"The Meaning of Work"

Well, here we are–it’s Labor Day weekend, the last hurrah of summer as we gear up for a new year. Yes, I know the calendar year starts in January and our fiscal year in July, but September has always felt like the real beginning of the year to me. No matter how early school starts or how much work we do in August, it is a month that still sounds like summertime–a month for vacation and slow, lazy days. Even when it’s still hot outside, September sounds like fall–crisp and cool. It’s time to go back to school, to pick up the pace at work, and to switch even our recreational focus to the rougher sport of football.

Labor Day weekend marks this transition, and you can really feel it here at JUC, especially this year. Let me ask: How many of the kids here got to ride a roller coaster this summer? You know the feeling when the safety bar is latched, there’s no going back, you chug slowly up to the top, and there is a little pause just before the plunge? Well, that’s sort of what today feels like at JUC. Next Sunday, the ride really begins, with three full services at 8:30, 10:00 and 11:30. Our Religious Education program gets underway during all three services, and our new adult Sunday forum called Explorations! begins at 10:00 in the chapel. We know the 10:00 service will be the most crowded, so we ask you to come to the 8:30 or 11:30 service if you can, which will also let you try out Explorations!. To keep children from having to go to RE classes twice, there will also be supervised play for children during Explorations at 10:00!. And then, next week, there will also be our big church picnic, with games and food and dunk tanks for the ministers, although I’m not sure I should have mentioned that last part.

But first, we have Labor Day. However you use it, whether for a cookout in the back yard, for cleaning out the garage, for the last swim in the outdoor pool, the last vacation of summer, or just another day of work since not everyone gets holidays off, keep in mind that this three-day weekend didn’t always exist. In fact, at one time, most workers in the United States didn’t normally get two-day weekends.

Labor Day has a history, and it wasn’t created just to mark the end of summer. The existence of Labor Day is a tribute to the labor movement in this country and a reminder of the meaning and importance of labor and work. We often take for granted many of the achievements of the labor movement, from the existence of weekends, the 40-hour work week and paid vacation to the minimum wage, workplace health and safety regulations and laws against child labor. The labor movement has contributed to civil rights, to the formation of a middle class, and to the health of our democracy and our economic system. Labor Day honors a very important part of our nation’s history, our social system, and our personal lives.

For much of human history, the primary meaning and purpose of work was subsistence or survival, especially through the production of food. There are many people for whom that is still true today, although food production has changed radically from previous centuries. In early America, the vast majority of people worked on farms, growing food to eat and trade. If you like genealogy, you know how many of your ancestors were farmers, no matter where you live today. Back then, it was planting season, not September, that felt more like the start of a new year. Because they worked on their own farms, most people had no employer/ employee relationship in their work. That all changed with the industrial revolution, when textile mills and other forms of mass production employed increasing numbers of workers. In the factories, the rhythms of nature no longer mattered, and people could work all year long.

We forget how awful working conditions often were in those days. Not only was there outright slavery until the Civil War, but industrial working conditions were often horrendous. From the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 workers in 1911, to the horrors of the meat packing industry described by Upton Sinclair, to the simple reality of long, grueling days of hard labor, the conditions of work were often grim. We hear echos of those days in songs that have been handed down to us from railroad, coal mine and factory workers, illustrating how the human spirit seeks to survive even in very difficult circumstances. It took a while for the labor movement to develop, with some of the first stirrings going back to before the Civil War, including an 1824 textile workers strike in Rhode Island, and a strike by women laborers in New Hampshire in 1828, in part to protest a rule that prohibited them from even talking at work.

The origins of Labor Day itself go back at least to 1882, when the Central Labor Union in New York City held the first Labor Day event. In 1884 the union declared Labor Day to be the first Monday in September, as a worker’s holiday, and as a day for parades and worker solidarity. At the time, laborers in the United States were often required to work from ten to sixteen or more hours a day, six or even seven days a week, and protests for an 8-hour day began in 1877. The labor movement was gaining steam, including a successful strike here in Denver against wage cuts by railroad owner Jay Gould, which spurred a large increase in Knights of Labor membership.

On May 1, 1886, a huge labor rally for an 8-hour work day began in several cities, including over 300,000 protesters around the country. But three days later in Chicago, during a protest of police treatment of demonstrators, an unidentified person threw a bomb that killed one or more of the policemen who had been trying to break up the gathering. Police responded with gunfire and several people were killed. This became known as the Haymarket Riot or Massacre (depending on your perspective), and it set back the 8-hour work day for decades. In what later political leaders acknowledged was an unjust trial, several labor leaders were blamed for the violence, and executed for it. Workers’ movements around the world were horrified, and as international labor and socialist movements grew, May 1 was selected as Labor Day or International Workers Day in many other countries, in memory of what happened in Chicago.

As political pressure grew for recognition of a Labor Day in the United States, the September date was favored by many politicians as less inflammatory than the May 1 date. Several states adopted Labor Day, and it was adopted as a federal holiday in 1894, in an attempt to appease the labor movement after federal troops crushed the Pullman railway strike that year. Most remaining recognition of the May 1 date in the United States was eliminated when it became associated with communism during the years of the Red Scare, but some in the labor movement still consider it to be the true Labor Day, and it is still the primary workers’ holiday in other parts of the world. It was not an arbitrary choice when the marches for immigrant rights earlier this year were held on May 1.

Throughout its history, the labor movement is a story of struggle, often rapidly growing in numbers, and often declining in the face of vehement opposition by business owners and often government. Many of the greatest achievements of the labor movement found their fruition in the New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, especially with the National Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which established the 40-hour work week, created the minimum wage, and banned child labor. In 1948, when the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, with leadership by the United States, it proclaimed the human right to work, with just and favorable conditions of work, as well as the right to join trade or labor unions, and the right of fair pay and an adequate standard of living.

