In Praise of Labor
I am a son of Labor. My father was a truck driver, and my mother worked in a textile mill. Their story is typical of first-generation Italian Americans. So many in their day provided for their families with hard physical labor, working with their hands. Their hands were calloused and strong. Many of the old Italian guys in my neighborhood had the end of a finger or two missing. These were the hands that built America.
Today, in our Gordon Gekko, greed is good America, we don’t appreciate the working men and women as we should. One of my favorite philosophers, Bertrand Russel, once said, “In America, money is the accepted measure of brains. A man who makes a lot of money is a clever fellow; a man who does not, is not. The social scale in America is indefinite and continually fluctuating.” Many admire the wealthy not for any merit they might have but simply because they are rich. Now, don’t get me wrong, if any of you out there would like to write me a check for millions of dollars, I would gladly accept. However, suppose we were to really think about who is important, who keeps things going. In that case, it is not the Silicon Valley entrepreneur but the mechanic, truck driver, and warehouse worker.
In the book Silicon Snake Oil, Clifford Stoll asks the question, when your toilet is backup on a Saturday night, who are you going to call? A software engineer or a plumber? Stoll’s book was published in 1995 before so much of our infrastructure became dependent on the Internet, yet his overall point remains valid. During the Covid lockdown, who did we consider essential workers? Actors? Athletes? Social Media Influencers? You know as well as I, it was the people that made things run. It was the people who did the real work. Truck drivers. Warehouse workers. Grocery store workers. Doctors. Nurses. Firefighters. Police. Even as I write this, I have a car that I can’t drive because the replacement part is on a ship that can’t be unloaded because there aren’t enough dock workers.
One of the most ludicrous books I have ever read was Atlas Shrugged. In the book, all the captains of industry decide that society is intruding on their creative genius, so they go off to establish a libertarian nirvana. In this paradise, the head of a railroad is building his railroad with his own hands – like that could really happen. The others are pretty much doing the same. Meanwhile, the rest of the nation, deprived of their genius, falls apart. What rubbish! Based on my long career, I can tell you what would happen if the heads of corporations left; NOTHING. There would be no noticeable change. The working men and women in this country know how to do their jobs. They don’t need some schmuck from a board room to tell them what needs to be done or how to do it. Many new management styles leverage this exact principle. From what I recall of 2020 marketing directors were not on the list of critical workers, neither were CEO’s.
But I digress.
Labor is a significant part of our Italian American heritage. Most Italian immigrants who came to the United States were from Southern Italy. They were typically common laborers, the contadini. They worked in factories, on construction sites, and the loading docks. If you are Italian American, you know this. You have heard the stories of how your grandparents and great-grandparents came to a place they did not know, where the language many did not understand. You know these stories, and we must not forget them. We must not let our children and grandchildren forget them.
We cannot let them forget how our grandparents and great-grandparents were a significant force fighting for workers’ rights. We cannot let them forget how 146 hard-working people, many of them Italian mothers and daughters, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire because of the greed and stinginess of its owners. We cannot let them forget how our Italian forebears were on the front lines of the Campaign for Bread and Roses in Lawrence, Massachusetts. With pride, we should tell how they stormed the factories and tore apart the works threatening with death anyone who dared attempt to restart them. These are the ancestors of whom we should feel most proud.
We cannot forget that their efforts gave the laborer a fair chance to live a good life in this country. Their work in the labor movement gave us the weekend, paid holidays, child labor laws, overtime, minimum wage, injury protection, workmen’s compensation insurance, pension security, Social Security Insurance, and the right to organize. We cannot forget that things we take for granted were the things for which they fought bitter battles.
So, today is Labor Day. Go to the beach. Have a barbeque with some friends. Do all the things that you enjoy doing on the day that is the unofficial end of summer, but don’t forget to do the essential thing, which is to remember. Remember who the critical people really are in this country, the people who make things run, the working men and women of the United States of America.
For more on Italian and Italian-American culture, read my book Italianità, The Essence of Being Italian. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.