Guest Opinion | Councilmember-Elect Rick Cole : Enjoy Your Labor Day Time Off, But Don’t Take It For Granted

You probably haven’t paid much attention to the controversial $25 billion-dollar national mega-merger between Kroger and Albertsons. Even if you shopped at your local Ralph’s (owned by Kroger) for your Labor Day barbeque, you probably haven’t given it a second thought.

Yet if this deal goes through, it will affect every one of us – and represents exactly what’s tearing our country apart.

For the past 75 years, supermarkets have been the mainstay where Americans buy groceries. For decades, most Americans not only patronized their local chain stores, they developed personal relationships with their favorite checkers. Behind them stood thousands of stockers, baggers, butchers, and all the other jobs that brought food to our tables.

Most of those jobs were unionized. Supermarkets were a rare bastion of retail workers who enjoyed the protections and benefits of a living wage, medical benefits, pensions, and job security. None of that came easy – every increment of progress was paid for by the willingness of those workers to strike if necessary. 

Yet all that is being systematically eliminated by deals like the Kroger/Albertson merger. The goal of corporate chieftains is not to cut soaring food prices, but to beef up their profits by eliminating competition and cutting jobs.

You see it here in Pasadena with the aggressive expansion of self-check-out counters at local stores. Even though internal auditors report widespread theft with the new systems, corporate CEOs are betting that they can refine the technology to make in-person shopping as impersonal as online shopping.

You may prefer the convenience of doing your own checking – or you may hate it. But the implications go far beyond personal preferences. The relentless effort to automate jobs to augment profits is at the heart of the growing fissures and deepening polarization that are undermining our democracy.

It’s a cliché that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The first observances of Labor Day were born at a time of strikingly familiar challenges to today. 

The Gilded Age of the late Nineteenth Century in America was a period when gigantic fortunes were built on the backs of working people. As our nation urbanized and industrialized, the old verities of Jeffersonian democracy gave way to widespread discontent and conflict. Labor Day was an American alternative to the revolutionary politics of May Day, which is the worker’s holiday still marked throughout most of the rest of the world. 

Here in America, courageous unions and political reform transformed the brutal, degraded lives of exploited workers into a broadly-based prosperity based on an expanding middle class. Labor organizers and their progressive allies battled to provide us all the 8-hour workday, the weekend, the outlawing of child labor and the beginnings of worker safety protections — all things we take for granted today.

Except we can’t take them for granted anymore. Corporations are turning to “gig work” and automation to eliminate what had been secure, full-time jobs with benefits. That systematically erodes the livelihoods and security of jobs that once paved the road to middle-class standards of living and security. Younger workers today face a lifetime of precarious employment, lack of upward mobility, reliance on the government for medical benefits (if they get them at all), and the impossibility of ever owning a home or even being able to afford rent for a decent place to live. Older workers find themselves out of work at a time when they face daunting prospects for finding jobs that pay as much or provide comparable benefits. Meanwhile, when giant corporations have oligopolistic domination of our food supply, the consumer doesn’t benefit from the savings squeezed out of those worker’s livelihoods. Big corporations’ growing economic power not only gives them greater leverage to break unions, but also to impose price hikes on us all. 

Labor Day celebrates the success of American workers earning a fair share of the nation’s bounty. Enjoy the time off, but don’t ignore the intensifying threat to the very achievements that we are celebrating.

Labor struggles won us paid holidays like this one, not to mention advancements like weekends, the 8-hour work day and workplace medical coverage. Labor struggles raised the standard of living for the vast majority of Americans. This Labor Day should be a time to commit to taking action to ensure the gains of the past are not squandered in the present. And the next time you’re at the store, skip the self-service line and tell the checker you support them having a job with a living wage.

Rick Cole is District 2 Councilmember-elect, taking office in December. He previously served as Mayor of Pasadena and City Manager of three Southern California cities. He is currently the Chief Deputy Controller for the City of Los Angeles.