Top 5 Reasons “Labor Day” isn’t for Laborers Anymore

http://www.juancole.com/2014/09/reasons-laborers-anymore.html

Top 5 Reasons “Labor Day” isn’t for Laborers Anymore
By Juan Cole | Sep. 1, 2014

Calling the bottom of a river a “bed” is a metaphor. Imagine the river restlessly sleeping on its muddy mattress. But when we’ve so internalized a metaphor that we forget it is a figure of speech, as with the phrase “river bed,” it is called a “dead metaphor.”

Labor Day is, alas, akin to a dead metaphor in contemporary America. There was a time when, as in 1936, the unionized auto workers could make effective demands from their employers, for higher wages and better working conditions. Workers no longer get better off in today’s USA. They are often summarily dismissed if they try to unionize. They are badly paid. Good jobs have been switched out for bad jobs. Tax policy has been manipulated by the wealthy and corporations, who have bought Congress and state legislatures, so as to ensure that the rich get richer, and richer and richer.

The US has one of the worst records on wealth and income inequality in the advanced industrialized world. This situation is bad for everyone. Rich people still only need one or two refrigerators. Many poor people can’t afford any. Having a small number of super-rich and a large number of poor means that refrigerator manufacturers can’t sell as many refrigerators as they could in a more equal society, which means that they can’t hire many workers, which reduces the number of jobs in the manufacturing sector.

So as we burn dead meat and play frisbee in a warming climate, we could stop to consider the lives of the laborers we are theoretically honoring: