Rhode Islanders are returning to work rebuilding our roads and bridges through RhodeWorks, modernizing our schools with the School Building Authority, and completing green energy retrofit projects through the Infrastructure Bank. We’re attracting new high-wage jobs from out of state, like GE Digital, and some of our biggest employers are doubling down on the state, including Citizens Bank. We have a long way to go, but it’s clear we are moving in the right direction.

Labor Day is an important time to recommit to supporting and protecting our workers. It’s why we raised our minimum wage last year and we’re working to do it again. We’re cracking down on misclassification and going after companies that break the rules to ensure that every worker gets a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

Our resilient and tireless workers do everything they can to grow our economy and strengthen our middle class. And in turn, I’ll be relentless in doing everything I can to ensure everyone has the opportunity to make it in Rhode Island.

I wish all Rhode Islanders a safe and happy Labor Day.

While all such lists much start with Dust Bowl Poet Woody Guthrie, the godfather of the modern working class song and a real life folk hero himself, he certainly wasn’t the first one to sing about labor struggles.

That dubious distinction belongs to the early American slaves.

Blues guitarists like Leadbelly took it from there.

And then artists like Johnny Cash took over.

Joan Baez was one of the folk singers to follow in Woodie Guthrie’s footsteps by singing about folk heroes like Joe Hill, most famous for saying, “Don’t mourn. Organize.”

All of a sudden, the working class was a meme in pop music once again.

Reggae legend Bob Marley wrote many songs about the struggles of black people. This one is my favorite.

Once John Lennon shed Paul and Ringo, he joined in too:

But no one since Woodie Guthrie has better portrayed the working class struggle than Bruce Springsteen. This song is called “Factory”

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain
I see my daddy walking through the factory gate in the rain
Factory takes his hearing, but he understands
He’s just a working, a working a working man

End of the day, factory whistle cries
Men walk through the gates with death in their eyes
And you just better believe boy somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight
It’s the work, the working, just the working life

The eighties, for reasons related to Ronald Reagan, wasn’t the best era for working class anthems, but punk bands kept the tradition alive.

So did country music, and to some extent Hollywood:

Here’s another of my favorite working class songs that come from the stage. “Annie” is one of America’s great examples of anti-government propaganda – the poor kids are mistreated in the public orphanage until Daddy Warbucks comes and rescues the lucky ones. The American dream, indeed.

In the 1990’s rap acts like Public Enemy kept alive the tradition of creating music about the struggles of the poor.

And today, artists like Steve Earle are keeping the tradition alive.

For some good Labor Day journalism, please read the Providence Journal editorial this morning, in which they make some surprising statements for the normally very conservative ed. board:

“Consider that U.S. government data indicate that per-capita productivity has more than doubled since 1968,” they write. “And yet 60 percent of the income gains went to the top 1 percent in 1979-2007. And that was before the Panic of 2008. Lower- and middle-income people ought to get slices of the economic pie more commensurate with their contributions.”

Some will be continuing the fight for better workplace rights this Labor Day, like the janitors and food service workers at Brown University who will march today to draw attention to their impending contract negotiations.

The ProJo also profiles Scott Molloy this morning. He’s a professor of labor history at URI and the founder and president of the Rhode Island Labor History Society. Pat Crowley just wrote this piece about Molloy a few weeks back. And Ted Nesi dug up a piece written by Molloy on the history of Labor Day in Rhode Island.

Traditionally, the Ocean State honors Labor Day with a memorial at the site in Central Falls where four factory workers were killed during the Saylesville labor strike in 1934. Here’s a preview of the event, which is today at 10:30 a.m., and here’s the story I wrote on it last year for WPRO (needless to say I’m guessing this audience will appreciate this story more than did my audience at WPRO!):

President Grover Cleveland pushed through the legislation to make Labor Day a national holiday in 1894, just days after the violent break up of the Pullman Rail Strike – a walk-out led by Eugene Debs that started with 3,000 workers in Pullman, Illinois and grew to almost 250,000 by the time the president deployed some 12,000 army troops to dismantle the protests.

The holiday declaration was meant as an appeasement to organized labor; 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded during the insurrection.

Some 40 Labor Days later, Rhode Island would leave its mark with regard to famous organized labor insurrections in what has become known as the Saylesville Massacre – although it really wasn’t so much of a massacre as it was a 48-hour stand-off, spanning two cities, between union workers and the Rhode Island National Guard.

Textile workers from all over the Eastern Seaboard had gone on strike for better wages and mill owners responded by hiring non-union laborers to keep their businesses in operation. On Monday, September 10, at the Sayles Finishing Company in Central Falls, 600 union supporters had gathered in front of the textile mill that was now making due with non-union workers.

John A. Salmond describes the events that then transpired in his 2002 research paper “The General Textile Strike of 1934: From Maine to Alabama”:

“Minor scuffles turned more serious as the shifts changed at 3 and 11 p.m. The state police, augmented by special deputies lost control at the second change, and, as the crowd surged forward to invade the plant, they fired blindly into it. Two strikers were hit with buckshot while a score or more were injured by bricks, rocks and billy-clubs as the police added ‘to the uproar the thump of swinging nightsticks and exploding teargas bombs.’ One, Louis Fercki, was critically hurt, his skull fractured by a club during a fracas at the mill gate. The strikers prevailed, however, trapping seven hundred workers inside the mill until first light.”

The next day, September 11, Governor Theodore Francis Green called in the National Guard, but Salmond wrote that “he was too late to prevent an escalation in violence at Saylesville.”

Local and state police were joined by some 260 national guard troops, who could not keep in control the reported 4,000 people who were continually charging the gates of the Sayles Finishing Company throughout the day and into the next evening. They threw rocks and pieces of headstones from a nearby cemetery at the troops, according to Salmond.

“Indeed, the local cemetery had become a battleground. Troops, firing machine guns from the mill roof, eventually drove the crowd away from the gates. Eight strikers were shot, none fatally, due to the determination of the guard commander to use only buckshot and to fire, for the most part, safely over the heads of those in the crowd. More than 100 were injured by clubs or missles, however, including 18 guardsmen, before the fighting ceased. Governor Green, meantime, had placed the whole Saylesville district under martial law.”

Bullet holes in headstones can still be found at the Moshassuck Cemetery in Central Falls, 978 Lonsdale Ave, where today’s crop of local labor leaders will hold a vigil at 11 a.m. to honor the event and the people who took part. You can watch some old news footage of the events by clicking here.

But the real massacre occurred the next day in Woonsocket, at the Rayon Plant. There, guard troops fired on striking workers again. One, 19-year-old Jude Courtemanche, was killed and four others were seriously-wounded.

“This time there was no shooting over the heads. Faced by an angry mob of nearly 10,000, guardsmen shot to wound, if not kill. ‘The screams of the wounded stopped the strikers,’ ran one report. They beat a disorderly retreat to the town’s business district, where for three hours they laid waste, looting stores, setting fires, and hurling stones and other missles before the guard was able to restore order. Governor Green, by now thoroughly shaken, closed all of Woonsocket’s nighclubs, saloons, dance halls and stores until further notice, and an uneasy calm returned to the city.”