Column on labor day

St. Benedict’s program for monks centered on the twin duties: to pray and to work. Centuries later, Freud said that human life existed to love and to work. When I was in school, Max Weber surmised that the “Protestant work ethic” came into being as a secular proof of salvation for an afterlife. Few things in our country are as admired as the capacity for hard work. Few things are frowned upon as shirking the responsibilities of work.

Upper Alton got a head start on Labor Day parades last weekend. As summer ends, it is good to close the vacation season with a long weekend. Labor Day was a response to violence between labor and owners that continued to mar relations for over a generation.

Lyman Trumbull, author of the 13^th Amendment, had a house in Alton for years that still grace our town. As an old man, he was called to help defend Eugene V. Debs. During the Pullman strike that was a factor in Congress creating Labor Day in the first place. Debs tried not only to organize Pullman workers but started a boycott of trains with Pullman cars in railways.  President Cleveland sent in federal troops to Illinois. With Clarence Darrow, he went to the Supreme Court in defense of Debs and the right of laborers to withhold their labor in his view. The Debs case stood for years as a signal that the Supreme Court was willing to go to great lengths to use the power of the government to support business against the demands of labor. After the Debs case, thousands of injunctions were ordered against strikes. It would take the Wagner Act in the mid 1930s to try to try to level the forces at a negotiating table instead of violent confrontations.

The two major parties continue to be split along the fault line of labor. Gov. Rauner’s proposals are stuck in an economic view of the world of the fifties: blame unions. Only around 11% of the work force is unionized. So many of the industrial union jobs have disappeared in the global marketplace. My uncles were high school dropouts who made a middle class living in the coal mines of Western Pennsylvania. Plus they had the best health insurance plan available at that time. Now people in managerial salaried positions are asked to work 50-60 hours a week, with no overtime as a matter of course.

Americans are understandably concerned that the hope that one’s children are better off economically and socially seems in peril. That shortened horizon of the future has spawned some of the disgust with our economic performance in the last generation.

Sabbath is an important concept since we work so much. Indeed it reflects the memory of slavery in Israel to insure that at least one day was devoted to rest: physical, m emotional, spiritual rest in God. Pope John Paul II: “The word of God's revelation is profoundly marked by the fundamental truth that man, created in the image of God, shares by his work in the activity of the Creator and that, within the limits of his own human capabilities, man in a sense continues to develop that activity, and perfects it as he advances further and further in the discovery of the resources and values contained in the whole of creation. We find this truth at the very beginning of Sacred Scripture, in the Book of Genesis, where the creation activity itself is presented in the form of "work" done by God during "six days"²⁸, "resting" on the seventh day.”

The capacity to be competent and productive  in tasks set before us is a constant inner tension, if we are young or well into retirement. At any age, we seek a balance between work and rest, creation and recreation. Work helps define us and our very identity. May we honor labor in all of its forms as we mark the close of another summer.