Three day weekends are fun, but Labor Day is also about labor.
Summer’s over and that’s a drag, but at least we get that nice three days weekend for no reason right?
Well yes we do get it, but you’re wrong if you think Labor Day is just about beer drenched Sunday afternoons and grilling. Indeed it’s actually about a lot more than beer and brats. Wikipedia sums the historical origins of this holiday pretty well as:
Labor Day in the United States is a holiday celebrated on the first Monday in September. It is a celebration of the American labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of their country.
That’s about right, but we as Americans rarely talk about this.
Back in 2011 The Washington Posts’s columnist E.J. Dionne authored a great column about what he called “The Last Labor Day” lamenting the decline of the idea of labor, that is to say work, as an honorable and noble task in and of itself:
Imagine a Republican saying this: “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. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
These heretical thoughts would inspire horror among our friends at Fox News or in the Tea Party. They’d likely label them as Marxist, socialist or Big Labor propaganda. Too bad for Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, who offered those words in his annual message to Congress in 1861.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free
Listen to how Lincoln talked in those days!
These days we don’t talk about labor and work. We don’t point out that Steve Jobs’s ideas about small computers that play music or are phones would mean nothing if it wasn’t for the anonymous African miners who dig precious metals out of the earth and the anonymous Chinese factor workers to turn those metals into your iPhone.
Instead we talk about “job creators”, we talk about “entrepreneurs”, and we talk about this, that, or the other market day in and day out. We talk about those damn Winklevoss Twins over, over, and over again.
We ignore the fact that labor, that is to say waking up and going to work, will be a defining point in most peoples’ actual lives. It will be a way they identify themselves, a way they prove their worth to themselves and their loved ones. It will be a way that ordinary people can look back on their ordinary lives and understand that they did in fact matter.
It’s not glamorous working in a paper mill that makes toilet paper, but it still is a very important job.
So I propose this: this Labor Day, let’s not let it be the last Labor Day. Instead let’s all take the time to think about the person, that is to say the worker, who picked the vegetables in your fridge, who changed the oil in your car, who built your house, indeed the person who who manufactured your toilet paper.
A world without Steve Jobs would be a world with clunky Windows phones and MP3 players. That would be a marginally worse world than the one we live in, but we’d still get by. But a world without the people who made your toilet paper, well that would be something you would never want to endure.
Like The Good Men Project On Facebook
Photo by Melbourne Water/Flickr