When I was a child, viewing the world through a child’s lens, I considered the Labor Day weekend the swan song of summer, signaling the end of unstructured time and lazy days, the final hurrah before school started and cooler temps turned the leaves pale and fragile. All that is moot, I suppose, now that most school years begin in August and leaves turn on a dime, responding to the caprice of a jet stream pushed by the air flow spurred by arctic melt-off. And since the origin of Labor Day was to celebrate and promote the hard-won achievements of unions for the beleaguered working class — like the minimum wage, overtime pay, a five-day work week, the end of child labor — I’m pretty sure that Labor Day itself is — well — moot.
No longer a day of national pride or activism, Labor Day at least gives us a long weekend away from work, or what serves as one in this age of iPhones and intrusive technology. Thirty-four million Americans are estimated to travel this weekend, only 30% by plane. That’s a lot of cars on the road, easily exceeded by the number of hot dogs, hamburgers and beer sold. For the business class, this is the last big summer push, and for their employees, especially those manning the convenience stores and fast food joints around the nation, it represents another $7.25 per hour ($8.80 on average.)
It’s the rare service employee who gets a 40-hour week, but even should they have that opportunity they will earn well under the poverty level for a family of three (a bit over $1,800). Economists suggest that adjusted for inflation the minimum wage in 1968 would be over $10.50 now, while the Economic Policy Institute has pointed out that “if the minimum wage had kept up with productivity growth [since 1968], it would now be $18.67 per hour.” Robert Reich has suggested that both McDonalds and Wal-Mart, representative of low-pay employers, could easily afford to pay their workers $15.00 an hour without too big a bite from their profits.
Firebrand and populist Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida has put forth a bill (H.R. 1346) raising the minimum to $10.50, which is $1.50 more than Obama has pushed for. For such bold action, Alan is considered a dreamer. If national leadership — Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Boehner — don’t get behind such a push, it won’t happen. And while unemployment rates have been steadily falling, low-paying jobs in retail and service industries accounted for more than half of the national job gain in these last months. Wall Street is flush while Main Street remains depressed. And let’s not kid ourselves, that’s exactly how Wall Street wants it.
Last Thursday, fast food workers in over 50 cities across the nation went on strike, the largest ever to hit the industry. Strikers demanded the above-mentioned $15.00 per hour, but even had an individual storefront decided to raise pay, it would be caught between franchise fees for rent and royalties and the need to raise consumer prices to cover the increase. In short, breaking away from the pack would be difficult as the laws around this venture are complex and restrictive, intentionally tangled and tilted.
Yet even more important than a pay raise, seems to me, is the strikers’ more essential demand: the right to organize. It is truly remarkable how such a fundamental right has been all but made illegal in this nation. As we lose that ability, bit by bit, Labor Day and all it represents becomes even more endangered.
Once jobs paying decent wages were allowed to be exported to nations paying pennies on the dollar for labor, the end was clear. We no longer manufacture, we no longer employ in wide swaths of productivity. According to Moody’s Analytics, “low-paying industries have provided 61 percent of the nation’s job growth, even though these industries represent just 39 percent of overall U.S. jobs.”
Clearly, if 99% of us are destined to become worker bees, tending the hive for as many hours as it takes to make a living and leading lives of exhaustion and despair, the 1% can continue to live in their alternate universe of privilege and excess. We’re getting closer to that model every day, and no one in their right mind can call that accidental but — sadly — ask people who the 99% are and only some of them can answer.
So 34 million of us are running on fumes this holiday, unaware of the shameful elitist coup that has drained the middle class of its life’s blood, and mostly oblivious to the long history of worker struggle in this nation, or the ferocious means by which the privileged have continually fought against the establishment of a secure and prosperous working class.
