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 the day to honor laborers, it is a day to honor work. Today is meant to be a day of rest, a day of repose and respite.

 This year as with last year we have record-low unemployment, our work-force participation at an all-time high. Workers are seeing increases in wages, and so manufacturers are gouging, inflation is high, and the banks are taking their cut in the form of higher interest rates.

 When it comes to their 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 customer service, sales-support, my clients are mostly restaurants to whom we sell gourmet food; a lifetime of working in restaurants has given me the product knowledge to manage our catalog of goods.

 I work mid-shift, and partly from home. It is the first regular job I have ever had, my first foray in a normal corporate environment, there are benefits and there is HR.

 I have found it strange to find myself in this role, in this place…so late in life.

 Understand this!

 The American worker needs more guarantees than 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 and culture and civics 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, so that we may all get there together; 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 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 they are unwilling to reinvest in their workforce, facilities and equipment, ten we should take their profits from them in the form of higher taxation.

 Happy Labor Day!