Redtree Times

Lewis Hine- Powerhouse Mechanic (1920)

Labor Day is about honoring the workers who built this nation, those who brought us this world that would no doubt seem inconceivable to people just a few generations removed from us. We are the future that was once only imagined by our forbearers.

This future we now inhabit is better in so many ways and lacking in others from earlier futures. It is inevitable that there are tradeoffs, a price to be paid for any type of gain or progress. Some of us, a select few, revel and prosper in this future while some of us decry all that has been sacrificed in order to get to this point.

We find ourselves wondering if the coming future will still need the common person, the worker who wants only to have the opportunity and freedom to live a comfortable life for their family.

What sort of future will we build for coming generations?

We have always been sold a future that will be better, one that comes with greater comforts, one which comes with little sacrifice or effort on our part. The promise of the good life. Nothing but leisure and prosperity. All we have to do is go along for the ride and leave up to the experts.

That has always been the promise of the industrialists. When the industrialists were promising the moon, the labor movement made its own promises to the workers. Better pay. Benefits like health insurance and pensions for retirement. Safer and sanitary working conditions. Protection from the abuses of the employers and so on.

The labor movement fulfilled its promises. The workplace of the not-so-distant past was one that once offered wages barely sufficient to live on, working conditions that were dangerous and unhealthy, few if any benefits, no holiday or overtime pay, and no protection from employers who wished to dismiss workers for any reason. The labor movement delivered higher negotiated wages and benefits as well as a stable and safe work environment.

The realized promise of labor built the present future.

Of course, the industrialists and the technocrats of today are once again promising their version of the next future. All comfort and ease. Prosperity and nonstop leisure for all.

If only…

Unfortunately, though the wealth and prosperity enjoyed by the industrialists in the past was enormous, it was never enough.  They craved more, if not everything. They had learned lessons and taken notes from their past defeats and concessions to the workers. They slowly set out to erode the strength and power of the unions. They bought even more political power and created campaigns that set the workers against the very unions that had brought them the relative comfort they enjoyed.

As the unions’ power eroded, the workers conceded more and more to their employers. Wages couldn’t keep up with the cost of living. Benefits were cut then cut some more. More and more workers were replaced by new technologies. The political power bought by the bosses allowed them to weaken the protections for the workers.

And all while they still promised the worker a bright and rosy vision of the future.

Just trust and leave the details to them. Go with the flow.

I don’t believe in the future they promise. I don’t think it will come about in the manner in which they desire.

The future will be built on struggle and won’t come easily. Any future worth living must come through great efforts. Suffering and sacrifice. Blood, sweat, and tears.

And that is the province of workers.

Ultimately, they will make the future.

Happy Labor Day.

Not sure if this coherent. Not what I intended when I first sat down this morning. I had the Wendell Berry passage on file, and it spoke to me just then. We have been sold a future so bright and easy that it is, indeed, cultish. A cult that idolizes the wealthy and trusts that the future they promise will be good for them and everyone else without them having to dirty their hands or put down their phones.

Maybe that is cynical and untrusting. Maybe. But trust is betrayed becomes cynicism.

I don’t even know what I just wrote. Time to get the hell out of Dodge.

Here’s a favorite song from Tracy Chapman, Talkin’ Bout a Revolution.

Like the future, make of it what you will…