Americans work pretty hard. A full time work week for a typical American is now roughly 47 hours.While the entire point of Labor Day is to celebrate the contributions that these workers make every day, a lot of those people don’t actually get to enjoy the day off. About 30 million people — or 10 percent of the population — still have to work.
For white-collar workers, Labor Day weekend is a chance to unwind, hit the beach or party. For blue-collar employees and anyone working the front end, the story is a bit different. Their Labor Day often consists of cleaning up after the people that do get to celebrate.
Who are these people? They’re the bartenders serving people who’ve been there since eight in the morning, policemen who keep the streets safe when those people get going, and the nurses and doctors who take over when that fails.
There are the pharmacists, because grandma still needs her heart meds, the air traffic controllers working like madmen to keep the planes taking off, and everyone in retail.
They’re taxi drivers and TSA agents, the pizza delivery boy and the girl selling souvenir toys, and there’s Pete… Who knows what would happen if Pete stopped making panini?
For people working in customer service, utilities and critical services, Labor Day brings more trouble than it does relief. Work gets a lot harder when the insatiable horde of holiday goers blazes through.
It’s probably impossible to have a holiday where every person gets the day off, but it’s definitely possible to rethink the way we view work-life balance in America.
Labor Day shouldn’t be seen as merely a one day reprieve from a terrible work life. It’s meant to be a reminder to strive for a better work culture in general. Considering it’s a holiday created in recognition of the American Labor Movement, it seems to have lost that purpose. There’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to workers’ rights in America, whether that be maternity or paternity leave, the right to leave work at the office or workplace, or any of the other outdated social systems we rely on. If anything, in a year when presidential candidates have proposed an increase to the minimum wage, Labor Day must be looked at as a real chance to reflect on what changes can and should be made.
There shouldn’t be the need to indulge a society’s pent up emotions with a single holiday. Ideally, America would be a place where people have the ability to disconnect and relax on a more regular basis. That’s something Labor Day should stand for, and it’s something to strive for.
At the same time, it is a day to celebrate; don’t forget to be respectful and safe in doing so. Labor Day is the fifth deadliest holiday when it comes to drunk driving and general stupidity. Messes are created that someone must inevitably clean up. It’s important that people who do get to enjoy the holiday are responsible and clean up after themselves, if only to make the lives of those who can’t celebrate a bit easier.
letters@chronicle.utah.edu
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