Surely you've got something to do today. The gutters might need a good cleaning. Maybe it's finally dry enough to mow that lawn (and it needs it). This being Arkansas, a lot of people will use this three-day weekend to get the hunting camp ready for fall. And don't go into those duck blinds without some wasp spray.
Being good Americans, today we will celebrate labor by . . . taking the day off work. And what will we do on our day off work? Being good Americans, we'll work.
Don't try to explain it to those who aren't American either by birth or by attitude. Labor isn't a political party on these shores. Labor is a reason to party and talk politics. If you're confused, you might not understand jazz or baseball, either. Poor soul.
In this country, labor is something we do, not who we are. There is something in us, in this New World, that does not like the idea of labor as a permanent class. Or as a permanent party. Unlike our European cousins, Americans tend to view labor as a means to an end, maybe a stage that some of us pass through on the way to becoming just another capitalist. Grandma canned tomatoes to get her family through the winter without starving. Mom canned tomatoes because she liked the recipe, and the smell in the kitchen reminded her of her childhood. Today the family owns a small canning business and is selling its brand to Wal-Mart. And plans are to expand to overseas markets when Jimmy gets his MBA.
A president named Coolidge once said the business of America is business. That's been about 100 years ago. But the idea hasn't changed all that much since then. And as long as business is good, it will need labor. Which might explain why, among many things, the country's two major political parties remain relatively free of class ideology. That is, when compared to the European parties. Imagine a multimillionaire former everything in the establishment and a (supposed) billionaire who owns golf courses both claiming to be working for the little man in this presidential election year. And their followers really believe it! Deep down. And can show you why. What a country.
Name a political party after labor? To do that, you'd have to think that labor and management weren't linked together in a symbiotic relationship--both improving or declining depending on how, yes, business is going.
Lest we forget, the Great Depression was a boon for the Socialist and Communist parties--and their equivalent on the right, which offered their own kind of panaceas. Desperate economic conditions are the seedbed of both Communism and fascism, which have a way of mirroring each other as they circle, prepping for war, as always. While both may have attracted Americans from time to time, they tend to lose their attraction as the economy improves. There is no force like prosperity to make people wary of changing the system, whatever system.
Americans may get carried away now and then under the pressure of events and begin flirting with the theoretical, but basically we remain pragmatic. What else would you expect of a frontier people who had to live with reality--or die? Ideology fells no trees, plants no crops, raises no barns--or families. That takes work, and faith. No wonder the frontiersman had to know how to plow, shoot and pray.
Early labor unions in this country resembled producers' cooperatives. Not until the American Federation of Labor took shape did the idea of a permanent labor force acquire a measure of respectability. That was largely because of the AFL's emphasis on skilled labor and high standards--not class identity. When its president, Samuel Gompers, was asked what labor wanted, he did not draw a vision of the New Society or of a New Man or any other utopian figment. His response consisted of: More! More of this, more of that, more of what Americans want and what makes America great. And when labor got it, it wanted more of it. And as long as business was humming, and the pie got larger, there was more to go around.
By the turn of the last century, as the American economy grew more industrialized, Americans' economic interests grew more differentiated--and hostile. Finley Peter Dunne's fictional Irish barkeep, Mr. Dooley, described the change this way: "Capital still pats labor on th' back, but on'y with an axe. Labor rayfuses to be threated as a frind. It wants to be threated as an inimy. It thinks it gets more that way. They are still a happy fam'ly, but it's more like an English fam'ly. They don't speak."
Now, almost a century and many a clash and collaboration later, labor and capital have been joined in their struggles by management. All have come to recognize a common interest in preserving their--and the country's--competitive position in the world. One great aid in the American bid for world markets is what has become known, sometimes only in retrospect, as the American work ethic. The pride and care Americans take in their work, and the responsibility we take for it, need to be fostered.
There is a kind of labor, really a caricature of it, that degrades--pointless, unproductive, wasteful make-work that cannot be described as anything but an insult to human intelligence. "Most men would feel insulted," Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now."
Now there are oh-so-modern, highly sophisticated forms of rote labor that come complete with pretentious verbiage ("a paradigm shift that will get us thinking outside the box") but are no less brutalizing.
If mindless, unproductive work is a curse, the rewarding kind of labor is one of the great blessings of life. "When I go into my garden with a spade and dig a bed," Emerson wrote, "I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands." Which is why so many will prepare the garden for the fall today. Not to celebrate a holiday, but for . . . exhilaration and health. And for the broccoli and cauliflower.
This is the sort of labor to encourage even at a time when Americans are told we can now sit back and let machines do our work--and thinking--for us. Labor is so inseparable a part of life that to assign it to others, including our "thinking" machines, would be to let them do not just our working and thinking but our living for us, too.
That labor which serves man best ought to have an element of play, or even art, to it. The drudge may make the worst of workers. The best are worthy of their hire, and, more important, of their own self-respect.
Editorial on 09/05/2016