What Labor Day Means To Me

Like most all of our major holidays, the meaning and history of Labor Day has been forgotten and replaced. Whereas Christmas once celebrated the birth of One who placed spirituality above materialism, who said things like “cast your bread upon the water”, it is now the biggest excuse for superfluous spending our nation has. Where the 4^th of July was once a day to commemorate our decision to rid ourselves of a government that was not responsive to the needs of the people, it has now become little more than another day to celebrate wars fought on foreign soil for a government that is not only unresponsive to its citizens’ desires but criminally murderous abroad. Likewise Armistice Day, a day that was established to mark the cessation of violence and the beginning of a new peace, changed into a day to honor those who had fought and continue to fight. Using veterans much like human shields, Veteran’s Day has become another tool to silence dissent of military adventurism.

Labor Day—its name very succinct in its subject, was harder for the powerful of our society to subvert—is nothing more now than a day off for those fortunate to have an employer willing to give it to them. No mention of the roots of Labor Day or its significance is given by the corporate media, nor even as of late by Public Broadcasting. For to speak of it would bring attention to the fact that labor was once a power unto itself, that common workers managed to band together to advance their shared interests against the monied interests who pooled their resources into keeping the working people divided and powerless.

But there was a time--and it was really not so long ago, my grandfather was a part of it—when conditions for the average workers were so bad that they felt it necessary to band together to demand in strength what would not be given to them otherwise. They demanded they receive a fair slice of the pie, a fair share of the profits that had been created by their labor.

The struggle was real, it was intense, and it was quite often deadly. Such was the righteousness of the cause, however, that ordinary working-class people were willing to put aside their fear as well as their religious, ethnic, cultural, and racial differences and see their shared interests. Words like brotherhood, sisterhood, and solidarity were used, were meant, were believed in. People, recognizing their shared interests and shared humanity, banded together to take what was rightfully theirs from an elite class who lived in luxurious mansions and never dirtied their hands doing the actual work that transformed the U.S.A. into the wealthiest nation in the world.

Such was the power of the labor movement that it was able to secure from the federal government a token of the power and value of labor: namely a day of appreciation of, and rest from work for, labor.

This was the first holiday ever designated for the common man. No longer did we merely celebrate the notion of great men and great leaders, we now celebrated the contributions of all who contributed to society. And not only did it celebrate the common laborer, it celebrated the shared goals and the feeling of commonality amongst us. Labor Day was a shared holiday, a holiday for everyone, a recognition of our shared humanity, dependence upon one another, and strength in unity.

But this was not a good thing for those who paid for other people’s day of rest from out of their profits. Never mind that those profits were generated by someone else’s labor in the first place, they wanted all they could get. Especially power. Labor had shown for a time its power, but those who profited off of labor had many skillful planners, lawyers and propagandists in their employ, people willing to work against the common good in order to make a handsome profit for themselves. Considering themselves great men and the common laborers as nothing more than resources to be maximally exploited, the war against labor continued even as workers were winning their greatest victories.

Divide and conquer. That’s been the game of every ruler from even before the time of Sun Tzu. Scott Walker was caught on camera uttering that exact phrase to a wealthy donor:

It was necessary to construct the debate in the media--which is owned and sponsored by the wealthy capitalists--around the things that divide rather than unite labor. Play up the differences that exist between the rural worker and the urban worker, the blue collar from the white collar, public workers and those who work for private employers. And by all means, do not discuss labor as though it had an identity of its own. Do not mention labor rights, labor concerns, labor solidarity. When workers complain about losing their jobs to overseas factories, make sure that the blue collar workers hate the workers replacing them rather than the person who made the decision, and make sure the white collar worker blames it on the blue collar worker’s inability to learn the kind of skills that are (at least for now) in demand.

Commonality, that’s what Labor Day means to me. It means power shared broadly rather than concentrated in the hands of a few who have managed to gather about them an inordinate amount of wealth. It means unity rather than division. It means working together for the benefit of all, rather than suffering under the delusion that the human race can progress through selfishness and ruthless competition.

It means common goals for the common man. There are some who would say this is antithetical to freedom, but when they speak of freedom they speak of a rich man’s freedom. It is a freedom for a few paid for by the servitude of the many. Those without power can never expect to be free. Freedom will never be given by those with power, just as an equal share of the wealth will never be given by those whose only interest is profit. Labor Day is a day to remember the effort required for common workers to get what is rightfully theirs. Labor Day is a day to celebrate the average person, the common person, the working person. That person is me, and I’m willing to bet it is you too.