Welcome to another one of those holidays that almost everyone has forgotten the significance of! It may once have been intended to be an opportunity for inspiration and reflection, but it's been made over into the usual excuse to take a day off and party.
Really, the calendar would work just as well, wouldn’t it, with less moralistic nagging? What if we got rid of all those hauntingly meaningless, annoying labels and replaced them with more appropriate names like, “Summer Party”, “Spring Break”, “Winter Party with Presents”, and “End of Summer Blow-out?”
Actually, looking at that list it seems we may have a start on one of them. What is it with that dreary religious stuff hovering over an otherwise perfectly gonzo party, anyway? Can’t we just take a few glorious Spring days off for screaming oblivion without a bunch of serious types sticking some bleeding dude in our faces that they’ve been hauling around on a stupid, ugly cross for a couple thousand years? Like, really! Ick!
And so we come to “Labor Day.” Just what is it we’re supposed to be thinking about this time? Labor? How ridiculous is that! We’re doing our best to forget about “labor” on our day off, right? What retarded killjoy would name a day off, “Labor Day?”
The people who made Labor Day possible, that’s who. Lest we forget, all of us latter day products of media that has cultivated an attention span carefully engineered to make it absolutely no farther than the time between commercial breaks, a hundred years ago the expectation was that as much of that “labor” as possible was done at least six days a week, every week, and along with it, as close to twelve hours per day as it could be made to go. Employers didn’t pay people to have days off, they paid them to work, and employees were expected to consider themselves lucky to have jobs even if they were ten years old and nursing a broken arm. Keep the sniveling to yourself!
Ok, it does start to sound like the canned grandpa story about having to walk ten miles both ways to school - uphill, in either a blizzard, tornado, or monsoon every day, barefoot, carrying his sick grandma, and towing a wagon full of rocks. But hang in there. This story is different. That fabled grandpa was lucky – he got to go to school. This grandpa had to work.
The labor reform we’re being asked to commemorate on Labor Day brought us weekends off, paid sick days and paid holidays – not to mention paid vacations. We got work days reduced to eight hours with any extra hours rewarded at overtime rates. The reform movement gave us child labor laws and eventually employer sponsored health care.
OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is another product of those changes that employers and the aristocracy have been working extra super hard to get us to hate, since OSHA’s charter is to make the workplace safe, and the employers responsible for getting it that way.
Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and many other programs were the eventual products of all the reform we should remember on Labor Day. They’re also targeted for destruction by the mob ignorance of Tea Party style fanatics dragging the GOP deluded part of our culture around.
What gets even more forgotten is the significance of all the labor that’s being done, and much of the perspective that goes with it. The labor reforms of a hundred years ago were closely associated with evolution of the world’s communist parties for a reason. It’s not just the labor of the aristocracy and the bosses that counts. It’s the labor that all of us do.
Perhaps the one most critical element to consider is that we are all part of an economic organism. We must all do our parts or the organism cannot live, or certainly cannot live well. The only fair way to understand it is to acknowledge that if there are any jobs that we as a economic entity consider worth doing, then those jobs have every right to enjoy every bit as much compensation as any other jobs in the system, regardless of all the glamour discrimination, ego stroking, and bigoted valuation done by those who consider their jobs the most worthy.
If corporate officers consider it important to have the trash taken out, then the people who take out their trash deserve every bit as much reward for taking it out as the corporate officers who produce it. Otherwise, let the corporate officers take out their own trash!
If it is valuable to us to have fast food, then the people preparing and serving it deserve to be every bit as rewarded by the system as those who eat the food they make possible.
The principle should be even more forehead slapping obvious with teachers. If we consider it worthwhile to be taught, then those who teach us have every single right that we do to an equal share of all the things the teaching makes possible.
Yes, that’s communism. It represents a grossly superior alternative to the greed-based, increasingly more instant self-gratification and elaborately disguised, intrinsically self-destructive Law of the Jungle we know of as capitalism.
Then again, this is supposed to be a party! Grab a beer! Roll another one! There’s gotta be some good sports on TV! Don’t we pay the US military over half of every tax dollar to shut people up when they talk about filth like communism? We have all-American freedoms here! And we’ll chain ourselves to any sidewalk anywhere, naked and spread-eagle, to have every last drop of blood exploited right out of our bodies to prove it!
Happy Labor Day!
Comments
Wait a second... I thought Labor Day was for stores to have yet another excuse for a sale.
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