In Many Ways, This Holiday Just Doesn’t Work
Labor Day is my kind of holiday, mainly because you don’t have to work at it.
There are no decorations, no elaborate meals, and, most of all, no gifts. Who shops for Labor Day? Only in families slavishly dedicated to holidays would there be any attempt to exchange Labor Day gifts, and even then expressions of gratitude would be awfully strained: “Aw honey! A 12-pound sledgehammer! I can do some damage with a sledgehammer like this! Nicest sledgehammer a girl could want!”
Labor Day is the most oxymoronic of our holidays. On Valentine’s Day, we send valentines. On Thanksgiving, we give thanks. On Labor Day, we bolt from labor as fast as we can--ideally, on the Thursday night before the Friday before the weekend before Labor Day--and do everything we can in the next few days to blast work from our consciousness.
On Labor Day, we play volleyball, hit the beach, parboil in traffic, soak in beer, argue, fix flats, go to the movies, eat barbecued chicken, watch TV and slump in patio chairs with our mouths open and our eyes half shut, inert as horned toads.
If we really respected work, I suppose we’d celebrate Labor Day by doing more of it. We’d work an extra shift, pound out a few extra memos, add another prong onto the Multi-Pronged Strategic Implementation Master Plan free of charge, just for the joy of it.
But, for some reason, we don’t.
Instead, we pine for the enlightenment of the Europeans, to whom summer vacations of less than a month are nothing short of barbaric. We wonder why we feel tired all the time. When we hear on the news that parents spend 14% less time with their kids than they did in 1969, we nod, wearily.
Oddly, the idea of Labor Day at its inception a century ago was to honor the idea of labor. It was about the virtue of the workers “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold,” as one early Labor Day orator so enthusiastically put it. It wasn’t about packing whining kids into a fetid minivan and swimming against a steel tide to get out of town.
Congress made Labor Day a national holiday in 1894. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, it was the brainchild of either Peter J. McGuire, of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, or Matthew Maguire, of the International Assn. of Machinists.
So was it McGuire? Or was it Maguire?
Labor Day scholars just don’t know. And I can accept that, because it probably would take an awful lot of work to find out.
At one time in this country, Labor Day was a big deal. Every town of any size had a Labor Day parade. Politicians rolled out windy tributes to the Working Man. Hands were shaken, backs slapped, cigars smoked. Maybe the plumber and the carpenter and the bricklayer felt a surge of appreciation from their neighbors for the hard work they put in the rest of the year.
Today that’s more difficult. It’s easy to understand what a bricklayer does, but it’s impossible to understand what a Local Area Network (LAN) administrator does, unless you’re another Local Area Network (LAN) administrator. (They do something with computers. I’m not the person to ask.)
Each year, the state predicts those jobs that will grow the fastest. In their most recent projections for 50 occupations in Ventura County, officials were bullish on machinists, computer engineers and systems analysts--jobs one, two and three, respectively, through the year 2002. Welders bring up the rear at slot number 50.
Figures like that are not the best news for people like Ed Kraemer.
Business manager for the United Assn. of Plumbers, Pipefitters and Apprentices, Local 484, Kraemer worries about a thinning in the ranks of skilled construction workers. His union recruits at job sites and schools, but plumbing doesn’t have the drawing power of the computer industry, or aerospace before that.
“The overall job market is so good that people are doing things outside construction,” he lamented. “But we offer them a career.”
As for Labor Day, it’s become less of an event, Kraemer acknowledged.
Construction unions in Ventura County used to throw a big picnic on Labor Day, but now they hold off for a few weeks.
Too many people are out of town on Labor Day, Kraemer said.
Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. He can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
