Golden Oldies: Quotable Quotes: Labor Day
by Miki Saxon
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Back when this blog was published seven days a week, Sunday featured a collection of quotes along with (hopefully) pithy or erudite comments from yours truly.
Read other Golden Oldies here.
C’mon, guys. What else would today be about?
Scott Johnson said, “A bad day at work is better than a good day in hell.” If you don’t agree, ask any of the thousands of people who are there because they don’t have and can’t find a job.
And on a day dedicated to the working stiffs, management should take to heart the words of Henry George, “Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over,” before finding yet more ways to reduce their compensation.
Thomas Geoghegan explains succinctly why unions aren’t organizing the way they used to, “When people ask me, ‘Why can’t labor organize the way it did in the thirties?’ the answer is simple: everything we did then is now illegal,” as are many other actions from that era.
Everybody works hard these days, whether they sweat or not. Victor Hugo understood that when he said, “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”
Samuel Gompers offers two insightful comments.
The first recognizes that labor knows boundaries.
“All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day . . . is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.”
The second seems to me to apply to any thinking human, not just those designated ‘labor’.
“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”
Finally, Elbert Hubbard offers some profound advice to all those who run flat out 24/7, “The man who doesn’t relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.”
I hope you take his words to heart, unplug and hoot a bit this weekend.
BTW, do you know the true story behind labor Day?
Image credit: Valerie Everett
