Dave Araki
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

Labor Day Celebration

The delivery man dropped off a package today. Monday, Labor Day. I was a little surprised, but then I thoght to myself, well at least he’s got a job and some sort of income. These days, the online shopping model has created such a huge amount of delivery items that the traditional local level delivery services cannot handle the volume effectively. The big drop site deliveries are still handled by the big shippers, including the US Postal service, but on the local level, no one can handle the huge number of boxes that are being delivered every day.

In response, smaller delivery services have found a resurgence in business, not in primary shipping and handling, but in overflow control. Non-descript vans literally packed full of boxes and boxes that would have otherwise gone through fedex or UPS are now under seperate label, Amazon, Walmart, Jet, and vey often no-name, shipping, often enough dropped off by UPS, Fedex, or the USPS, but just as often by deliverypeople with no uniform and just a folding handtruck. They’re paid understandably low wages, the source of their employment being probably adding up to a spreadsheet number of no more than pennies on the package. And where it’s not cheap enough, they can always write off the difference as a business loss.

Whatever way about it, someone — a person, a fellow human being with a mind, a family, a life, is having to deliver the box from the online superstore on Labor Day.

Then as I walked outside, I thought about the mail box I wasn’t bothering to check, since the post office definitely observes a national holidays like Labor Day. People who hold up the Post Office as a failed business model are missing the real point of the United States Postal Service. The USPS unites the country with a single national system that ties every place in the country to the rest of the country. For a sense of Nation, it is a subtle but vital part of tying a vastly spread and diverse community together as American.

We Americans often feel so alienated from each other that we might forget that there are vibrant and functional reasons for us to find community instead of isolation from each other. The USPS runs throughout the country like blood vessels in our bodies, we don’t think much about it, but they tie everything together.

This is the real purpose of the USPS, and we should not judge it by the standards of some other businesses. Most business does not have the very infrastructure of the Nation in mind. Most businesses are only interested in their own models of profit. With this in mind, we might think it of vital importance to view the US postal Service as a national institution rather than a for profit business.

But to have a delivery man have to work on Labor Day? Sure he’s getting paid, and as like as not in this wage slave society, he’d not get paid on a national holiday if he didn’t show up. In very few industries would we see Labor Day as a currently paid holiday, even if they got the day off.

Why do we celebrate Labor Day at all?

We all have some sort of framework for what work means, whether in retail, in an office, on a roadside, whether plying fastfood, flipping burgers, or operating heavy machinery. There hundreds of thousands of job types in our society, from manual labor to the purely mental. We tend, as humans, to associate things with what we are exposed to or can imagine. Our idea of Labor is work. Our idea of Work is a Job. Our idea of a Job is functionality. Our idea of Functionality is Good.

What we may not consider is that Labor of some sort is a daily function of most of the people in America. Labor is something that we do, but since we associate it with our experiences, we don’t see that it’s the lifeblood of our economy and nation. Without people working, there is no country. So Labor Day is actually about the United States of Americans.

Why do we not see that? Because the general feeling is that there is a dualism at work. All industry is seen to have a duality. Labor and Management. This has been a traditional framework for hundreds of years, rooted in archaic hierarchies of class and wealth distribution. No one has done much to change the model, and most people only know the one.

Business and industry cannot function or even exist without human labor. The work is as integral to the existence as the initial intent and capital.

Entrepeuners who have thriving businesses are to be applauded, their engenuity and ambition are important, but at some point, they will have to realize that the businesses they run are on the backs of their employees and that improving the physical and financial health of those employees can vastly improve their own businesses.

Labor makes the United States functional. We all share in that functionality and it should tie us together as Americans and Humans. The current model of Business elevates the role and importance of Management far above Labor, and has created a framework where we all want to be management. Imagine an industry of Managers.

We as a nation need to consider a new framework of Labor and Management. One in which the value of Labor is seen for what it is, the vital enaction of prosperity, and compensated accordingly. We should all be celebrating Labor Day with a national pride in the working energy of the American People, and Labor should walk hand in hand with a newly imagined Management to create a stronger and healthier nation. But first a newly imagined idea of Work has to be developed.

    Dave Araki

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