A Day of Labor

AFTER THE AMERICAN civil war, the industrial revolution got started in earnest in the united states; the american genius for turning catastrophic orgies of death into economic bonanzas.

It wasn't pretty. The huge corporations and their new factories, without precedent or external control, treated the workers like property, essentially doing with them whatever they wished. Long hours, low pay, prison like working conditions, impoverished working conditions. The philanthropy of andrew carnegie was built on the backs of thousands of horribly abused workers.

Carnegie was not reluctant to use guns against his striking workers, nor to allow them, their wives and children, to languish in dire poverty because of slave wages.

Worker strikes were a constant companion of american society between eighteen eighty and nineteen hundred. They were violent. Neither the corporations nor the government had any hesitation about using rifles and billy clubs quieten or disperse angry mobs.

Labor Day was invented in eighteen eighty two in response to all this. I is uncertain whether the iedea came from the top or bottom; for the sake of being reasonably appropiate we'll say that the michinist gets credit, not the executive.

Like every other holiday in america, the origina, true meaning of labor has been totally lost, adanconed, neglected, distrorted and twisted into something more convenient and fun. Americans love their holidays, as long as they revolve around fun, feature a day off from work, and occur on a monday.

Labor Day started out as a day to celebrate the greatness, the dignity and pride of the working man...but nowadays it celebrates...celebrating..it is our unofficial end of summer. A last fun fling before shcool starts.

So on labor day we no longer have parades of carpenters, factory workers, and plumbers, nor exhibits exalting the creative, hard working genius of the american worker; we have cook outs and boating on the lake, and, for a little while longer, jerry lewis.

And lo, and behold, we jump ahead to today, and we find workers in america...slightly less exploitied, but only slightly, and with few opportunities, since most jobs have been moved to countries where brutal exploitation of labor is still accepted. In america, if you have a wife and two kids, and work full time, chances are you live in poverty, and that just aint right. Millions of americans are in precisely that situation.

Most of the world celebrates May first as international workers day. As usual, the U.S.A. goes it alone.  But as long as we all do it together, and for the right reasons, all is well. Maybe if we declared a national holiday of cooking out and watching TV in america, americans would slowly turn it into a day to celebrate labor.

Bb

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