Todayborday is Labor Day

Yeah, I know, Labor Day's not until Monday. But, you see, I've been tagged. Tasked by PSoTD to discuss what Labor Day means to me as a holiday.

My first thought is...not much. I work retail and have for the bulk of my employed life. If you work in a store, you don't get Labor Day off. In fact, it's usually twice as crowded with doofuses in white shorts and loud Hawaiian shirts fumbling with your stock, hauling around their screaming, grab-happy children and asking questions so stupid, you'd think they were auditioning for the Teen Jeopardy Tournament. So I typically wind up doing more work on Labor Day than I would otherwise, making it not just an empty, meaningless holiday but actually kind of a cruel, federal governmentally-sanctioned joke at my expense.

The whole enterprise just reflects our bullshit society, how only one segment of the population is deemed worthy of attention and respect. If you work in some office as a cubicle jockey, if you're an executive or middle-management type, there's this whole day set aside to commemorate your efforts. "Oh my word, you've been filing? Extensive data entry as part of an ongoing reorganizational project? You had to take an extended lunch meeting at Dorcia and now you don't have time to work out before getting back to the office for your afternoon conference call with Leo in New York? OH MY GOD YOU'VE GOT CARPAL TUNNEL SYNDROME? You need a legal, annual holiday so you can watch more televised athletics!"

But a huge segment of the population - people who also work hard and frequently aren't paid as well for the work that they do - don't ever get Labor Day off. You think all the firemen get to hang out at home with their families and have barbecues? Of course not. Because what if one of those office drone schmucks or mail carriers lights herself on fire during her family barbecue? Someone's got to go put her out, right?

Ditto the cops, the people who work in stores or entertainment venues, bus drivers, flight attendants, soldiers, Hewlitt-Packard's Bangalore Customer Service and Relations call center staff...They don't get shit. When's our holiday? We could call it "WE'RE CLOSED Day." Or, int he case of city employees, "SAVE YOUR OWN STUPID LIFE Day."

I mean, here's the reality: For most Americans, there's only one real holiday, and it comes twice a month...It's called fucking payday, and if they really wanted to "honor the workers," they'd give us another one of those once a year come September. Yeah, but you're right, better to give executives who already get three weeks a year paid vacation on top of company-sponsored conferences and retreats and extra day to hang out with the fam...They've earned it!

I'm all about the spirit in which Labor Day was founded. It's hard to even believe at this point in our history that organized labor and unions were ever respected organizations, considering the smear job corporatists have been running against them for my entire lifetime.

Seriously, since I was a child, the concepts of labor and organized crime have been entirely conflated in my head. Unions are, by definition, corrupt sub-Mafia organizations, so obviously they should be done away with completely. That's the attitude now. Ask someone under the age of...hell, probably 40, about unions and all they'll come up with is "Jimmy Hoffa" and "lazy Teamsters." Rich Americans have convinced everybody else that they deserve to be poor and they deserve to be downtrodden and that to unify and fight back is a pointless, futile pursuit. The only hope is to lie and cheat your way to the upper eschalon so you can begin shitting on the little guy. And the message has stuck cause rich white guys have a kickass PR Department.

And that's why Labor Day itself has become a cruel charade. It no longer exists to "honor the workers" or to commemorate any great gains made by the working class. It's just another hollow yearly summer ritual - the last insufferable pool party before the insufferable kids return to their prisons reformatories conformism factories schools for another round of consumerist brainwashing.