Cup of Coffee: Happy Labor Day

A few thoughts on an overlooked and undervalued holiday

I’ve written full newsletters and/or regular blog posts on Labor Days in the past and, when I have, people have usually told me that I needn’t have bothered and that I should’ve taken the day off.

I go back and forth on the matter. For as much as I go on about respecting labor, I tend to discount my own labor as, you know, labor. It’s easy for me to do that because I really enjoy what I do and it doesn’t feel like work, but the same can be said for a lot of folks who generally like their jobs, I suppose. Either way, I imagine that on some future Labor Days I will work and others I will take off. This year, for the most part anyway, I have decided to take it off. Before I take it off, however, I will drop two little thoughts.

First, as I do most labor days, I’ll leave you with a thing I wrote a few years ago about how Labor Day is watered down and overlooked holiday, the meaning of which has almost been wholly lost by the country at large, undoubtedly by design. As I note in the piece, the very creation of Labor Day was something of a cynical, political act, taken by politicians and business owners in order to appease workers they had just murdered and brutalized. It was also established in September in order to separate it from the larger international workers’ day of May 1. The holiday itself was something of an apology, but also a means of blunting the edge of the labor movement.

These days, those with wealth and power would much prefer you think of Labor Day as an occasion to grill meats, shop sales, and watch daytime baseball, which normally doesn’t happen on a Monday. I won’t begrudge you a burger and a ballgame today — a day off, if you have one, is something you should savor — but I do ask that you take at least a little time to think about the idea behind Labor Day and what it truly means.

Second, I leave you with a quote. It comes from the author and thinker Barbara Ehrenreich, who died late last week.

Ehrenreich did and wrote a lot of things, but her most famous work was probably the bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which was Ehrenreich’s account of trying to make ends meet while working low-wage jobs. These days a great many people are aware of just how inadequate the minimum wage is and how people who don’t make much money have to cobble together multiple gigs in order to survive. When it came out in 2001, however, the idea was nowhere near as front and center in the national consciousness. While the lessons of the book have yet to be fully embraced by those in power — the federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009 and real wages have actually decreased compared to what they were 21 years ago — it became a best seller and is now considered a classic in social justice literature.

There are a lot of great insights, anecdotes, and reporting in Nickel and Dimed, but this is probably my favorite quote:

“When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”

Remember that notion the next time you hear about “makers and takers” or about how spending even a small amount of public money to improve the lot of working people and/or the poor is a “handout.” The rich and powerful in this country — in all countries — have been getting handouts from working people since the beginning of time. They are the beneficiaries of other people’s labor and other people’s sacrifices. The only difference is that when the rich and the powerful get their handouts, they refuse to admit that that’s what they are or, at the very least, claim they are owed those handouts as an entitlement.

Never forget who truly works hard in this country. Honor them today and promote the things that will make their lives and their lot better the rest of the year.

Have a great day everyone.