Labor Day?

marjorie says...

The rest of the world (practically) celebrates International Workers Day, or simply Labor Day, on May 1 in commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago as well as the international labor movement. But here in United States and Canada it’s celebrated on the first Monday of September. Labor Day in the U.S. was adopted during a time of great labor organizing as a counter measure to having May 1 become the national holiday. Understanding the history of Labor Day goes a long way toward explaining why it’s essentially a meaningless holiday.

Yes, it’s meaningless. It’s a long weekend that the American middle class uses for vacations and barbeques. And the political class on occasion uses it for meaningless speeches as election season begins. Don’t get me wrong, we already work way more compared to our other first world counterparts. American productivity is sacred and American workers by and large have bought into the notion that their lives should be slaves to the wheel of profit, or simply a better paying salary. Most of us get very little vacation time and most of us experience very stingy bosses who count every single day we take as if it were gold. So I don’t begrudge this Holiday time even though I don’t like the fact that it’s an empty holiday. After all, most of us don’t think twice about all the labor working on this day to make it a nice holiday for the rest of us, much less organized labor itself.