Reigniting the Spirit of Labor Day
Labor Day should be a wake-up call.
What was an annual celebration of the people that keep America running has turned into a day of confused meaning for a society that has in many ways turned against organized labor.
Yes, organized labor. No matter how it is perceived today, Labor Day was not conceived as a holiday to commemorate the hard work of everyone who held a job. It was born out of the struggle for labor rights and was designated as the day to recognize the accomplishments of trade and labor unions. It was intended to be a day of activism as much as a celebration, unique among our national holidays.
We live in an era where organized labor has been under attack by politicians and business leaders. The anti-labor efforts have been so successful that many working Americans have consistently voted against their own best interests for over 30 years. It is one of the most stunning examples of self-defeat in the history of mankind.
Painting organized labor as a destructive force has been a key weapon in the effort to create the income equality we now have, with workers taking in less and corporations taking in more.
Middle class America was built by the labor movement. It didn’t exist before organized labor and there’s little chance it will exist if the labor movement is allowed to dissapear. Does that make you question the true motivations for anti-labor sentiments? It should.
Knowledge suffers in our age where polemics have replaced history. We are a society weakened and beaten down by rhetoric, believing that somehow the new path to the better days we crave has nothing to do with the old path that lead to the best days we’ve ever had. It is the greatest subterfuge ever pulled on the American people, and we continue to eat it up.
Working life before unions was not pleasant. The eonomic and safety expectations of today came from the fight to make things right 140 years ago. There was no 9–5 schedule. No weekends off. No “work-life balance.” Employer provided healthcare? No. All of that all came to us because of the labor movement.
No matter what politicians tell you, no matter how they romanticize an unrepresented working class, the days of every man for themselves were terrible. If we don’t begin demanding that the victories of the labor movement are not only preserved but irrevocably codified, we will slip back into the abusive system of have’s and have not’s in which the industrial revolution took roots.
In our divided nation, one would think that making life better for workers would be a uniting force. Perhaps if we stop listening to the voices that seek to break us and go back to the spirit of unity that birthed the labor movement, we will find a way to avoid the total rollback of what our forefathers so rightly struggled for.
