Labor Day in Chicago
The day set aside to memorialize workers is a day that many of us don’t have to work. For the United States, where both glamorous and unglamorous work is celebrated as the best possible use of one’s time, it is a little ironic that we hold on to this holiday. Unsurprising–it is a day off, after all–but certainly telling. The highest gift one can give a laborer is freedom from work.
Not incidentally, the work that makes up an ever-large share of the economy, in services and warehouses and other settings where the workers themselves are increasingly invisible to the rest of us, is of the unglamorous sort most likely to continue on Labor Day.