Today is Labor Day, 2021.
Steel worker in Denver Colorado working on parts for the hull of a ship, 1942. I recently had a jury in Denver in which not one single person had a blue collar job.
I'll be working.
That shouldn't be too surprising, as I'm a "professional", which means that I have hours and whatnot that are outside of the hourly concerns that many employees have. But my first observation is that.
Labor Day in the no holiday era.
It's a holiday, but a lot of people will be working.
That shouldn't be the case.
For that reason, I'm going to forego going to any stores that are open. Indeed, my wife tries to do that on Sundays as well, and while I'm not as good as her about that, I agree with her.
An overseas view and the American economy
The second thing I'm going to do here is to link in the British Adam Smith's Institutes blog entry on Labor Day. It's interesting how this British institute sees the American holiday
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LABOR DAY
The Adam Smith Institute is vigorously pro free market, so perhaps its view isn't too surprising. It's notable as it takes a really cheery view of the American economy at a time at which Americans have been doubting it pretty rigorously, with the bizarre emergence of socialist thought gaining some currency, supposedly, in the country.
I don't think that the "socialist" who self declare as that really grasp what socialism is, and are actually social democrats, but that's another topic. The bigger topic is that lots of Americans don't feel that the economy works very well for them anymore.
One thing Adam Smith couldn't have foreseen is an economy that was controlled by corporations to the extent ours was. Smith was a free marketer, but that was mostly a free market economy that was more like that which distributist imagine, rather than capitalists. Smith probably didn't magine a world in which a lot of people from middle class backgrounds would find themselves working at Wall Mart, rather than owning stores of their own.
The disappearance of the blue collar holiday
It wasn't all that long ago that this day still had a very blue collar tinge to it. Even when I was first practicing law the labor unions had a picnic on this day in City Park, and this region of the country has never been keen on unions.
Maybe they still do elsewhere, but labor in the US has taken a pounding by the capitalist exportation of manufacturing overseas, and the good blue collar jobs with it.
Probably only President Obama was really honest about this, in terms of a national leader. He flatly noted that the jobs had gone and weren't coming back, taking the capitalist position that this was okay as new jobs came in their wake. That's the capitalist theory. We sent jobs overseas we no longer wanted and got back great new high tech ones we did.
Except that's a view that's only really easy to hold if you are at the top of the economic ladder. Most people aren't nearly as rah rah about that sort of evolution of work, as most people don't really want to work in a cubicle. Office Space was a popular movie for a reason.
Indeed, an entire category of nostalgia is based simply on the idea of economically having your own. Your own little store. Your own farm. Yours. Nobody is going to get rich doing that, but you'd have your own.
Money is supposed to be the solution to that, and I've been hearing a lot about that recently. You are supposed to enjoy this evolution, and move up into it, as there will be more money.
But then what?
Well, that's the thing. You are supposed to make more money as you'll have more money. And you'll like that as you'll have more money.
American money is just weird paper backed by nothing whatsoever, of course. But in the spirit of the times, that's supposed to "bring you joy".
Gen X and Gen Y
But apparently it doesn't.
Indeed, as we've already noted here, Gen X and Gen Y, and even the Gap Generation, have many members who don't see it that way. They'd like to have a life, live where they want, have their friends, families, dogs and cats, and just, well, be.
And lots of them aren't going back to work post COVID at all.
Sooner or later they'll have to. And that will be pretty soon. But the voting with their feet they're goind right now says a lot about how the economy, and the labor it entails, is viewed right now.
9/4/21
