Happy 250th Birthday, America!

On July 4, 1776, in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, the Second Continental Congress voted to ratify what became our Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson was chosen to create a first-draft of a document that would spell out the colonists’ grievances and also spell out the principles that the new country would stand for.  He toiled alone for over two weeks in a boardinghouse, writing and re-writing the draft of the document. 

He then presented his draft to four other Congressmen who had been appointed to help Jefferson on the project – Ben Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston, who red-lined the draft with revisions so painful to Jefferson’s soul that he described his cohorts’ changes as “mutiliations.”

The final document, which still guides our great democratic experiment today, promises us “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” 

Two of the three are guaranteed in the Declaration – we get life and liberty.

But the founding fathers did not guarantee happiness – only the right to pursue it. 

And those of us who toil in labor and employee relations – management leaders, union leaders, HR professionals, arbitrators, mediators, governmental agencies – enjoy our freedom and liberty as we pursue happiness within the labor-management relationship.

Almost all collective bargaining agreements will address this pursuit of happiness, often characterized by the joint quest for “harmonious relations” or “amicable relationships.”

When we meet and confer under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 to collectively bargain wages, hours and other conditions of employment, both the union and management are in the pursuit of happiness – the union, for its represented employees and the union; for management, it’s the board of directors and C-suite officers.  And it only results in happiness when all stakeholders play fair within the governing rules, acting in good faith, to reach fair and just results that advance the success of all constituents. 

However, in my career as a management negotiator, I never looked at the bargaining table with thoughts of the happiness I was pursuing! 

So today I’m asking us all to reframe as we celebrate our country’s birthday and be happy that we have laws like the NLRA of 1935 and myriad other employment laws to help us pursue happiness in collective and safe ways.  I want us to celebrate the fact that we have come a long way in 250 years as company and union leaders to advance the happiness of all those we represent.

Our laws are not perfect – the NLRA is flawed, with unions thinking it doesn’t have enough “teeth” in enforcement, and companies thinking it unduly restricts management rights.  Interpretations change like seasonal winds.  Precedents are created, then changed with new NLRB members and judges.

But let’s briefly revisit a small but important sample industrial life and the pursuit of happiness as it existed in labor relations prior the New Deal’s NLRA and other labor and safety laws.

The Homestead Strike of 1892 was a strike and lockout in Andrew Carnegie’s Pennsylvania-based Homestead Steel Works.  Carnegie’s innovations led to great personal wealth, yet steel workers toiled in dangerous conditions for minimal wages. 

The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (the AA) was organizing workers and pressing for higher wages and safer working conditions.  The AA won higher wages and better working conditions in a number of Carnegie’s mines, and he felt the AA had gained too much power and control. He ordered his manager, Henry Frick, to lock out the union and wait until the workers gave up.  Frick locked out the workers one day before the contract expired.  Two days later, the workers seized the mill and sealed it off from strikebreakers. 

The one thing Carnegie and Frick wanted was the thing the union would not do – dissolve the union.  Ultimately, armed conflict erupted between hundreds of Pinkerton guards and the workers.  The Pinkertons surrendered; nearly a dozen people had died.  But the state militia arrived, took over the plant, and the union workers were defeated as the mill resumed full production under state control.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York in 1911 was the deadliest disaster in industrial history, resulting in the deaths of 146 young, mostly female garment workers who jumped from 8^th and 9^th floor windows or died from fire or smoke inhalation because stairwell exits were locked to reduce theft and unauthorized breaks. 

The fire led to legislation requiring factory safety standards and spurred the growth of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), which fought for better working conditions on behalf of the workers.

In West Virginia, the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 became the nation’s largest labor strike and biggest armed conflict since the Civil War, with over 10,000 striking coal miners engaged against heavily armed private guards employed by the coal company.  The miners wanted union recognition, better wages and safer working conditions.  The coal company controlled nearly every aspect of miners’ lives, from the company housing they lived in to the company store where they had to buy their goods.  Although the United Mine Workers and employees suffered defeat and many were prosecuted and convicted of crimes, the plight of coal workers was amplified and eventually led to the rights and protections in the NLRA.

Against this historical backdrop (that is very representative of the early Industrial Era), the work we do today in labor relations as leaders for either the union or management should be viewed as the pursuit of happiness.

We will still have labor strikes and lockouts.  Local unions will be recognized, and they will sometimes be decertified.  Unfair labor practices will be committed – some will be egregious.  But our legal framework and the labor relations world that we inhabit continues to arc toward higher ground – toward the pursuit of happiness, as our founding fathers intended.

Happy birthday, America!