Celebrate Labor Day?

I’m not entirely sure which category this should go in. My blog has ooodles more categories than John’s, but I’ll just have to survive and stick it … here!

Monday, we celebrate Labor Day here in the United States. Labor Day is the US’s welcome to the industrial age. On this day, thought to have first been celebrated in New York City, we are to celebrate what the average Working Joe does for the economy of this great nation.

For me, this comes after a week of hell. I’ve been hard-pressed to blog at all, as I’ve been constantly slammed by more and more work. Nothing seems to be going right, and as I’m in the thick of everything, I get all of the backlash. It’s Thursday and I finally finished a two-hour task today that I’d been trying to get done all week long. That’s how bad it’s been.

And, with that miserable feeling resting on my shoulders, I’m about to look at Labor Day, and I’m not too happy with where we’ve come.

Alternet has a great story called Labor Day 2003: Nothing to Celebrate, and it isn’t very far from the truth. America’s workers, in all varieties, are working harder than they ever have before, but aren’t reaping anymore benefits than they were before. If ever there was a Labor Day for American workers to celebrate, this sure isn’t the one. It’s now 30 years since the end of the “golden era” for American labor, which by most accounting ended in 1973. Over the past 30 years the productivity of the people whose brain and muscle creates the wealth of the world’s richest nation has grown by 66 percent. But the wage of the typical employee – the median wage – has grown by only 7 percent. One day off to celebrate our labor is hardly enough compensation to make up for longer workdays, less vacation, and little to no monetary compensation for the sacrifices that we’ve made in order to keep the economical base of this country running.

Who’s benefiting from all of our hard work? Well, I’ll give you a hint. There are only about 200,000 of them in the country, and they are the primary supporters of the Bush Administration’s drive for re-election.

So the next time you go home and collapse on the couch and wonder just where all your hard work is going…

- Stacy