The labor movement has often been vilified as an enemy of capitalism, yet much of the success of our economic system has come from bridling and harnessing the power of capitalism rather than letting it run amok. Though bitterly fought at the time, many of the successes of the labor movement are noncontroversial today. What laissez-faire capitalist really wants to repeal child labor laws, end all workplace safety rules or eliminate the weekend? Social Security was considered socialist when it was first proposed, but it has done more good and has more popular support than just about any government program. The reality is that capitalism would self-destruct if not constrained and harnessed for the public good by the collective action of workers, by good regulations, and by taxation to support the public structures that make economic success possible in the first place.

However, too many people have taken the fall of Soviet communism to be a vindication of unrestrained capitalism, and the power of free markets has become almost an object of worship to some. Excessive concentration of power is always dangerous, whether in the hands of corporations, powerful individuals, government, or even labor unions. But labor influence and membership has declined over the last half a century, to the point that it is hard to believe that a Labor Day holiday would be created today if we didn’t already have one.

Of course, part of the decline of labor is because we live in a changing world, with economic globalization, with fewer manufacturing and more service jobs, and with rapidly-evolving technology. The labor movement may need to adapt even more than it has to these changes, and it needs to maintain focus on issues such as universal health care that affect all workers, not only the interests of current union members.  But we need a healthy labor movement as much or more than ever. I believe corporate responsibility is possible, and I don’t think the relationship between employers and employees always needs to be adversarial, but we do need checks on corporate power. We face an enormous danger today from the consolidation of power in the hands of large corporations controlled by the wealthy few, especially when that corporate power transcends, coopts and controls the structures of government that should be holding it in check. Government protection of workers has eroded, and there are still sweatshops, widespread poverty, and even slavery–debt slavery especially–around the world and right here in our own nation. Our trade policies are only aggravating those problems and enhancing corporate power, and the power of the military has been used for the benefit of corporate wealth as well, from Guatemala to Iraq. If we want to avoid a future of even more extreme inequality and even greater human suffering, we need the balancing power of collective action by workers and other individuals watching out for the common good.

The labor movement reminds us of the worth of every single person, that no one is ever just a cog in a money-making machine. The right to work and to an adequate standard of living is central to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, although I also wonder whether it would be possible to pass a statement like that today if the United Nations had not already adopted it. Truly, our voices for human rights are needed more than ever.

Certainly, the meaning of work is rooted in basic human rights, and in our basic human needs to eat, earn a living, and support our children and families. But the meaning of work is also about more than survival, or at least it ought to be. Work is also about dignity and about identity, a sense of who we are and how we contribute to a good greater than ourselves. While much work will always be drudgery, and any job will have elements that we do not enjoy, work should never mean exploitation and misery. Under the right conditions, it is possible for work to be a source of great personal meaning and satisfaction in our lives. If we are fortunate enough to find work at the point of intersection of our abilities with the needs of the world, work that addresses both the sources of joy and the sources of pain in our lives, we can find work that we truly love, that is deeply meaningful. I feel very fortunate to have found work in ministry that I truly love, at least most of the time. Circumstances and finances sometimes force us to settle for less-than-ideal work, and some people find meaning more in volunteer work than in paid work, but wherever you find it, I wish this sense of meaning for you.

It is also worth noting that in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, just after the right to work and to fair employment and compensation, the next article proclaims the right to rest, leisure, and holidays with pay. We also have a right to play. Workers in the United States typically get much less vacation time than in places such as Europe, where six to eight weeks of vacation is common, often including the whole month of August. But what matters is not only the amount of time off, but also what we do with it.

A right to play means having time to rest and rejuvenate, to observe the beautiful world around us, to look at something familiar as if we had never seen it before, to wander through the woods with no particular goal. It means riding a roller coaster if we want to, talking with friends about anything we wish, running and jumping barefoot through the grass, playing games, creating art for no one but ourselves, feeding not just our stomachs but our spirits as well. Part of the meaning of work is found in the balance of work and play, remembering that it’s all about life and the things that make life good for everyone.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t work to do. There’s plenty of work, and we need the capacity and discipline to rise to the tasks that confront us. Our work for justice and equity and human rights is needed more than ever. But even when the work we face is very important and serious, it helps to keep a sense of playfulness and humor in the middle of the work itself. I love the sense of humor I see at JUC. You know if you’ve ever worked in an office that is completely devoid of playfulness and humor, or if the only humor is biting and sarcastic, just how deadly it can be. A sense of playfulness keeps the creative juices flowing, and it can make even drudgery a little more fun. No wonder even the railroad workers and coal miners sang songs.

So enjoy your Labor Day tomorrow, and look for the moments of humor and play in your day, whether you are at work or not. I’m sure we’ll all need a sense of humor as we plunge into three services and all kinds of work and activity here at JUC beginning next week, but if we remember why our work matters, including the amazing amount of volunteer work that keeps this place going--if we laugh and sing songs and just enjoy being with each other along the way, even the hardest parts won’t be bad at all.

And for the kids who are here and who have made it through this whole sermon on Labor Day, do the schoolwork and the chores you need to do, but remember to allow play time for yourself, and remind your parents to play as well. Every time your parents see you, they see why the work they do is important, and they see why vacation and play are important, too. Labor Day is a holiday about work with a long and serious history, not to be forgotten, but it is also a holiday, so go and enjoy it well.

May it be so.