09.01.13

The Anti-Labor Labor Day thing

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 8:55 am by George Smith

From the 27th , here:

Labor Day, as defined at the DoL: “The first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.???

I look forward to the expostulations and op-eds we get this time of year: Anti-labor and anti-union essays, bits on right-to-work-for-less, tributes to the biggest corporations for their innovation in trimming the workforce & making work not pay …

From one of TIME’s six figure explainers, a backhanded stealth piece that successfully delivers the implication that being hard on labor makes our country better, more successful:

Will you be barbecuing this Labor Day, or slaving away at the office? According to new survey data from Bloomberg BNA and Beyond.com, many Americans will have the somewhat ironic pleasure of laboring on the day that’s meant to commemorate the “social and economic achievements of the American worker.???

Bloomberg BNA data shows that 39 percent of employers will keep operations open …

So do we benefit at all from working so much more than our developed peers …?

If employers are required to give a worker a lot of time off, that worker is going to produce less. All else equal, this will make the worker less valuable to an employer, and lower his pay. In this time of over-indebtedness, both among citizens and the government, it hardly makes sense to enact restrictions on how much people are allowed to work, as it’s only through work that we’ll lower these debts …

Furthermore, apart from a few small outlying countries, American workers are the most productive in the world. Since that’s the case, we must be doing something right. Many economists believe our relative productivity is a product of having fewer restrictions on businesses, like requiring paid time off.

The debate over paid time off is actually quite similar to that over the minimum wage. After all, vacation time is just another form of compensation. Logically, requiring employers to give vacation time is going to decrease pay, and increase unemployment on the margin.

You can tell you’re dealing with the common journalist/asshole with the first sentence and the phrase: “slaving away at the office.”

Most people working over the weekend are not in the office.

They’re at Wal Mart, McDonald’s and retail, all in the rapidly expanding poverty-wage end of the economy.

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This, from a piece published in a newspaper in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is — ahem — timely:

[23 million Americans] are either out of work or markedly underemployed, nearly 50 million are on food stamps, a fourth of our children are living below the poverty level, millions of jobs having been shipped off to nations with lower labor costs, and our elected leaders have been doing very little to effectively support the labor side of America’s wealth-creating equation.

The question we really ought to be asking is: Why isn’t this a day of national mourning instead of a celebration? After all, what do most workers, or those who want to work, really have to celebrate?

Since the majority of Americans can no longer honestly celebrate labor during this holiday, perhaps we ought to more properly rename it Shopper’s Day, Crony Capitalism Day or the One Percent Labor Beneficiary Day.

“Slaving away at the office.” — TIME

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