Labor Day And The Lost Respect For What Has Made America Great

Labor Day may be a sop to the unions and the progressive pressure groups that are loosely defined as "labor," but I prefer to see it as a recognition of the incredible tradition of labor that took America from a small, mostly agrarian nation to a world-leader in 150 years. Yes, we had coal and oil and timber and iron and water power, but we had visionaries who could take those inputs and create something far bigger. Samuel Slater, Eli Whitney, Oliver Evans, Robert Fulton, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and hundreds of other designers and engineers and dreamers created a manufacturing colossus, all with the help of the brightest and most hardworking labor force in the history of the world.

It was their brawn and brains that drove America to such great heights, and the honor of sometimes backbreaking work in the steel mills and coal mines and railroads and factories of America is something that we should never diminish.

Yet now we mock it!

Digging ditches as a teenager? Never! Bagging groceries, sweeping the shop floor, lugging parts from one bench to another, fetching tools, lubricating great machines? That's beneath us!

But that is the crucible from which the master machinist emerged. That is the classroom where the heavy equipment operator, who looks like he was born in the cab of his crane, learned his craft. That is where the welder who built the great war machines that saved the world learned how to do his magic. That is where the machine-tool operator who eyeballs a ten-thousandth cut learned his wizardry.

But we have spent generations denigrating that labor, and we are left with a nation that sees "labor" as a dirty word. Never mind that those laborers are responsible for the unimaginable wealth of America, and that without them we would rapidly fall back into a muddle of third world poverty and a decaying country that simply cannot be repaired.

Our youth dreams of web design and fancy offices and massage stations at work and never ever getting their hands dirty.

Change a tire? Call someone!

But one day that call will go unanswered...

posted by CBD at 12:00 PM

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