On Labor Day

Interesting opinion piece in the NYTimes in honor of Labor Day:

This Labor Day comes at the end of a 12-month period in which the face of American heroism was a worker's face. First there were the dust-covered firefighters, cops and emergency workers, and then the welders and excavators grimly digging all winter, the mail sorters risking their lives, the underpaid soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and, finally, a month ago, the nine grimy coal miners trapped deep underground in Pennsylvania. They tied themselves together with cable 240 feet below the surface of the earth -- an indelible image of solidarity that gave the country a badly needed metaphor and a happy ending as well.

The year's only good news was the sudden appearance of half-forgotten virtues like stoicism and sacrifice. Working stiffs turned into bands of brothers and Joe Six-Pack became the martyr, while the rest of us received a measure of redemption. We repaid them in an outpouring of news coverage, political speeches, merchandising and movie and book deals.

But this glorification of blue-collar heroes carries an unmistakable whiff of bad conscience. In recent years American life has put a rather low value on honest, unglamorous work and brotherly self-sacrifice. ''Solidarity forever'' was not a message that made much impression on the post-Reagan mind. In the age of the rising Dow, a wage earner seemed like a has-been, hopelessly out of touch with the opportunities all around. Laid-off manufacturing workers were told to quit whining and get retrained. Staying in the same job for more than a year was a sign not of loyalty but of stagnation, if not failure. The heroes of the decade were entrepreneurs and C.E.O.'s.

In the past year, though, we have learned that glamorized corporate chiefs will sell out anyone and that sad sacks with union cards and dead-end jobs are the ones you can count on in a pinch. Imagine being tied at the waist to Andrew Fastow, Enron's former chief financial officer, with the water level rising and the air supply running out. The limits of aggressive drive have become painfully clear. Those workers who were fast becoming relics turn out to have preserved the only qualities that matter when the crunch comes. Since these were the very people the rest of the country consigned to cultural and economic oblivion, there's an air of atonement in the worship: forgive us our sins of individualism.

But it isn't entirely guilt. Beneath the media fanfare about ''heroes,'' in the divided heart of the upwardly mobile, this romance with the worker reflects a genuine longing too. Who doesn't feel the pull of those values of solidarity as they disappear from the corporate world and much of American life? The restless energy unleashed by high-tech capitalism carried a psychic price, but it took a crisis to make most Americans aware of what has been lost. The narrowness of outlook that ambitious professionals despised now seems appealing: the flip side of parochialism is a sense of community, where time-serving can be a form of steadfastness. In a speech to the rescued coal miners, President Bush said, ''It was their determination to stick together and to comfort each other that really defines kind of a new spirit that's prevalent in our country.''

The problem with this ''new spirit'' is that it is based in large part on a sham. The gratitude and guilt and longing are real, but no one wants to be stuck in a hard, mindless, badly paid job with little room for advancement. The typical face of postindustrial working-class life is not a firefighter's or a coal miner's -- it is that of the exhausted Wal-Mart ''associate'' who has just punched out but is ordered to round up shopping carts in the parking lot. She can't clock her overtime hours because the branch manager needs to show high profits. Solidarity has been preached to her in the form of Wal-Mart family values, but it goes only one way.

Even the lionized firefighters have been reduced to the grubby embarrassment of contract disputes. ''I'm tired of politicians coming to our funerals and telling the widows how sorry they are,'' Stephen J. Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, said at a rally two weeks ago. ''Pay us a living wage.'' Meanwhile, the Bush administration continues to pursue relentlessly anti-labor policies. America wants its workers to do everything except ask for a raise in return.

It shouldn't be surprising, then, to learn that Labor Day was born in hypocrisy and blood. President Grover Cleveland signed legislation creating the holiday in August 1894, less than a week after 12,000 federal troops crushed a rail strike in Pullman, Ill. With one eye on midterm elections, he salved labor's raw feelings by giving the country a day off in honor of its workers. The degeneration of Labor Day has continued fairly steadily over more than a century of barbecues, and by now it's probably our least sincere holiday. In the year of working-class heroes, we should do something real for labor, or else we should spare everyone tomorrow's cliches and rededicate the first Monday in September to a cause that stirs genuine passion. Happy Investor's Day.