Workin' Man Blues

        My dad was a big fan of Merle Haggard, so I grew up listening to songs like “Workin’ Man Blues” and being indoctrinated into the worldview that they represented. As I got older, I realized that I didn’t care much for Mr. Haggard’s politics (“Fightin’ Side of Me” and “Okie from Muskogee” come to mind), but I’ll admit that in his heyday he was a heck of a songwriter.

        As far as I could tell, my father had few qualms with the views Merle Haggard expressed in his songs, and “Workin’ Man Blues” in particular spoke to and for him. He was a blue collar guy and proud of it. He may have hated his job and felt nothing but contempt for the idiot foremen he had to put up with (at least the way he told it), but he never felt ashamed of being a laborer. He believed there was honor in hard work, and he was suspicious of those who avoided work or who hired people to do work they could have or should have done themselves. He raised my brother and me to share the same values.

        I am not a blue-collar worker, but I still have that sensibility, I think. It still feels a bit odd to call what I do “work.” My days are mainly taken up with tapping on a keyboard, clicking a mouse, talking on the phone, and meeting with people individually or in groups. On Sundays, my work is basically to stand up and talk. It is challenging, at least mentally, but I still can’t help thinking that if you go home at night without dirt under your fingernails, you haven’t really been working.

        On Monday, we will celebrate Labor Day, but it occurs to me that our nation has for a long time had an ambivalent relationship with the laborers in our midst. Our leaders always give lip service to the virtues of work, and the notion that we would not be the world power we have become without people to do the drilling and building and digging, but at least since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, these same leaders have been consistently and systematically undermining the power and influence of organized labor. White Americans have the added burden of guilt, when we realize that for hundreds of years our forebears benefited from the unpaid labor of others and that we still enjoy those benefits, while our neighbors who are descended from those enslaved persons continue to find themselves on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.

        Our nation’s longstanding fear and hatred of communism (and its kinder and gentler cousin, socialism), have also contributed to our ambivalence about labor. We simply don’t know what to do with our workers. Politicians all over the country will undoubtedly be making appearances at auto plants and steel mills this Monday, their sleeves rolled up, perhaps even wearing hardhats, saying all the right things. But how many of them on Tuesday will go back to caricaturing laborers with demeaning monikers such as “Joe Sixpack” and opposing their right to unionize?

        Let us celebrate Labor Day this year as something more than a three-day weekend or the last chance to get to the beach. May we truly salute those who work for a living. They are honorable; let us honor them.

Grace and peace,

bob