Laboring Under Misapprehension

Laboring Under Misapprehension

(a totally non-humorous reflection)

Today is Labor Day in USA, although most European countries celebrate May Day (in remembrance of the Haymarket) as the moment to reflect upon labor's struggles, progress, and contributions. For many Americans, the 19th century violence surrounding the workers uniting against employers to demand more favorable working conditions and better compensation is a faded story we were told but did not need to live in our working years. Our Labor Day has happier evocations of the passage of summer and the commencement of last part of the year. We scarcely think of laborers as we make our sale-priced purchases from the busy salesclerks or watch highly paid athletes toil on our extra day of leisure this weekend.

I easily fall into the clueless group for whom Labor Day is merely a phonetic collection of three syllables to mark a federal holiday. I do not think of myself as a laborer, although I work for hourly wages for a large organization. My wages are not the $1.50 for a 10-hour day paid (often begrudgingly) to those six-days-a-week laborers in the 1880s, even when adjusted for more than a century of inflation. I have come to accept the elevation of the norm for such workers as I without questioning the past. I do not belong to a labor union and view them as yet another factor (often a very provocative one) in the puzzle of running a productive enterprise. They are an insulating and an isolating layer between me and my employer. I will more often complain about their existence and impacts on me through their self-interested negotiation than to recognize any need for gratitude for some concession they have won in the past that endures today as normal business.

I am not resentful of labor unions so much as dismissive of their ongoing necessity. I view their aggressive posturing as more habitual than required and an obstacle to cooperation. Our businessmen today have grown up in a more sensitive (and rule bound) era, but they have not changed their genetic human nature from the controllers of wealth of previous centuries. So, perhaps it is the never ending battle with different skirmishes that the labor union organizers rally their troops to fight yet today. My preference that it were not so may have as little reality as that for no crime nor war.

So, I also accept the existence of “organized labor” as I must accept “organized armies and police forces” to combat “organized (and unorganized) crime” and the other organizations that oppose them. They are responses that often take on the methods of their opposition. On Labor Day, like on Veterans Day, I should pause to think about the undesired necessity that has been (and still is) met by people who struggled and often sacrificed (their lives and their peaceful principles) to confront the opposition that might oppress us today without their actions.  Perhaps, tomorrow I can go back to my self-deluded dream world.