Labor Day is not a lonely and forgotten holiday. It is celebrated as the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. The schoolyear begins as does the football season. But how often do we commemorate the original purpose of the holiday, the labor movement? At least on most Labor Days, however, I think about a laboring man, my grandfather.

 I was raised in a working-class family. My parents, sister, brother, and I lived on the ground floor of a two-story house. My father’s parents lived upstairs. While I talked with my grandmother some, I spent almost no time with my grandfather, who just seemed silent around us. I have no idea how he ended up in Wisconsin. He was born in Pennsylvania to an immigrant family, most of whom emigrated back to Germany. I felt like I knew only two things about him: He played skat, a card game, at a local tavern on some weekends and evenings, and he worked at the Kohler Company, the firm that makes toilets and sinks and bathtubs. Other than that he was some sort of laborer in the factory, I didn’t know what he did.

I do know that he started at Kohler in 1917. I am confident of this fact because I now have my grandfather’s Hamilton pocket watch, which was awarded him by his employer on his twenty-fifth anniversary of working for the company. His initials are inscribed on the back. A cover opens revealing his name and further inscriptions: “1917 SERVICE 1942” and “KOHLER OF KOHLER”.  A goldish chain is attached to the watch and to a medallion, which is inscribed on the back with my grandfather’s name. The obverse has a relief of a factory worker, “Kohler” boldly written across the medallion, with a slogan on one side: “He Who Toils Here Hath Set His Mark.” (When I used to wear three-piece suits to court, I would carry this watch and medallion in my vest pockets. The watch still works beautifully.)

My grandfather continued working at Kohler for another dozen years, but then a strike came. Kohler was by far the largest employer in the area, and the walkout, with my grandfather joining the strikers, had a huge effect on the town. As the strike went on and union benefits lessened, families faced tough times. Some strikers sought other work, but there was not much to be had. A few decided to return to work. Loyalties were tested. In a town with a tavern culture, some regulars found they were no longer welcome at their favorite bar. Sporadic acts of violence occurred. I was only eight or nine when it began, and the kids seldom mentioned it. Child friendships did not follow the fault lines fissuring from the strike, but at home I learned the epithet “Scab” and the words to Solidarity Forever.

And I saw the effect on my grandfather. He was now home at times I had never seen before. And he looked lost, bewildered. Part of his life, his identity, had been stripped. I have no idea what kind of economic strain was weighing on my grandparents, and from the sanctuary of childhood, I never thought about it, or I never thought about it until a few years after the strike started. I was with some friends, and we wandered into a park behind our school’s playground. And there was my grandfather raking leaves. Until then, I was not aware that he worked for the city’s Parks Department. He saw me; I saw him. We made no signs of recognition. He looked embarrassed. Raking leaves was the kind of demeaning make-work projects of the Depression. It was akin to a handout. It was not the real work of making something as was done at the Kohler Company. Or perhaps, my grandfather was fine, and only I was embarrassed for what he now had to do. I know that I did not want my friends to know that the lonely-looking figure under the trees was my grandfather. Perhaps my grandfather was truly embarrassed or perhaps he recognized that I was or perhaps both, but we exchanged no greetings.

The strike lasted six years, then, and I still think today, the longest strike in the country’s history. The National Labor Relations Board eventually found that Kohler had not bargained with the union in good faith, and that set off another round of contentiousness about what back pay was owed the strikers. The year the strike ended my grandfather died.

My sister recently told me something I did not know–that my grandfather waited by his upstairs window watching for me to come home from school. He knew that I was studying German, a language that he considered his native tongue (he also spoke English, of course, and Lithuanian), and he was proud of my German studies. Although I would try to exchange a few words of German with my grandmother, I never said a word of German to him. I am sorry for that, and I am sorry that I did not go up to him in that park. We did not hug much in my family, but I wish that I had given him one. He may no longer have had the job that had been part of his identity for forty years, but work was still important to him, and the many others like him. I try to remember that, especially on Labor Day.

Labor Day was meant to honor the American labor movement, but do we do that on the holiday or at any other time? Aren’t we much more likely to denigrate the laboring class or organized labor? How often do you praise unions? When you pass a highway road crew, do you spot workers seemingly idling and think, “Working hard or hardly working?”

That was often my reaction at least until I got a job in a cemetery in the summer after I graduated from high school. My first assignment was to rake a grassy plot that had been recently cut. I thought that this would be easy, even pleasurable. I was young and fit, and I loved the smell of freshly mown grass. But after quarter hour my arms were sore. I took a few minutes’ break. After another fifteen minutes, my shoulders started to burn. I took another break. After a total of ninety minutes, every part of my body seemed jelly-like. How could all those people do something like this for eight hours day after day? Luckily, a regularly scheduled coffee break at nine interceded, and I was given a new assignment at its conclusion.

 During that summer, I worked alongside the full-time employees, and I saw how hard they worked and how often they took pride in what they accomplished. I had a new-found respect for those who labored. This education continued into the summers of my college years when I worked in a factory. I learned how hard it was to do repetitive tasks on my feet for a workday, but again I learned that the workers cared about the product. If I did not assemble something correctly or made some other mistake, I was quickly informed on how to do the task properly. These were boom times, and we worked nine-and-a-half hour days during the week and a half-day on Saturdays. The full-time workers did not complain but were happy for the extra money that they could make. I bitched a lot, got regularly drunk in what was left of the evening after scarfing down a meal, and then dragged myself out of bed at 5:45 A.M. for the start of another nine-and-a-half hour day.

(concluded on Labor Day)