How Should we Celebrate Labor Day?

Samuel Gompers once said, "All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts, and battles and man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day ... is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation."

So what should we do on Labor Day, besides taking time out from shopping and golfing and watching the ball games and going to the beach to watch a parade in honor the folks who brought us the weekend? (The first Labor Day Parade was organized by the New York City Central Labor Union in 1882).

Should we fester in our resentments about the one-sided class war that has elevated the average CEO's pay to 411 times the average worker or grouse about how the minimum wage would be $22.61 per hour if it had risen at the same rate as CEO pay since 1990?

Or should we try to figure out what to do about it besides organizing a quixotic campaign to repeal Taft-Hartley and other structural impediments to organizing that have shrunk unions to about 11 percent of the workforce?

Perhaps the least we can do is read a little bit about the history of labor from Haymarket, to Detroit in the 1930s, to Hormel, Decatur, the prison-industrial complex, the Battle of Seattle, Wal-Mart, etc.

Or maybe we should stop and think about how spiritually sick we workaholic Americans are.

I mean, have you ever asked yourself how many "successful" people you know who are genuinely happy, except perhaps in the moments of ecstasy that their addictions and gluttony bring?

Ever known a super-ambitious careerist who was content? The kids of the rich might be fairly content people (but they didn't have to work for it), and there are many content professionals who manage to carve out a decent living while doing what they like, even in the service to others. But I wonder how many super-rich people are truly happy.

As a kid I had a friend whose father owned one of the biggest private manufacturing firms in Chicago. I remember the first time I met him he was throwing a tantrum about the Teamsters. Didn't seem that happy to me. Then I noticed that there was a lock on their refrigerator. When his kids defied his orders not to eat between meals he applied the same tactics he used at work -- locked them out of the refrigerator!

Another thought: We all have the union movement to thank for many things including weekends, the 8 hour workday, overtime pay, the fact that scaffolds don't fall on our head as we're walking down the sidewalk, etc.

But what about challenging the work ethic itself, especially since for so many people the economy is not really doing much good?

After all, what's the whole point of work? To grow the economy? Why is a bigger GNP so important when we know that "trickle-down" economics is a farce and that the blind devotion to GNP on a limited planet has meant a system of planning that ignores things like global warming -- i.e. is practically suicidal. And who says the GNP is the best measure of a successful economy when it goes up everytime there's a car crash?

So what's the point? Whatever happened to the Right to Be Lazy? Isn't mindless growth (instead of real intelligent design - you know like electric cars) the reason why we are trying to control Iraq's oil and why we're driving the climate over the cliff of irreversibility? Doesn't that make you think that working as a cog in today's economic machinery is, well, kind of futile, especially for people who find themselves stuck making weapons or using them in a war that makes no sense?

The great philosopher George Carlin once said, "We like war, because we're good at it. ... And it's a good thing we are -- we're not very good at anything else anymore. Can't build a decent car, can't make a TV or a VCR worth a fuck. Got no steel industry left. Can't educate our young people. Can't provide health care to old people. But we can bomb the shit out of your country all right. Especially if your country is full of brown people. That's our new job in the world."

In an economy of death, why do we call a group protest against the job a "sick out" when it seems like the healthiest thing we can do? Isn't it one of the best inventions that organized labor has given us in the last few years?

Come to think of it, why limit our "holidays" to one day?

Have you ever noticed how many poor people (at least those not suffering from famine, war and pestilence) are much happier than the rich? Maybe it's because they're not trying to control things they can't control, like other people, or make war to control other people's resources and justify it with some twisted rationale that they in turn force the rest of us to adopt.

A man in India once told me: "We have everything you don't have, because we have nothing that you have."

Maybe some poor people are happier because they don't wear something around their neck that cuts off the circulation to their brains for 40 hours a week.