Issue of the week: The state of American labor

Can we quit glorifying “labor” already? said Kevin D. Williamson in NationalReview.com. Every year, we take off the first Monday in September, fire up the grill, and put on some hot dogs in a “crypto-communist” celebration of the working class. We do so despite the obvious fact “that labor is no longer a class—it’s a racket.” Don’t fall for the Democrats’ tired Labor Day speeches dripping with false pathos. “The main problem of the poor in the United States is not that they are worked too hard but that they do not work at all.” The Republicans should grasp this holiday as an occasion to talk about government-promoted unemployment and union excesses. “Patriotic bunting is no substitute for an agenda.”

Labor Day “wasn’t always about the hot dogs,” said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. It was a show of respect for workers, and it’s amazing how conservatives have flipped the script. They fetishize corporations and small businesses, yet ignore the plight of ordinary Americans who are paid lousy wages or laid off to pad profits, disdaining them as “‘takers’ rather than ‘makers.’” Many of these so-called takers work hard trying to make ends meet; if they need some help from the government, the past few decades of soaring economic inequality almost certainly have something to do with it. We have to face the fact that many Americans these days “find that no matter how hard they work, they can’t afford the basics of a middle-class existence.”

They “can’t be too picky,” either, said Robert J. Samuelson in The Washington Post. “Employers have the upper hand” in today’s economy, and “the advantage shows few signs of ending.” Unemployment is shrinking, but slowly, and wage growth remains sluggish at best. Union protections and private pensions are vanishing, though at least “the public safety net (unemployment insurance, Social Security, anti-poverty programs, anti-discrimination laws) remains.” Career jobs are a thing of the past, meaning that only the most talented, competitive, and entrepreneurial employees excel. History shows that workers get higher wages in periods of strong growth and tight markets. “On Labor Day 2013, this prospect is nowhere in sight.”

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Wages aren’t the main problem, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. Work, after all, isn’t just about collecting a paycheck. It “gives us purpose, stability, integration, shared mission. And so to be unable to work—unable to find or hold a job—is a kind of catastrophe for a human being.” In the United States, 11.5 million people are currently experiencing that catastrophe—not counting those who are under-employed or have stopped looking for work altogether. They are so tragically numerous because we lack politicians “who can help jobs happen, who can advance and support the kind of national policies that encourage American genius.” A zest for innovation still lurks in the American character, but we need a political leader who can stoke it back to life—“someone with real passion about the idea of new businesses, new inventions, growth, productivity, breakthroughs, and jobs, jobs, jobs.”