On This Labor Day

What Labor Day Means to Me

Labor Day is easy to think of as the unofficial end of summer. A long weekend, one last barbecue, the beginning of fall. But that’s not why we have it.

Labor Day grew out of the American labor movement and the fight by working people for something we can sometimes take for granted today: fair wages, safer workplaces, reasonable hours, and a voice in the economic decisions that shaped their lives.

For me, that history is also a family story.

My great-grandfather, Gustave “Gus” Sturholm, was born in Finland in 1881, before Finland was an independent nation. At the time, it was an autonomous Grand Duchy under the Russian Empire.

The Finland his family left was a very different place from the prosperous Nordic country we know today. It was still largely rural and poor. A devastating famine was only a generation in the past. The population was growing faster than the agricultural economy could absorb, land was increasingly difficult to come by, and jobs outside farming were scarce.

By the 1880s, those conditions were helping fuel what Finns came to call “America fever.” Families heard stories of jobs in American mines, lumber camps, factories and railroads—and of a country where work might offer the possibility of a different life.

According to our family history, Gus came to America as a small child as part of that early wave of Finnish immigration. Records show he attended public schools in New York before eventually heading west.

In 1898, at about 17 years old, Gus arrived in Wyoming.

And he went to work in the coal mines.

I grew up in the house Gus built. Literally. And also figuratively. My home town of Rock Springs was built around coal. Union Pacific was not simply a major employer. For years, the company exercised enormous influence over everyday economic life. Miners and their families depended on company-owned housing and company stores, and workers had fought over wages, working conditions and the high prices they paid for basic necessities.

This was a world in which the person who signed your paycheck could also have a great deal of control over where that paycheck went.

Gus eventually left the mines and worked as a store clerk. Then, remarkably, the immigrant kid who had started underground became general manager and treasurer of the Workingmen’s Commercial Company, founded in 1906, with stores serving mining communities including Rock Springs, Superior and Hanna.

I’ve sometimes heard it referred to in family lore as “the Finn Store.” It functioned somewhat similar to a co-op. But its name, and the communities it served, tell us something important about the time.

The Workingmen’s Commercial Company provided an independent alternative in places where company stores had long been part of the power structure of the coal industry. And Finnish immigrant communities across the U.S. developed a particularly strong tradition of cooperative stores, mutual-aid societies and other institutions built by working people pooling their resources.

That’s important, because there is a tendency today to hear words like workingmen, cooperative, labor or collective and immediately assign them a political ideology.

History isn’t nearly that simple.

You see, Gus Sturholm, my great-grandfather - was a Republican.

And not casually so.

He served in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1907 to 1911 and later chaired the Sweetwater County Republican Central Committee. While in the Legislature, he introduced legislation requiring annual reporting from Wyoming’s state coal-mine inspectors. An interesting piece of public accountability coming from someone who had actually worked in the mines.

Years later, he also served on the Rock Springs school board. A 1929 newspaper account lists Gus as one of the three board members overseeing Rock Springs schools.

Think about that life for a moment.

An immigrant.

A coal miner.

A store clerk.

A businessman running a company explicitly created to serve working people.

A Republican legislator concerned with oversight of the coal mines.

A local school board member helping steward public education.

Apparently, none of those identities seemed incompatible to him.

And I find that especially meaningful right now.

In today’s politics, we’ve gotten awfully comfortable reducing complicated ideas to labels. Believe workers should have a voice? Socialist. Support affordable child care so parents can work? Socialist. Invest in public schools? Socialist. Believe corporations should play by fair rules? Socialist. Think government has a responsibility to protect the public interest? You know the drill.

But those arguments tell us more about today’s political rhetoric than they do about American history.

The American labor tradition has never belonged exclusively to one party or one ideology. Neither has the belief that markets need rules, that workers deserve dignity, that public education matters, or that concentrated power deserves scrutiny.

In fact, there is something profoundly pro-market about what people like Gus and his contemporaries were doing. When one company controlled the mine, the paycheck and the store, creating an independent place for working families to shop meant more competition and more choice, not less.

Building a cooperative institution didn’t mean rejecting enterprise. It meant participating in it. Demanding accountability from mine inspectors didn’t mean opposing business. It meant recognizing that economic growth should not come at the expense of the people doing the work.

Those ideas feel very familiar to me. (I guess you could say it’s in my DNA!)

I believe deeply in entrepreneurship, innovation and private enterprise. I also believe a healthy economy has to work for the people who actually live and work in it. Workers deserve a voice. Families need the basic infrastructure, including child care and good public schools, that allows them to participate in the economy. Government should protect the public interest, insist on accountability and make sure powerful interests don’t get to write all the rules.

That’s not a contradiction.

My Republican great-grandfather apparently didn’t think so either.

More than a century and several hundred miles separates Gus’s Wyoming from the community I hope to serve today. The jobs are different. The economy is different. The challenges are different.

But the underlying question really isn’t:

Who gets a voice in the prosperity we create together?

On Labor Day, I think about the generations of people who answered that question by organizing, building businesses, starting cooperatives, educating their children, serving their communities and demanding a fair shot.

And I think about a Finnish immigrant who came to America as a child, started his life in Wyoming mining coal, and went on to spend decades serving working people and his community.

That’s part of my family’s heritage.

And it’s part of America’s labor heritage, too.

And I hope to make my great grandpa - and those who elect me - proud.