘working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major
philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that
the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing
so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so
that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the
working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to
everyone else.
—Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
Association of Social Work Boards Update
And because the organizing that’s starting to happen about the ASWB licensing exam is another kind of labor fight, here’s a roundup of some of the things that have happened since I last wrote about it:
Here’s a YouTube recording of the #StopASWB press action discussion among a number of social workers
Here’s the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) statement about the exam
Here’s a list of social work boards by state
Here’s the YouTube recording of the Social Work Rants podcast episode about the exam
Here’s the petition to end the exam and change the process of licensure
Here’s an article about the erasure of contributions to social work by Black, brown, Latino, Asian, American Indian and other populations, and the relationship between this erasure and what counts as “social work education.”
Here’s the episode of Social Workers Rise podcast explaining why the pass rates matter
This situation is emergent and ongoing—feel free to crowdsource information in the comments as it becomes available to you.
Labor Questions for Therapists