The Day After Labor
” To all our American readers, Happy Labor Day! And to all our Canadian readers, Happy Labour Day! That’s what the day used to be about: putting the “u” in Labor. You can’t spell labour without you, and without you and your labour this planet would be a primitive state of nature, red in tooth and claw. Consider the words of Peter J McGuire, General Secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, proposing the very first Labor Day a mere century-and-a-third ago. The new day would be an occasion, he said, to honor those “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold”.
What a crazy! All the grandeur we behold comes from man and his work? What fossil fuel is he inhaling? Today, rude nature is the state we aspire to, and you can’t even delve and carve a Keystone pipeline underneath it, out of sight. Labor itself, in the sense Mr McGuire used the term, is morally dubious among our elites, and, down at the other end, simply unknown. A statistic from my book After America, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore and which help support my campaign against Nobel fraud Michael Mann’s rude nature, into which I hope to be carving a hearty “up yours”…
Whoops, sorry. Where was I? Ah, yes. A quote from After America:
One fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no adult works. Just under 900,000 people have been off sick for over a decade, claiming “sick benefits”, week in, week out for ten years and counting.
By 2012, one tenth of the adult population had done not a day’s work since Tony Blair took office on May 1st 1997 – a decade and a half earlier. In such households, the weekday ritual of rising, dressing, and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. In Ferguson, Missouri, the “conversation”, as they say on MSNBC, is between the dependent class and the governing class that ministers to them and keeps them in line. If you’re a convenience store owner, your low-skilled service jobs are the only labor on offer, and, for your pains, you get burned and looted by the dependent class while your 911 calls go unanswered by the governing class, both of which you fund.
Now there’s a glimpse of the world to come, for those who wish to ponder it. Of course, nothing dates quicker than the future, as I suggested in this Labour Day column from Canada’s National Post twelve years ago:
This Labour Day, I thought about the working class, the masses.
No, honestly, I did. Okay, I was on the beach, but the folks around me lying on the sand had jobs they’ll be getting back to this morning. They worked. They would be classed as workers. But they’re not an homogeneous “working class”, they’re not conscripts in Karl Marx’s “masses”. The transformation of Labor Day, from a celebration of workers’ solidarity to a cook-out, is the perfect précis of the history of Anglo-American capitalism. “
As usual , read it all
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