Non-Laboring Day

I had someone ask me recently what my plans for Labor Day were. Since I have every day off from work now, I explained, Labor Day was just another in a long string of nearly-identical days. As I've written previously, sometimes I forget whether it's a weekday. And besides, Labor Day is now a signpost for fund-raising telethons and an excuse for retailers to have yet another sale.
   But I got to thinking about Labor Day, what it's supposed to mean and how it came about. It arose from populism in the late 19th Century, spurred on by growing awareness of robber barons' exploitation of all their workers, especially children. Workers got their own holiday, which was good for them, but kind of quaint now, and certainly outdated.
   Or is it?
   Most office workers today wouldn't think of themselves as laborers, and in the strictest sense they aren't; the heaviest thing most of us lifted in the office was a coffee cup. However - just because you don't sweat doesn't mean you're not oppressed. How many of you feel the pressure to put in more than eight hours a day, even though you're a five-day-a-week, forty-hour employee? How many of you take work home every night, or work on the weekends, every weekend? How many of you have bosses who put the screws to you not because they want to get the job done, but to look good to their own bosses?
   At some point in the past ten or fifteen years, corporate America adopted the idea that their workers are 'resources' to be 'managed' instead of people to be led, and that the company demands total loyalty, to the detriment of employees' personal lives and even their health. While at the same time corporate 'leaders' lie, cheat, steal, and betray their way to fatter and fatter paychecks, based on nothing but the fact that they can get away with it. And the concept of leading by example? Vanished, like a coin palmed by David Blaine in one of his terrible TV specials.
   The next time you stay late to finish a document or log in from home to read your work e-mail, ask yourself why you're doing it. Is it because you really want to, or because you're afraid of the consequences if you don't? If the answer is the second one - and it probably is - you deserve Labor Day as much as dock workers in 1899 did.
   Just say 'no' to corporate weasels, it's the only way they'll get the message.