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Showing posts from September, 2020
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Celebrating Labor in a Time of Pandemic What could be a better time than this particular Labor Day to contemplate the nature and meaning of labor in modern America – and, of course, offer the workers our thanks. When I was a kid, a long time ago, I didn’t think about workers or labor very much. My dad was a laborer and I always worked from the time I was in high school on but I just didn’t think much about it. I guess I always had the image of average men and women going off to work every day doing regular jobs at factories and folks like carpenters and plumbers. Working-class people doing things like building the Hoover Dam or the Interstate highway system and, when I was 21, helped put a man - an American man - on the moon. Solid, middle class folks. Certainly we still have many tradespeople but much of that world is gone now; this is a modern service economy. Today many of us work from home, attending (Zoom) meetings, creating spreadsheets and PowerPoints and d