To put 34 million into perspective, Mercy Corps reports that the millionth refugee child has fled Syria, dispersed with their families into overcrowded camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Their emergency care and emotional wounds have become a crisis. Ann Curry, just back from the camps, reported that even more than their food and water insecurity, or the wicked sandstorms or the retreating rebels using the camps as staging areas for counterattacks, the children’s emotional trauma and battle-inspired PTSD have caregivers wondering if they will become a lost generation. On the other hand, compared to poignant pictures of little linen-wrapped bodies on beds of ice this week, they appear to be among the lucky ones.
As we all, in this nation and around the world, struggle to peel back the layers of political plot and culpability in humankind’s use of chemical weapons on one another — in my estimation, an egregious example of the great disconnect between head and heart that defines this point in history — I think we need to reevaluate our notion of violence: what it is and what it means.
The current tragedy in Syria — a footnote in the annals of man’s inhumanity to man — is set to mark a generation. The sectarian war in Iraq, finally in the hands of the tribes that harbor the essential grievance that is sparking a renewed civil war, has already marked one. The Middle East’s stretch toward modernity has not been helped by the ‘civilized’ countries of this world, nor have those nations helped by allowing themselves to be pulled down into hubris and institutional violence.
How do we justify our failings, here in a fading empire that is being branded irrelevant because the President won’t unilaterally pound hell out of a country that has no clear target, that is already bloodied in the crosshairs between the East and West, without getting a vote from Congress? How can McCain and company urge another full-scale international misadventure without it becoming obvious that the only beneficiaries can be the military-industrial complex, the rest of us sucked dry by the Bush doctrine and the everlasting War Powers Resolution, our corporate powers gone rogue and our economy an empty husk?
Here in this nation, teenage unemployment is set to mark a generation, as well. The jobs that they traditionally apply for during their school hiatus are the jobs adults have now taken to try to scrape by. Among white youth, numbers of summer jobs have been cut in half in this century, while in Hispanic and black communities, the numbers are even worse, with only 20% employed during the summer season. This is where our youth test themselves in the public sphere. This is where they earn self-respect and contribute. Or, where they once did.
In the fourth consecutive summer that teen employment has remained at record lows, experts predict a generation economically stunted, anticipating a lifetime of lower earnings and fewer opportunities in a nation gone stagnant, its citizens increasingly incapable of breaking through the barriers of class distinctions. In a nation that has seen its middle-class circle the wagons, sending out every employable family member to bring in what it can, this is not only discouraging but a kind of violence, itself. Let’s be clear: poverty is violence against the spirit.
This Labor Day, as I listen to the sounds of children’s laughter, look out my window at little kids playing chase across neighborhood lawns, I can’t help but wonder what kind of world we’re offering them. Those who survive the ambitions of despots in Syria will be forever marked by hatred and fear, by sights and sounds too obscene for even the bravest to carry. Meanwhile, those who manage to sustain a life in increasingly depressed areas of this nation are trapped by substandard schools and jobs. The American Dream is more a criminal enterprise than an achievable goal through hard work and ethical conduct. Are we leaving the children of the world a dead end and a fading dream of a better future?
So what’s the new designation, I wonder, for this empty holiday? I guess Labor Day is really a day to celebrate the onset of football season, right? A pursuit engrained with pleasure in our combative human brains, but proven so risky to life and limb that the National Football League has settled lawsuits for old injuries out of court to the tune of three-quarters of a BILLION dollars, a hundred-million of that for research into brain injury. The corporation that rules football entertainment and all it stands for accompanied that payout with no admission of liability, by the way. Corporations are NEVER liable, as we’ve all come to understand.
There is nothing to celebrate this Labor Day, unless we ourselves decide we’ve had enough of this and determine that it’s worth the struggle, the risk, the effort to take back this nation. The heroes of the day are minimum wage workers striking at hamburger joints. What does that say about the state of the union?
Obviously, it would have been better by far if we’d made a turn toward restoration of corporate oversight, in just legislation, in ethical conduct, in sustainability, a generation ago, a decade ago, a year ago. It’s ours to do now, if we’re going to. Those who sit on the sidelines and bitch about the nation’s youth, or political representatives’ unwillingness to listen to them, or the need to make a buck over the need to be concerned about community welfare, and don’t make some effort to change that situation aren’t people I want to know.
Me, I can’t face the children and say I did nothing to save their future from the prior generation’s poor choices.
If you can’t either, we’ll have to risk, we’ll have to sacrifice, we’ll have to determine the struggle worthwhile and depend upon one another, as centuries of game-changers always have. We’ll have to remember why we came to the planet, what we know we have the ability to redesign once we muster the courage to step into our spiritual power, summoning the help of our Higher Angels.
You and I, we have to demand a different future than the one planned for us by the plutocracy. We have to stand up — so MANY more of us than them — and make ourselves heard. Until then, this is my last Labor Day.
Yes – I agree with Jude. Sounds truly amazing, Patty! A real gift.
Sounds like an invitation from the Cosmos, kiddo — you know, when a window opens we’re urged to fly through it. If it’s right for you, you’ll know. Ask in the Angels and let it perk awhile.
Jude, I sure will.
I was dumbfounded that not only did his family find my homemade stuff good enough for themselves and the people of Mexico, but thought they could make a profit too if they have enough to resell. I didn’t know what to think. I told my mother this morning that it can’t be everyday that a child named for a Mayan god comes forth to tell you how to get rich and then says not to fear the end of world talk and heaven is right here in the 5th dimension, unseen. I’m still swooning.
Reselling has a lot to do with being willing to gamble on bulk purchasing of products and overbuys, returned merchandise, and close-outs, without knowing what you are getting – sometimes it is all good, and sometimes not so good, which is the reason for having flea market outlets too. I had read about it before but never actually knew anyone who did it. The family wants him to learn Mandarin in college so he can protect their interests in future transactions. I’ve met some amazing children, but this one blew me away.
What a satisfying experience, Patty — not just finding so much “there” there, in your young friend, which is truly heartening, but to talk a little 5D? Divine! Last year I had a similar surprising conversation with a young man as we waited with the hordes in the Social Security office for our numbers to be called. So encouraging.
I’m envious of the conversation on a re-sell level, as well. Stumping to find a way to augment my wee income, here in the Pea Patch, I’m been seriously thinking about eBay and all the country shmutz, as me Mum would say, to be found here. When my kids were here this summer, my daughter was enthusiastic about how all the “shabby chic” (that IS the Patch) would sell big in her area. And frankly, it seems an easy fit for my Venus in Scorp on the midheaven, which never allows me to pass up a yard sale. The thought of entering that slipstream seems a tad overwhelming, but I know it can be learned. Do, please, send along any info that you find helpful. You can always find me at judeshere at yahoo dot com [hat tip to Len]
Grateful for the good wishes, Lizzy and be — I do believe I’m finally on the mend.
I like that Jude. . .the Gilded Age needing serfs and we are they! As for HGTV viewing for relief, I sometimes do that too, but often have to turn the sound off b/c of the stupidity of the owners/shoppers of/for homes makes me as irritable as the stupidity of the politicians I’m trying to escape. I’ve come to believe that those “shoppers/owners” are paid to say stupid things like “I hate the color of the paint in this room” or “carpet? yechhh!” since they the programs are sponsored by paint and flooring companies.
Hope you are feeling better now.
be
I thought this was posted by Eric too. Certainly didn’t intend to say let’s stop talking about the past, but the future isn’t that grim! Last night I worked at a local middle school farmers market again. A middle school child selling produce there, about 12 or 13 years, old talked to me for about two hours about how to make money selling on line. His immigrant parents from Mexico, aged 31, are already making over 20,000 a month on eBay, and about that much reselling at flea markets (I think he named 6 locations). So what brought the conversation? Last December I had given the child a bar of soap for helping with setting up tables. He had given it to his grandmother, but his parents were so intrigued by it they wanted to buy more to take to Mexico to resell at a profit. I’m like, what? Apparently they export to more affluent areas of Mexico. He texted his father to ask if he could give me his phone number so I could learn more about reselling and then he proceeded to talk to me about money and the value of collecting. We then moved on to NASA, the search for new living space on a new planet, and life in the 5th dimension. My head is still spinning. The young man is named for one of the Mexican gods, and I thought I was in a time warp. Holy cow, may the force be with us!
Many apologies for attributing this to Eric, dear Jude, “It had to be you!” Really loved this piece. Hope you have an easier day today.
Grokked in fullness, DivaCarla — it’s been a tough day, I’ve growled my way through it. I’d hoped not to have to spend much more of my lifetime listening to John McCain hold forth on America’s God-like role in the world, and especially how we’re responsible for all manner of instability since those Bushies left office and took their NeoCons with them. Pfffft!
Thanks for the link, I look forward to exploring the information.
And we’ve got to stop going to war, or none of these bright ideas will matter.
Jude, thought provoking article. I am provoked, on the side of justice, and also because I want a lifestyle that may be out of stock, and on permanent backorder. Not the one on HGTV, but one that lets me do things and go places, and fix things. I’d even like granite, especially resetting the granite sills under my ancient farmhouse.
I am a student of wealth consciousness, which at its most accurate is simply alchemy and understanding the way things really work. What riles me is the HGTV values that don’t take into account that we are the climax species in nature, not separate, but both dependent and responsible for the earth and for succeeding generations. Not history, but legacy.
My best guess for cleaning up the mess is to blend the Transition Town movement with Cradle to Cradle: William McDonough’s renewable abundance movement. Here’s a good interview with him this week on New Dimensions: http://www.newdimensions.org/principles-design-based-on-the-laws-of-nature-with-william-mcdonough/. If you miss the free listening and prefer not to invest $1.99 to listen, search his name on Youtube. There’s hours of content.
I believe that a thriving society for my grandchildren to bring their children up in will be a blend of 19th century rural community and technology, and 21st century technology and spirituality. McDonough is designing with this world in mind. Transition Town movement will get more traction in the mainstream when they adopt these concepts with a spirit of optimism and possibility. Thought I do love me a rocket stove.
As a “big picture” person, I love history but don’t dwell in the past any more than most people who have several decades under their belt. History is prologue, as they say. Still, it seems to me that whomever wrote that we won’t know where we’re going until we know where we’ve been is spot-on. Knowing how our history shaped our present makes a difference, provided it gives us a realization of how we carry that experience, that energy signature, with us into the future.
That realization is where we make the decisions about what to lay down — retire, if you will — and what to drag with us. What occurred in the past gives us the context for our present and I think context (meaning) appears to be what’s missing from so many of our lives.
Having lost our common linkage, our sense of community, we’ve focused on ourselves for quite a while now and it shows, not always admirably. Yet with Chiron so present these days, configuring the depth of our wounding into the prospect of our healing and essentially keeping our past fresh, assigning all we’ve outgrown to the trash heap seems, unfortunately, a bit premature.
I hear it all around me — I hear in in the voices of those in the practice of transforming their lives here at the PW blog, stories of stumbles and progress letting go of old attitudes, causes, habits and grievance. We are all works in progress. And I agree that it’s difficult to keep a foot in both worlds — what was, what will be — and find a point of power in the present, but we’re up to it. I’m pretty sure that’s why we came to this place and time, in service to the whole.
Shops still close around here on Sundays, be, not a stretch in rural America, sans box stores and big enterprise. Commercialism’s nod to religion, and you’re right — everything reflects what we value. Which is why I find Labor Day a disgrace and was disgusted with the 50th anniversary celebration of MLK’s “Dream” speech. Neither of these occasions were born of complacency, they should at least resonate some hint of their original magnitude and tranformative power.
Excellent link, nilou, thanks. Down in bed these last few days with fever and accompanying grunge, I turned on TV for background noise. Ever the contractors daughter, I selected HGTV as an island of relief from reality shows and the requisite action movies that play on holidays. I am forever amazed at the parade of first-time home buyers that have a budget of $650,000 and turn up their nose because the kitchen granite is a shade too dark or the closet in the fifth bedroom too small.
Who ARE these people? The ones whose lifestyle is being cancelled, even as we speak. But, again, until we REALIZE that, we continue to be fascinated with this stuff and behavior, dreaming of winning the Golden Ticket to Wonka’s world, taking notes for when our Lotto ticket wins. Seems more like selecting our chair on the deck of Titanic to me, but I suppose “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” should have given us those first signals back in the 80s that the Gilded Age was making a triumphant return and needed serfs to fulfill its promise … most likely, us. Our entertainment is a mirror of our society, which is why I find it surprising that we’re shocked when it all goes Shallow Hal.
I was going over all this in twilight sleep, last night, thinking about how spare our vision for the future seems to be, a kind of mosh of agro-badlands and techno-pastoral. I guess I’m still not ready to let go of the possibility that Franklin’s Republic or Lincoln’s Union has a chance to reconfigure itself into its ethical promise. And I’m not willing to presume that the millions still stuck in the PR programming, the HGTV fantasy and the mythology of a nation caught in the bone-crunching jaws of transformation, don’t have the capacity to come to a point of realization that human dignity, compassion and justice is essential not only to their own good, but to the worlds.
As Martin quoted — often repeated these days, which I take as a sign that it’s resonating us like temple bells — “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Doing our part hastens the day.
Thanks everyone for comments. Blessed be, all of you.
Some London street art to make the point.
http://streetartlondon.co.uk/blog/2011/12/12/banksy-out-stock/
If only enough people could understand that a life is of more value than a lifestyle…that would be game over. I live ever in hope…
nilou
I’ve read that Labor Day was chosen to be the 1st Monday of September, in part anyway, to give workers and their families a day of leisure during the long stretch between the 4th of July and the Thanksgiving holidays. What a coincidence that the 1st Monday of September is always when the Sun is in Virgo, the sign of labor.
Most government-decreed holidays lose their meaning over decades and decades of observation it seems to me. Even Christmas would have lost it’s meaning by now if not for the Christian churches and the people who attend them. Along with what you remember from your youth Jude, I also remember when shops closed their doors on holidays. In fact, I remember when shops closed (except for drug stores who stayed open to fill rx’s ) every Sundays when I was young. I suppose in part, holidays, especially Labor Day, lose their meaning because many parents quit pointing out to their children why they are getting a holiday. In fact, don’t we all come to take for granted those things (like holidays) that we grew up with? Things like the nuclear family, you know, mom, dad, brothers, sisters. . . . when I was a kid it never occurred to me that it wouldn’t always be around.
For us to remember why we have anything we enjoy that continues to stay with us we need to value it. If we take it for granted there’s a good chance we will lose it. Trouble is, it creeps up on us; that awareness that we are losing it. Not until we suffer the loss of it do we come to understand how valuable it was. I suspect it is a generational thing, you know, every so often, say a hundred years or so, we need to become conscious of what it is that we had but have no more, and then work our asses off to get it back. As long as there is duality and gravity and greed, the things we value will be lost if not maintained vigilantly.
The cyclical nature of things is always in operation. The trick is to get it to spiral upwards rather than stay at the same level. Consciousness is like that; it stays at the same level unless there is an impetus to climb up out of the rut. We have entered a time in which there is encouragement (from the universe as revealed by the planets) to do just that. Becoming aware of what we value is paramount because it gives us direction. Loss can either debilitate us or motivate us. So can talking about loss. Talk that inspires can incentivize and being incentivized can lead to action, and action can mobilize. Timing is everything. Now is the time.
be
There used to be a lot of bellboys in various locations, not just hotels (just watch the silent films); and there were jobs like elevator operator until the 70s. We wouldn’t dream of pumping our own gas until well into the 80s. When did we figure out we could press the floor button without help?? I’m pretty sure elevator operators of the world were in a deep depression over the situation, but now tell me – who cares? I remember riding the elevator at one of the department stores in the late 50s with a neatly uniformed elevator operator. It was all part of the energy of affluence (our mothers wanted to be like movie stars while our union member fathers worked double shifts). At some point it became important to have a two-car garage, now who do you suppose came up with that? I really hate it when the conversation is all about the past, but I find the new cool stuff irresistible. I don’t see the world as a consequence of our world view of work so much as a consequence of really really fabulous marketing and advertising.
Great article, Eric – and wonderful comments.
Just getting ready for bed at the end of this Labour Day holiday (yes, I’m from Canada and we have the same holiday but spell it with a u) and decided to check out the ol’ Planet Waves website before shutting down my computer. As always, I am glad I did, although I doubt that it will help me to sleep. This article really hit home. Our situation here in Canada is different, but only in minor details. Democracy here is just as much a farce as it is in the US.
As somebody who was a young adult in the 70’s I struggle to figure out how we got from there to here. It seems to me that we – the human race – have lost our sense of ‘we’. There seems to be very little feeling of community, anywhere, on any scale. Unless we can somehow find that sense of community again, I fear that we are doomed. Perhaps we are just going through an awkward stage and experiencing ‘growing pains’ as we evolve into the next stage of human development on this planet. But will we survive long enough to make it, I wonder. Many of us won’t, and perhaps none will.
How do we achieve the critical mass to simply put down all the guns and say that we won’t kill each other any more? That we won’t poison each other any more for the sake of a buck? That we finally understand that we all live or die on this ‘marble bowling ball’ together? (Thanks for that wonderful metaphor, Joni Mitchell.)
Well, I guess talking about it is as good a place to start as any. And spreading the word, in person and via the internet. And fighting back when the corporate power mongers threaten internet freedom. Because that is where the power to organize on a global scale lies and they know that. And we know that. That’s why we’re here.
Jude here, but let me add a line or two. Personally, I feel as though the many options that are making a come-back due to hard times (like barter and little towns issuing their own currency, as well as more mainstream tactics like job-share and employee-owned enterprise) have real potential to move the needle, but the mainstream cultural and financial barriers to those are still stout. In my mind, pecking away at that wall is the whole of the challenge, and the dreadful mess at hand — financially, educationally, yadda — is a “tell” that this hand has been overplayed, a sign that erosion of old methods will, must, give way to more balanced, authentic ways of sustaining ourselves eventually.
Our preoccupation with commerce is encoded in American DNA but our glut of excess has turned deadly. I blame competition, which I admit is the same as poking the human condition with a stick. If we could rise past our adoration of “zero sum” and find our point of collaboration — win/win — the resulting energy could lift us all. Simply, we just can’t own one another any more and make this work.
I look forward to the day that any Labor Day would celebrate not only creativity and right-livelihood but fair distribution and ethical stewardship of all resource. That would be worth a parade.
Meanwhile, here are some interesting bits … a clever and entertaining little pro-union, pro-worker representation video from Bold Progressives:
http://act.boldprogressives.org/survey/labor_fights/
Working America has a website dedicated to identifying worker issues and providing organizational info at FixMyJob.com:
http://www.fixmyjob.com/
and … in tribute to writing our own definition of work, of success, of achievement, peek at this cartoon (in the style of Calvin and Hobbs) … which I couldn’t agree with more.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/bill-watterson-advice-to-college-grads-illustrated-like-calvin-and-hobbes_n_3837271.html?ref=topbar
Thanks for your comment, Chief Niwots Son.
Eric- the thought that arises for me in reading this post concerns the nature of work and the economic system our culture has created for itself. In many ways I feel we are still playing out the consequences of a world view around work, compensation and ownership that evolved with the industrial revolution. While some claim we are now post-industrial, which you can read in many places on the internet (oh! the irony of a post-industrial world that runs on some of the coolest stuff our industrial culture has every produced), much of our society is still bound into patterns of existence based on an outmoded state of consciousness.
I am far more interested in helping that old consciousness get composted (it’s already shitty, not too far to go), and to tend to the new garden that is possible at this time. A large part of why I hang out here is because this is so often the conversation you and your team are leading, thank you.