Social Gospel

Happy Day-of-the Prophets!

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached at Putnam United Presbyterian Church
Labor Day 2023

Texts: Isaiah 32:1–8; Luke 1:46–55

This holiday weekend holds a lot of personal meaning for me, and I feel it acutely these days. My dad just passed away last year. My dad was a Pennsylvania coal miner, and although he stopped working in the mines due to injury when I was still a boy—or maybe because of that traumatic moment in my family’s life—I have always associated Labor Day with my father. Too many of us treat Labor Day now as just another federal holiday, just another three-day weekend, one more chance to grill some hot dogs before the summer is over and schools begin in earnest. But our celebration of labor and the labor movement in this country should be much more profound. Labor Day is a day set aside to celebrate the American worker, all people whose work maintains this country’s productivity and vitality, but especially those who do the hard work, the physical work, the essential work few people want to do but must be done, the work that is never glamorous and seldom celebrated. Labor Day should be a day to honor that American worker.

It’s also a moment for us to reflect on the history of the labor movement and give thanks for the benefits from that struggle that we now take for granted. In order to reflect on that history, though, we have to know it, which fewer and fewer of us do. We need to remember collectively the brutalizing working conditions in coal mines, steel mills, and factories 100 years or so ago, and remember the ways that wealthy industry barons controlled every aspect of their workers’ lives, on and off the job. We need to revisit the ways industrialists and government leaders actually conspired to keep laborers from organizing, often violently. We need to remember the years it took for major industries in this country to unionize and for workers to get their seat at the negotiating table. Most of all, we need to give thanks for the employment protections that those negotiations yielded, benefits many of us take for granted: a minimum wage, a reasonable work week, restrictions on child labor, overtime pay, health benefits, disability protections, and more.

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Labor Day: The Day of the Prophets

jamescalvindavis 1 Comment

I grew up in a small coal town in western Pennsylvania. For many years, Colver was a typical company town, reflecting the power differential between miners and mine owners, and reinforcing mining families’ total dependence on the company for income and services. Even the name of the town reminded its citizens of company dominance, deriving as it did from a mash-up of the owners’ names: Coleman and Weaver. But by the time my father returned to his hometown to work in the mines, the industry’s influence over the town and surrounding area was mitigated by another force, the labor union. Once free as “job creators” to dictate the working conditions and living arrangements of their employees, coal companies now had to negotiate with the collective power of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).

For most of my childhood, the United Mine Workers were led by Richard Trumka, who passed away recently after a lifetime of advocating for the American laborer, in roles with UMWA and the AFL–CIO. For his part, my father was active in UMWA District 2, Local 860, even after a back injury ended his active employment. Dad hurt his back when I was seven, but by the early eighties his fellow miners found themselves unemployed as well, displaced by the end of workable coal strips underneath our sleepy town. The coal industry remains the centerpiece of Colver’s history, but by the time I became a teenager, the mine’s demise (and the absence of any substitutable prospect of work) was the defining reality of the present.

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