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It’s Labor Day weekend, and for the second year in a row, reality reshapes the old traditions.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which persists despite widespread availability of effective and safe vaccines, continues to show us why workers deserve their own holiday.
Last year we learned how many different jobs were “essential,” and in how many different ways. Police, firefighters, medical workers, those professions were obviously essential. Garbage collectors? Yep. Grocery store workers from purchasers to shelf stockers and cashiers? Yeah, actually. Same for all the food processing plant workers who supply stuff for those shelves. And all the farmers, and all the truck drivers, and all the people who keep roads open and operational.
Infrastructure maintenance folks who keep water, electricity and sewer lines flowing? Absolutely. The telephone and cell-phone workers? No need to Google that one on your smart phone, they’re essential. Toilet paper manufacturers? Roger! Pharmaceutical companies? A lot of life-saving meds taken every day, so, of course.
The list grew long, so much so that we spent 2020 realizing there were precious few jobs that could be deemed truly non-essential in our hyper-linked, interdependent world. Every job is essential to someone, and not just the worker who fills it.
The arrival of vaccines slowly seemed to bring things close to normal, with people going back to work, theaters — both live and film — re-opening, and the return of those festivals and picnics and fairs that give the area its distinct flavor.
Then we saw something else we hadn’t seen in a long time: There were lots of jobs, but not always people willing or able to fill them.
That may be the message worth remembering this Labor Day. The holiday has always been distinct because it is not about religion, a famous person, a war or those who fought for them, or any single event in history. Samuel Gompers summed this up years ago by pointing out Labor Day is “devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.”
It is dedicated to the American worker. To the people who get no special recognition most of the time because, well, they’re just doing their jobs.
Put another way, Labor Day honors the people who make America run, and thus who make America.
Last year we saw what happens when those people can’t get jobs. This year we are experiencing what happens when employers can’t get enough people to get the jobs done.
Usually we can have a cook out, watch a game, mark the changing of the seasons and maybe voice a few profound quotes — as has been done in this space in the past — like “No work is insignificant” (Martin Luther King Jr.), “Without labor, nothing prospers” (Sophocles), “The end of labor is to gain leisure” (Aristotle), or “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it” (Ralph Waldo Emerson). Then we go back to work.
But the pandemic has cast new light on the old holiday. It’s still about the American laborers in their many forms, but it’s also about the labor they do and the tremendous value it brings to individuals and to the entire country every day.
We celebrate the laborers, the fruits of their labors, and the need for their labor.
— Times Leader