You’ll often hear people of a certain age saying, “Young people today don’t take work seriously.” Well, every older generation has been saying that for the last couple of centuries. We aren’t born with the work-friendly mindset but have to develop it over the years.
My heroes are people who get the work done. Soldiers come to mind. So do nurses, who don’t get as much attention as doctors but save a lot of lives. And of course parents do a lot of work as a matter of course.
I haven’t done much work in my life. True, earning a Ph.D. involved a certain amount of work, but it didn’t seem like such because I’d wanted to do it. (Real work is the stuff you got stuck with doing!) I survive because of other people’s work, not just my parents but everyone who works enough to pay the taxes that finance the disability support I receive. I’m not proud of it.
So this weekend is Labour Day. I think back to the 19th century, when radical socialists made May Day a time for the working class to assert themselves. Around the turn of the century they created Labour Day as an alternative day for workers, shorn of leftist politics. I’m glad that back then the ruling elite was sufficiently afraid of the power of workers that they had to palliate them through such devices. In the last century, especially in North America, many in the working class have stopped identifying as such and want to see themselves as middle-class, and it’s made them easier for conservatives to manipulate. (It shows in their hatred of “welfare bums.”)
In recent decades, the “establishment” has stopped fearing the workers and it shows in the increasingly shameless exploitation of the neoliberal era. (Thank you, Ronald Reagan.) I want them to feel that fear again. May workers come together and return to general strikes and syndicalism! “Workers of the world unite.”
No comments:
Post a Comment