Most of us spend more waking hours at work than anywhere else. So why isn’t Labor Day a bigger deal?
For many Americans, the three-day weekend that stems from the holiday serves as a speed bump on the road to summer’s end. It’s a chance for one last picnic (but not really), refreshing swim (but not really) and home-repair project (but not really) before the weather turns cold.
Yet we will do more of all these activities in September — heck, I cook outside all year long, provided I can shovel my way to the grill — so Labor Day isn’t truly about the end of summer.
In the past, we could argue the holiday was more about the start of a new school year. If you are of a certain age, you can probably remember the pungent mix of anxiety, nervous excitement and full-on dread that would accompany Labor Day activities, conducted with the full knowledge that the next day you would don your stiffest, newest pair of jeans, board a bus and prepare to meet new teachers who had spent the last three months devising Machiavellian means of academic torture.
No matter the Labor Day menu — burgers, hot dogs, chicken, corn on the cob, baked beans — it was seasoned with fear.
Oh, sure, there were students who were actually excited about a new year, who looked forward to Trapper Keepers filled with Ditto sheets (kids, ask your grandparents about Dittos sometime), endless afternoons in sweltering rooms with only the occasional beep of the projector to prod the drowsy teacher’s aide to advance the filmstrip from frame 65 to frame 66 of a 215-frame extravaganza on the mating cycle of the tsetse fly, and buckets of slop ladled onto fiberglass serving trays and dignified with the name of lunch.
But let’s be honest: The rest of us never trusted our classmates who reveled in such ridiculousness, who could kiss goodbye the last vestiges of midnight bedtimes and fireflies and comic books spread across the front porch without so much as a backward glance. I mean, we’d copy off their papers and gobble down the cafeteria food that they wouldn’t deign to eat, but we didn’t think they sucked the nectar from the flower of life like all us working-class drones.
But now that so many districts start back to school in mid-August, Labor Day is no longer a first-day marker for students, either. Many of our kids have been back in the saddle for weeks by the time this first Monday in September rolls around.
So what the heck is the purpose of Labor Day?
I suggest we make it about — gasp! — labor.
And not in the “Frank and Ernest” sense, either, where Labor Day was the one time each year when the comic-strip duo was gainfully employed.
No, I’m suggesting that we really take a moment to salute America’s employees, who have undergone a sea change in the last year or two, swamped by COVID, by pendulum swings of different opinions over their essential or non-essential status, by attacks on their work ethic.
Take just a second to consider that last point — the ongoing meme-war over the alleged laziness of the hourly laborer, who has the temerity, the unmitigated gall, to no longer be content to toil for minimum wage in some of the dirtiest, smelliest, most lowly regarded positions.
As one worker said when questioned about the pervasiveness of this opinion, almost always offered by somebody who has been mildly inconvenienced because their Nacho Bell Grande has taken a few minutes longer at the carryout window, “Don’t they know how many of us died?”
The point is well taken. Frontline employees in a bunch of occupations didn’t have the ability to switch over to cushy work-at-home situations during the pandemic and haven’t accrued enough sick time to take off every time they have the sniffles.
But one thing they can do: Get sick or die because of their jobs, and go to the grave with the criticism of their fellow Americans still ringing in their ears.
Maybe this Labor Day, think about how many of our friends, neighbors, kids and grandkids work in retail or restaurant work, and how many of them will be working on these commercial frontlines this Monday, on weekends, on midnight shifts, flipping burgers and stocking shelves, while others are enjoying the fruits of these labors and begrudging them every penny.
Maybe Labor Day isn’t a bigger deal because we feel too guilty thinking about it more than we do, which right now, isn’t much.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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