The heart of Labor Day is in our choices

And here’s the part you might not expect. These victories can’t be claimed by one political party. At different times in our history, both Democrats and Republicans pushed pieces of the labor movement forward. Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, said it clearly: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.” Theodore Roosevelt, also a Republican, went after corporate monopolies and defended workers’ rights to organize. Dwight Eisenhower accepted unions as part of the American fabric, even warning his party against dismantling them. For a long stretch, the Republican Party carried a strong pro-labor voice.

But, time shifts ideologies.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act on states’ rights grounds. He lost in a landslide but carried several Deep South states that hadn’t voted Republican in generations. That opened a door that’s been hard to close.

Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign put the Southern Strategy at the center of Republican politics, trading the party’s historic pro-labor identity for a new coalition built on resentment of civil rights gains. “Law and order” and “states’ rights” were the chosen language, but the meaning was known. By 1972, Nixon had swept the South, and the GOP had locked itself onto a course that would essentially define its politics for the next 50-plus years.

Ronald Reagan built on that in the 1980s. He opened his campaign in Mississippi near the site of the murder of three civil rights workers with a speech about states’ rights. In 1981, he fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, sending a sharp message to unions. He tied the Republican Party more firmly to business deregulation and free-market economics. By the end of the century, Democrats were more closely associated with unions and civil rights, while Republicans leaned toward business interests and limits on organized labor.

Even as these shifts played out, workers of all parties still wanted the same basics: safer jobs, fairer pay and stability for their families. What matters today is that there are those every day who continue to fight for workers’ rights. Not in speeches or slogans, but in legislation, in negotiations, in action, in real lives. Today, the Democrats hold the baton but will that baton eventually pass back one day? Who knows. ...

In the end, the name of the side matters less than the choices made in its name. Democrats carried both the shame of Jim Crow and the pride of the Civil Rights Act. Republicans carried both the moral clarity of Lincoln’s words and the hard edge of Reagan’s strike-breaking. Parties are coalitions that shift. They are not fixed moral entities but parties led by humans living in a cone with context and lessons.

The measure isn’t in the branding but whether workers are safer, better paid, able to live good lives. That’s the standard I hope we all share. Few people you meet on the street, no matter their party, would argue against safe workplaces, fair opportunity, time to rest and the hope of leaving more to the next generation.

Labor Day, at its best, is a mirror. It asks us to reflect on what kind of country we are building together. Do we measure success by profits, or by whether families can thrive? Do we believe in protecting the worker on the factory floor as much as the executive in the boardroom? Do we remember that the American promise has always been fragile, always contested, always won through action? Can both exist in symbiosis or is exploitation inherent in American business?

When the noise of politics clears, it comes back to the same test workers asked a century ago: who is really standing up for the people?

This Labor Day, honor the day the way it was meant to be: not just by resting, but by remembering. And then by asking yourself, in the way you vote, in the way you treat the people who work beside you, in the way you stand up for fairness: who and what are you working for?

Annie Tsai is chief operating officer at Interact (tryinteract.com), early stage investor and advisor with The House Fund (thehouse.fund), and a member of the San Mateo County Housing and Community Development Committee. Find Annie on Twitter @meannie.