Another Labor Day has come and gone and it is apparent that unions are losing their grip on the holiday. Sure, you’ll find an occasional parade or picnic celebrating organized labor’s glorious history, but Labor Day 2007 looked a little different from those of just two or three decades ago. The number of parades and picnics has dwindled, as has the number of celebrants. That’s because the labor movement has taken it on the chin. Unions are no longer needed, the conventional wisdom goes, and labor’s demise is just reward for its interference with the marketplace. In this view, it’s not a bad thing that only about 7 percent of private sector workers are in unions.

There are many reasons for the decline of organized labor. The near monopolistic practices of organized heavy industries, such as steel and auto, to name two of the most obvious, made foreign imports more attractive than American-made goods. Follow-the-leader pricing, planned scarcity and the unwillingness of the corporate sector to disrupt controlled markets by updating production facilities contributed to the decline of heavy industry in the U.S. The last few decades, hundreds of thousands of union workers in heavy industry lost their jobs to foreign producers that rely on modern technology, just-in-time production practices, and the “subsidy” of national health insurance. Worse, the intractability of U.S. corporations is only likely to exacerbate the problem. Consider, for example, gas prices at $3 a gallon, but American car makers are still betting their future on the sale of SUV-style crossovers and bragging about cars that get 28 miles per gallon. Is it any wonder that Toyota is outstripping General Motors in the American market?

The other side of the monopolistic practices of American corporations is globalization, a phenomenon that has just about finished the job of killing manufacturing in the United States, and with it hundreds of thousands of good union jobs.

Justified on the premise that market forces are most efficient, globalization is ultimately about cheap exploited labor. Should you ever go into your local anti-union Wal-Mart – hopefully you won’t do that – you might think about the conditions under which the goods you buy were produced. Chances are they were made by a young person overseas, perhaps even a child, who works long hours under unsafe and unsanitary conditions for less than a subsistence wage. Think about the working conditions of many Wal-Mart workers right here in your own home town — minimum wage, no benefits, working off the clock. Then, there’s the issue of Wal-Mart’s forcing local shops out of business and taking your local dollars back to corporate headquarters, leaving behind a trail of abandoned and boarded up shops on Main Street.

The attack on labor works in large part because unions are losing the war of ideas. The neo-conservative emphasis on the sanctity of the market as the driving force behind U.S. economic policy has become the conventional wisdom of our time. But no one asks what the market looks like. The free market is supposed to consist of thousands and thousands of enterprises with easy access to the market as conditions dictate. That’s why it’s absurd to talk about the corporate sector in terms of a free market.

Not long ago there were only seven large oil companies. With additional mergers, the industry is now down to the five sisters of oil! Market theory holds that competition will reduce costs and lower prices. But this all assumes a competitive marketplace. In the old days, people like Teddy Roosevelt used government’s power to break up monopolies. Not any more. Corporate monopolies — protected by the myth of the marketplace — lead the race to the bottom by breaking unions; imposing low wages; eroding job security, health benefits and pensions; and by battling any government effort to make them provide health and safety protections to the labor force.

So now that the Labor Day celebrations are over, what do we do?

It’s time for labor to take the offensive in the war of ideas by exposing the reality behind the ideology of the marketplace in our corporate-dominated society. Organized labor has think tanks across the country; thousands of local unions have newspapers, magazines, Web sites and other means of communicating with members. It’s essential for labor to coordinate the diverse activities of these dispersed media so that we speak with a single clear voice. But that’s not enough. We need to discuss and debate alternatives to the marketplace. The labor movement must provide a national forum to discuss progressive ideas, and to analyze alternatives to the neo-conservative marketplace rhetoric accepted by both political parties. If we don’t act soon, Labor Day will simply become an annual wake for labor’s glorious past.