LABOR DAY

Labor is defined in Webster’s Dictionary as, “work done for wages, as opposed to work done for profit.” That’s the Jeopardy answer. This day on which we honor those who work for wages grew out of the efforts of the 19th century labor movement to achieve an eight hour work day, despite bitter and often lethal opposition from industrialists. Though they were vilified and beaten up, those laborers stuck to their guns and eventually achieved their goals. They fought and died to establish the principle that it isn’t the people’s job to serve the economy, it is the economy’s job to serve the people.

Peg and I went to the movies on this steamy Labor Day. We saw, “2 Days In Pairs,” a close second for the worst picture of the year (1st place goes to “Mr. Bean’s Holiday”). On the way out, though we had already validated our parking ticket, we had to stop at a machine and have it validated a second time. The benefit of having a machine instead of a person – there are similar machines at Century City and the Beverly Connection and I’m sure there will be more soon - is that you don’t have to pay it a salary, so operating expenses go down and profits go up. The cost is that a person loses his job and customers have to spend another fifteen minutes standing in line, not to mention the bottleneck in the parking lot due to the unmanned, automated exit gate. But the owner doesn’t care, because he’s not there and his profit margin is higher.

I'm not saying this is a conspiracy, but it is a trend. Remember when gas stations featured friendly, compitent, polite men who were only too happy to fill 'er up and check the oil? Remember when the "friendly skies" were actually filled with friendly people who treated passengers with respect, when flights were mostly on time and airlines didn't intentionally overbook? Step by step they are chipping away at the quality of our lives in order to raise their profits. No one step is ever big enough to cause much of a stir, but taken all together, what they add up to is no longer the country we were brought up to believe in.

Politicians came out en masse today, talking about the sanctity of working Americans and how much they support them. Such bullshit. Running a campaign today costs tens of millions of dollars, and the only place to get that kind of money is from corporations, and the only way to get it is to sell your soul, one campaign contribution at a time. Tell me how honest you are after we get publicly funded elections, then we’ll talk.

I offer a toast – to everyone who works for wages.

a foot on either side