I Appreciate Those Who Labor

It is Labor Day, 2011, a holiday I did not particularly care for when I was a child because it’s passing meant I had to go back to school! Some of that feeling continued into my later adult years when I became a high school English teacher. Labor Day still was associated with going back to school after an all too short summer.

It was my native Canada that supplied the inspiration for Labor Day in the United States. Peter McGuire of the American Federation of Labor got the idea of celebrating this day while attending a labor festival in Toronto, Ontario in May of 1882. On September 5 of that same year, the first Labor Day celebration was held in New York City. In 1887, Oregon was the first state to turn the day into a state holiday. Twenty-nine other states followed Oregon’s example. In 1894, a strike witnessed the deaths of several laborers in conflicts with the military and U. S. marshals. When the strike was settled, President Grover Cleveland sought reconciliation with the labor movement. A bill was introduced in Congress, passed unanimously and signed by the President establishing the first Monday in September as Labor Day, a federal holiday in all fifty states and the District of Columbia.

Now in my eighth decade of life, I can say I have spent my whole life avoiding hard physical labor. I have always tried to use my brains instead of my brawn, even though I am not unusually endowed with either. In the jobs I chose while working my way through college and seminary, in my ministry choices of pastor, high school teacher, and now writer and editor, I exercise the muscles between my ears far more than those in my arms, legs and back. Because of this I have sometimes taken an unsympathetic view of those who do use those muscles to earn a day’s pay. I have been wrong in this.

American workers provide the muscle that makes architectural drawings turn into real brick and steal buildings and engineering specs into real automobiles. They provide the physical infrastructure needed to transmit ideas and words instantly around the world. They build and put satellites in space. They build and maintain the equipment doctors use to treat patients. It is their hard work that brings to reality the dreams and ideas of others.

I salute the workers around the world today. I appreciate your efforts, without which I could not do the things I do. It is sad that we live in a very difficult time for workers, a time when jobs are scarce and workers and their families are hurting. I do not pretend to understand all the reasons why this is happening now here in America and in other parts of the world, and I do not know what the solution is. However, it is my prayer that the dreamers, designers and thinkers of the world soon again will be hiring workers to turn those dreams, designs and thoughts into the real world products we all need and depend on. Without workers who have the skills to build and create in the physical world, all the people who have the ideas and thoughts are just idle dreamers.