Labor Day Should Be All Year

Monday was Labor Day, a holiday established to honor the American Labor Movement. It’s important that we have mindful and not just mindless holidays, so we should take a moment to consider what it means that as a nation we honor workers and the right to unionize.

Over the last forty years, there has been a systematic attack on unions and the labor movement in general. Jeff Bezos for instance famously sabotaged the efforts of Amazon workers to unionize this past year, and all over the country worker’s efforts to unionize are now bumping up against large and small resistance within huge corporations. Unionized workers receive on average higher pay and better benefits, extremely important given that there is literally no place in the country where someone working 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job can afford a two-bedroom apartment. The good news is that a younger generation now seems to be discovering the importance of unions, rising up to create them and support them in a new and refreshing kind of way.

Barbara Alper

I was raised to deeply respect unions, and my grandfather was a union worker on the Rock Island Railroad. When I was a child my parents used to tell us, “If you cross a picket line don’t bother to come home.” I’ve been shocked over the years watching people cavalierly crossing picket lines. I was always taught never to do that.

We have minimized not only the economic value of people’s work but also its psychological, emotional and spiritual value - not only for individuals but for society. The entire fabric of American civilization is impacted by the way in which workers are too often seen as mere cogs in a machine. Time for a serious rethink and an enlightened redo.

Our deepest identity is always the identity we share with others. How does that apply to our identity as workers? Some of us are healers, some of us are scientists, some of us are business people, some of us are teachers, some of us are artists and so forth. But from a spiritual perspective it is not just what we do in the world that’s important; what matters most is the purpose behind our doing it. Doing anything just to make money does little to uplift the energy of a situation beyond mere financial transaction. Doing whatever we do with an attitude of contribution, however, raises the level of excellence in any situation. This is a blessing not just on the customer or receiver of goods or services; it also blesses the worker himself.

One of the shadow sides of contemporary capitalism is how it has diminished the meaning of work, ascribing to it value too often based on money and money alone. Some of the most important and meaningful jobs in the world - teaching, humanitarian organizations, social work, and so forth - are not financially remunerated in outstanding ways, yet people doing them have chosen such fields because of other kinds of satisfaction they provide. In a society where such undue status is afforded to people’s capacity to create wealth, we have seen people doing some of the least important things getting the greatest respect, and people doing some of the most important things getting the least.

It’s psychologically and spiritually debilitating when we don’t experience work as an extension of who we are, with no deeper existential purpose than making money in order to survive. Raising the minimum wage is not just about countering poverty; it’s about countering despair. Cancelling the college loan debt isn’t just about stimulating the economy; it’s about stimulating people’s aspirations. We aren’t just skewing our economy by rigging it in favor of a few; we’re suppressing the hopes and excitement people should feel just being alive. The American economy as it is now constructed is actually weaponized against our people. We have every right in the world to stand up and say this has got to stop.

It is outrageous that in the richest country in the world there have been schoolteachers paying for school supplies out of their own pocket (pre-Covid, of course), people working forty hours a week standing in line at food pantries, or people having to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. None of these things are necessary, given the wealth of this country; all of them are the product of a society in which a massive transfer of wealth into the hands of one per cent of our population has been a forty-year theft encoded in economic policy.

We have to seriously disrupt that pattern, and supporting unions is one of the most important ways to do it. Busting monopolies is another (kudos to the president for appointing Lina Khan as head of the Federal Trade Commission, Brian Wu at the White House, and Jonathan Kanter to the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice). We should also repeal the extreme tax cuts to corporations and the richest individuals that were enacted in 2017. And pressure our senators to support the PRO ACT!

Sheridan Libraries/Levy/Gado

Years ago, I was at a department store in London buying lipstick. I was struck by how the saleswoman referred to another woman behind the make-up counter as her “colleague.” It startled me a bit, and I realized then how much we had psychologically diminished the value of work in the United States. From that day on I have adopted the word “colleague” in ways I had not before.

We need to accord greater economic value to certain work in the United States, and greater respect to almost all of it. Nothing is a more transformational goal than that everyone should be able to make a decent living working at a job that they find satisfying. I’ll hold to that dream, if you will. And let’s work for it.

In this area as in so many others: with out attitudes, our personal behavior, and our public policies, we can transform what is into what can be.

Make sure you listen to the podcast from August 23rd called TRANSFORMING CAPITALISM Part 1. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.

I think we should make Labor Day all year.