It’s about us

Labor Day is not one of the most popular holidays. It isn’t commonly associated with parades (although, in our area, DeBruce holds one annually; see page 2C). The stores, of course, run sales on this holiday as they do on others, but there aren’t special decorations or foods associated with the day with which to entice consumers. Other than maybe “On the Waterfront,” it’s hard to come up with Labor Day-themed movies to show on television.

One reason for this lack of interest may be that most of us don’t really identify with the word “labor.” “Labor,” for many, means “union.” And with union enrollment having declined from 20.1 percent of the workforce in 1983 to 12 percent in 2006, for most of us that’s someone else.

But in a larger sense, labor is work, something most of us have to do to survive. Except for those of us who are retired or live off inherited wealth, we are almost all laborers, or members of a household supported by a laborer.

But there’s another problem with Labor Day: popular culture today does not value us as workers. We are valued as consumers. We are encouraged to “own.” The idea that one might have to work in order to own is quickly glossed over. The stimulation to consume comes not only from advertisements, but from politicians like President Bush, whose prescription for a strong economy at a press conference in December of 2006 was: “I encourage you all to go shopping more.”

Workers, after all, are merely an expense; it is consumers that drive profits. And that expense has been ruthlessly controlled: during the current expansion, real average earnings have risen less than one percent. No wonder that corporate profits during the first nine months of 2006 (the latest data available) soared to a record 10.1 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), while wages and earnings hit a low of 45.3 percent.

The result of this dichotomy is that, despite headline economic numbers suggesting a low unemployment rate and growing economy, the experience of workers down here in the trenches is hardly rosy. Nationally, polls show widespread concern with the state of the economy. Locally, the precarious situation of many workers has shown up in part in the food pantries. Narrowsburg’s St. Francis Ecumenical Food Pantry, discussed in “Slim pickins at food pantry” on page 5, is one example; the food pantry of St. Andrews Episcopal Church in South Fallsburg is another. Mother Joan LaLiberte of St. Andrews notes that the families she has seen are not, for the most part, welfare cases; they are working poor who cannot make ends meet.

The local economy has not been immune, either, to the national real estate slowdown, related in part to the sub-prime mortgage debacle, in which buyers were encouraged to buy more and bigger houses than they could afford, on unrealistic terms. And that too has its roots in the imbalance between our valuation of consumption and work.

In a society that prizes consumption above all, but will not increase workers’ real pay, how do you get people to buy more? There’s only one way: get them to borrow. This recovery has been financed mostly by a consumer debt explosion, much of it collateralized by people’s homes. To make matters worse, much of the lending has occurred on terms that have been at best deceptive and at worst fraudulent. Workers are now left with the same old wages but a staggering increase in what they owe.

Like so much else in life, the economy is a matter of balance. In order for it to function well, we need capital as well as labor, consumption as well as saving, borrowing as well as lending. It is not possible always to stay at the correct balance; but it is possible to notice when we have swayed too far toward one pole or another.

Currently, we have sent jobs overseas for the sake of cheap prices, plundered our savings and our equity to buy bigger cars and houses and kept workers’ wages down so that corporate profits can soar. If workers and consumers were two different groups of people, we’d be facing civil war. But of course, they are not. They are two different aspects of ourselves. What is needed is not the victory of one group over another, but a rethinking of how we identify ourselves. Perhaps it’s time to glorify shopping a little less, and working a little more. This Labor Day, let’s remember that we, too, are labor, and recommit ourselves, and this nation, to valuing workers as they—or rather, we—deserve.

Also in this issue:

• Smallwood not exclusionary

Dr. Punnybone

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