Making Labor Count Once More
Let’s talk about the ways in which a season of televised pomp and circumstance, from the just-finished Olympics to the current pair of conventions, can get one thinking freshly on the weighty topic of labor, which is certainly occupying at least a part of our minds as we approach the big holiday once named in the working man movement’s honor!
In particular, let’s not just talk about old manufacturing jobs or unions or even the need for so many of us to travel long distances to find meaningful work and what that should or shouldn’t mean in terms of our local development priorities (and policies).
Did anyone not notice the way in which the Opening Ceremonies in the Beijing Bird’s Nest went off, with thousands of participants moving in unison like flocks of birds? Some scoffed at the conformity of its participants but others, us included, were not only amazed at the beauty of such communal effort, but reminded of how our own nation’s rise was predicated by a similar sensibility. And how that sensibility was once part and parcel with the pride in organized labor, the working classes, that the coming holiday celebrates.
Look back a century and one finds a profligacy of proud images that depict long lines of assembly workers in automobile and other factories, or mighty rooms full of office workers all pecking away at their new typewriting machines. Think of the manpower it took to build our local reservoirs, or the Panama Canal. Later, the pride that arose from such demonstrations of labor’s strength in coordinated numbers was repeated, four-fold, in the way we all trumpeted the munitions lines of our war years’, and the way our sudden call to might raised us all to the increasingly leisure-concentrated years we are still enjoying.
Now shift to the conventions and the massiveness of their cable-ready pyrotechnics, the sheer chutzpah of their entertainment savvy. Far cry from the smoke-filled arenas that nominated the likes of such 40-somethings as Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt, and even JFK to the candidacies that eventually led to their presidencies. You hardly notice any workers nowadays… they’ve been shunted off-stage, out of the television’s eye.
These days, it turns out, any crowd brought forth for politics is being decried, by at least half of the political spectrum, as mere celebrity, a ploy. And the successes that are trumped, labor-wise, are not for those who persevere at their necessary jobs year in and year out, making our society work, but the few who rise from the masses to the level of riches and need protection so they can hopefully help those they emerged from.
Moreover, our current public discourse on middle class obstacles and opportunities keeps getting bogged down in talk about what constitutes rich, much of it based on accumulated wealth, or belongings. We hear little about the ways in which the majority of us have to work hard, often several jobs at once, to not only put aside something for our older age, but simply meet the simpler needs of heating, food and the matching of regular incomes to ever-rising costs our present economy requires. And nothing to pump up our pride at being middle, or even working class folks.
There is much talk about our right to own guns, to shop indiscriminately, to be able to afford cheap gas at the cost of our environment… and yet the moment someone brings up a generic right to good health care, half our country shudders and states that such rights are not inalienable. Hey, many are saying, why should one person pay for another’s aid? Don’t we all have the opportunity to simply earn more to match our needs?
Look again at the Beijing Opening Ceremonies, and the proud faces of all those athletes who marched in from all over the world. Did they look less healthy than us, even though most of them came from countries with nationalized health systems? Did they appear downtrodden because the richest they could get was only a fraction of the richest one can become here? Were they despondent that in the rest of the world, the idea of hard work, and unions supporting those who work hard, is still something that’s integral to their daily lives, their politics, their very hopes and aspirations?
No, no and no.
Not for the rest of the world our new taunt that talk of labor and opportunity, of real jobs and the failings of real wages, is nothing but “class warfare” and something vaguely Marxist.”
If there’s any lesson we should remember each Labor Day, it’s that we have much to learn from the way economics effect our lives and ways of thinking, and maintains class divisions, no matter how often we say they don’t exist. Because, in the end, such things do matter… They effect the ability, for most of us anyway, to live decent lives.
So what should we wish for this coming weekend? And bless ourselves for, if anything?
First, how about we get beyond endless talk about ways in which we can help money trickle down to us poorer folk, and get some decent discourse going about ways to make real wages work for us in the ways that matter… be it by cutting our healthcare costs or ensuring that our kids have a chance at the sorts of good education, beyond high school and the community college, that allow for real advancement? Second, why don’t we stop worshipping the rich and the lucky and find new ways of empowering the workers in our world, so we can feel the same pride in our day-in/day-out jobs other countries’ workers feel. Third, shouldn’t it be time that we stop pretending we’re somehow different, and the rest of the world sucks, and realize we’re all in the same basic work force now… with some of us building better birds nests, through cooperative efforts, while others of us are putting all our future eggs into baskets that are nothing but better stabs at entertainment?
As for a blessing… How about all of us agreeing that the very idea of Labor this weekend’s supposed to honor be not only honored again, but removed from stereotypes and returned to where it was a century ago… as a proud bedrock for who we are as a people, as well as a starting point for where we can all go, not through riches but smarts and perseverance? And maybe even towards greater compassion and openness to this huge world we all inhabit.
Sure it’s corny, but so’s this holiday. Have a greet weekend… and good luck to all of you starting school again in the coming week! PS