It is a paradox that Labor Day is devoted to fun and idleness because, after all, it is the one-day in the year when we are supposed to celebrate work. In particular we should be honoring the history of the Trade Union Movement that protected workers and gave them a political voice.
Work is not popular any more. I mean what my father would have called “real work,” where you get your hands dirty, use your muscles, and maybe even sweat a bit. Most young people wisely prefer an office job, where the most challenging physical task of the day is switching on the computer. There is plenty of strenuous physical work to be done, but there's almost no connection between the value of that work and the rewards for doing it. We need plumbers much more often and more urgently than we need pop musicians or politicians, but guess who stands higher on the pay scale.
A reminder of this unwelcome fact came in the mail the other day. We get a lot of strange catalogs. I regularly get one for industrial packaging, for example, and another for heavy lifting machinery, although I don’t have much use for industrial packaging or heavy lifting machinery. The catalog that came just in time for Labor Day was for tools, so I looked through it. I already have several tools – screwdrivers, hammers and so on – and I could always use more.
But these were professional tools for big jobs: massive generators, super-sized pressure washers, high-capacity pumps, hydraulic power packs, air compressors, high-powered bench tools and, yes, heavy lifting machinery – four hundred and ninety-six pages of equipment designed for serious work. If there’s anything calculated to give a man a feeling of inferiority it’s a catalog like this. I once talked to the owner of a tool rental company who told me that suburban men often like to test their masculinity by renting out tools they can’t handle, like chain saws or pneumatic drills, and have to be dissuaded for insurance reasons. He dissuaded me from renting a digging machine that I certainly didn’t know how to handle.
Under all the semi-mystical claptrap about computers and virtual reality is the fact that we live in a physical world, a built world, and somebody had to build it. The most exquisitely sensitive poets need a solid roof over their heads, but few of them would know how to construct one, any more than I do.
Studs Terkel, in his wonderful book of interviews called Working, talked to many real workers. One said, in a proud phrase that stuck in my mind, “We built the pyramids” – meaning that workers just like him built the pyramids, and everything else.
We owe a lot to workers who really work, often with hard-to-learn skills and hard-won experience. Without them we paperwork professionals might have to work ourselves, which scarcely bears thinking about. At the very least we should spare a thought on Labor Day for the men and women who really did build the house we’re sitting in, the power lines that run our computers, the barbecue grill, the bridges we cross on the way to visit the family, the swimming pool and, yes, everything.
Copyright: David Bouchier
