The Daily: 4 September 2023

Labor Day

Today is Labor Day in the US. This first Monday in September is the day that our country dedicated to honoring the working class after the powers that be decided that May Day, the original Labor Day, was too closely tied to the actual labor movement. A parade of organized laborers was held in New York on September 5, 1882; but the September holiday was not widely adopted until after the Haymarket International Worker’s Strike debacle in Chicago in May 1886. The year after Haymarket, Oregon, oddly enough, was the first state to make Labor Day a public holiday. In 1894 Congress made it a national holiday for federal workers; but as late as the 1930s, unions were still encouraging most other workers to strike in order to get the day off.

Today, the holiday weekend serves as the end of summer for Americans. It is a holiday for most of the professional-managerial class. It is not for most actual workers, though manufacturing and other ‘heavy labor’ Labor Day hours do come with holiday pay. Apart from education, most care-workers, including retail workers, do not have a day off. On the contrary, if you work in retail, then this weekend is likely spent managing ‘end of summer blow-out’ sales — extra work so that those with a paid holiday can spend more money while they are not working. Most care-workers do not get holiday pay either… because most care-workers are in positions that don’t come with such benefits.

I have the day off because I have inadvertently joined the professional class, the bottom rungs thereof anyway. So I have an extra day to actually accomplish some of the work that benefits me, the only work that I need to do in order to keep my body going. Normally, I shove this labor into the approximately 60 hours between leaving work on Friday evening and showing up again on Monday morning. If I sleep like I should, that’s reduced to less than 36 hours. So most of the month, I don’t sleep like I should. Which means that every few weekends I crash. I feel like crud. I am useless. Nothing gets done at all. These weekends are followed by at least a week of not eating well — because nothing got cooked — and fretting about the laundry and the state of the garden. So this extra day is good. Maybe I can get ahead in my ongoing task list… if there aren’t any new tasks added to it.

The weather might actually be obliging. It is not supposed to rain again for many days. The forecasted highs are a little uncomfortably high, but Vermont is not seeing the misery that the middle of the country is experiencing. There are no triple digits in the forecast here and also little humidity in the daylight hours. The Canadian smoke seems to be lessening as well. So I can work outside, and my basement and garage are unlikely to flood this week… for a nice change. I actually laid down the basement rugs yesterday before doing the laundry. I hope this isn’t tempting cosmic shenanigans.

Labor is so ill-defined in this culture that it is only on Labor Day, the day I theoretically get to be ‘off work’, that any of the actual work of living gets done. Not just in my life, but in most lives. In addition to catching up with quotidian responsibilities like cleaning the toilets and washing socks, this is the day when people tackle the summer projects that never got done in the summer months. Woodwork and porches are being painted. Windows might finally be cleaned. In homes with a gardener, the ever-mounting piles of garden veg are being summarily dispatched. I suspect there are many pints of corn and tomatoes going into storage today even with the triple-digit temperatures making the kitchen an actual hell. Today, not having much of a harvest to speak of, I am tackling the weeds that have taken over in these many soggy weeks. I don’t know if I’ll get done — because one is never done with weeding — but hopefully when the sun sets I won’t feel like ducking my head and running for the back door whenever I come home from work, too ashamed to be associated with this advanced state of garden disarray.

I have heard of people going places for a long weekend over Labor Day, and there are all those sales in the box stores beckoning to leisure shoppers. But I don’t know if I’ve ever done much of anything but work on Labor Day, mostly without wages. It was even worse when I owned a bookstore. The store was closed on Labor Day, so I had no laborers. But I usually had to get the shop ready for the annual onslaught of September book releases. This usually began on Sunday afternoon — also a regular day off for most of my employees — but it rarely got done while the store was open. Getting ready for the first Tuesday in September meant remaking displays and piling the new books in the back room, to be ready to go out on the floor on Tuesday morning. There were usually remnant back-to-school books and decorations that needed to be stored, shelved or returned. Then I dug out autumn decor and sideline merchandise — like leaf-pressing kits or kid quilting patterns — and faced out fall classics on all the shelves. Some years, there were midnight release parties in the wee hours of Monday night. I tried to avoid that… but mid-grade and teen fantasy publishers will release All The Books on the Tuesday after Labor Day…

No books these days, but I have much more garden work than I ever did in New Mexico. Even a drought year in New England produces more weeds than I pulled in New Mexico in a decade. And while there are some deep-rooted nasties and patches of hard caliche clay in the high desert, most of the weeds I dealt with were loosely held in my sandy garden soil. Weeding the cracks in the sidewalk was the hardest part of the job, but those weeds only sprouted after it rained. I also didn’t have as much work in processing the harvest. I could dry things out there, which was a simple process of hanging it up or putting it in the dehydrator for a few hours and then storing it away in jars and bags. I made apple butter, which was a task for five or six afternoons from July through October. Maybe. I also made lots of breads and muffins from various squashes, but that too was not intense labor. You can accomplish quite a number of other tasks while the zucchini bread is in the oven.

Here the garden is work. All the time. But I have less time than ever to get it done. I do not have a flexible schedule — which, in any case, does not mean flexibility from my employer to allow time to meet my needs; it means I have to accommodate their needs with odd shifts and overtime on short notice. (That was my last job…) I have a fixed schedule. (Which means there is always overtime.) I can’t take time off to take care of my garden on the days that the weather is amenable. I often don’t get any garden work done at all during the week because it involves changing out of work clothing, wolfing down dinner, and heading out for an hour or so of flailing about with the midges and mosquitos. Then I normally have to shower to make sure nothing nasty has found its way to my skin, to say nothing of getting the dirt off before climbing into bed. So my long hours of daily wage work thwarts any effort to get real work done. But I can’t not do the real work… that’s the only work that is needed in my life. I have to cook dinner and do laundry. I also have to pull weeds, and would have to even if I didn’t use my property to grow more useful plants than grass and daylilies. These aren’t lifestyle choices; it all must be done. And I can’t afford to pay someone else to do this work — so I have to shove it in around the useless wage work somehow.

Well, my wage work not completely useless. I won’t do that kind of work even though I know the pay is much better and the paid holidays more frequent. I won’t take wages for a bullshit job, at least not how David Graeber defined the term. His essay, and later book, set clear specifications for a job to be classified as bullshit, the most important of which is that the job serves no utilitarian function. