Labor Day Is About Jobs

Labor Day, used to be a day of muted celebration. Now, it is merely another day off for students and some workers. It has been hijacked by Madison Ave and, man, there are some terrific sales! It has become a three-day shopping weekend.

But for many families, scoring a fantastic backpack at a secondhand store is a major victory. That is because they are unemployed or underemployed.

It is all about work: the need to work, the right to work, the essence of your identity as a worker. It is a source of pride and satisfaction, a place where you have accomplished something. Hopefully, your family can live on what the workers in your family bring home.

Workers have been thrown away by the millions. First, there were the perverted tax breaks for off-shoring and outsourcing. It always seemed to me that those actions by American companies should be punished and not rewarded.

Now, a new and devious strategy has infected American corporations like a cancer. They pleaded with the government (that would be you and me) for gargantuan bailouts or (horrors), they would need to file for bankruptcy protection. And so the bailouts materialized.

Then came the movement, led by the Koch brothers, and their crusade to destroy all unions, especially public employee unions—not so hard to do since unions had made themselves offensively outdated by enriching the leaders at the cost of alienating their workers.

Next, the Koch brothers, along with other captains of industry, declared that the EPA and all of its stupid rules are horribly harming their bottom line. Their profits could be lots and lots bigger if they didn’t have to worry about polluting the air, land, water and the basic social structure of the middle class.

These corporations no longer need to concern themselves with paying for pensions because they threw that idea overboard a long time ago with the invention of a “self-directed” 401K. Workers know how that turned out. There is an entire generation reaching retirement age who have no money due to the bad decisions made by those same corporations.

Now, with American corporations bursting at the seams with more cash than they have ever had, they are paying the big boys millions in bonuses for a job well done and are refusing to hire any more workers. Those who have not been fired are doing double the work without a dime of extra compensation.

The final kick in the teeth for the unemployed is the new and legal policy of corporations to not even consider hiring someone who is out of work. Only working people need apply. The longterm unemployed, through no fault of their own and sometimes after decades of service, are not real people anymore.

So look around and think a bit about the invisible, humiliated, desperate people who are pretending to be just fine. You may have no idea which of your neighbors is flirting with disaster. But there are millions of them.

It’s time to get involved in politics and government because the private sector has utterly failed to provide even the most basic safety net. It takes a country to solve this hideous turn of events. It should begin with requiring corporations to actually pay taxes greater than the amount they pay their CEOs. If not, say good-by to the American middle class.