Labor Day

Today is Labor Day, our great national holiday, a day set aside for the American worker, a day to celebrate the ordinary citizen, the men and women whose blood, sweat and tears sustain this country.

Today is meant to be a day of rest, a day of repose, a day of respite; today is the day to honor laborers, it is a day to honor work, a day for convivium and victuals.

This year the labor market is stagnant, our work-force participation remains stuck; workers are seeing shrinking against inflation, which is high and the banks are taking their cut in the form of higher interest rates, tight energy supplies are allowing the producers to gouge…they are taking in record profits and the worker is paying price.

When it comes to real-wages the American worker has seen this cycle before: two steps forward and one step back, or one step forward and two steps back.  

I spent most of my life working in the hospitality sector. Now I am employed by a food distribution company. I am in purchasing, my vendors are gourmet producers and importers, a lifetime of working in restaurants has given me the knowledge to manage these portfolios.

I have been working for this company for over four years, it is the longest job I have ever held, and my first foray into the corporate sector…there are benefits, they have HR.

I have found it strange to find myself in this role, in this place so late in life which causes me to reflect on the scramble I am engaged in to pad a retirement account with savings, while having such little time remaining in my working life!

The American worker needs more guarantees than an annual holiday in their name. We need a fundamental reorganization of the social-safety net; we need national healthcare, a single-payer-system, health benefits should be guaranteed by the state, not negotiated through labor contracts that ultimately deflate the worker’s actual wage.

These costs should be removed from the balance sheet of the employers, so that the costs of labor are clear and predictable and not entangled with the machinations of pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, insurance providers and phony non-profits like hospitals.

We need education reforms: we need to return the tools of critical thinking and logic to the classroom; we need to teach language arts and arithmetic, music, culture and civics should be in the public-school curriculum; we need industrial arts and mechanics.

We need to support the American citizen in order to enable them to reach their greatest potential, we need this so that we may all get there together, because the more the worker succeeds, the more America prospers.

We need housing reform, and we need it now; we need affordable housing for every family, and the security of knowing that our fellow citizens: our sisters and brothers, our daughters and sons, our mothers and fathers are not living in the street.

The American worker needs these things, and the investor class needs to give it up; if American industries are unwilling to reinvest in their workforce, facilities and equipment, then we should take their profits from them in the form of higher taxation...this is the way it is, and this is the way it has always been.

Do it yourself, or we’ll do it for you…Happy Labor Day!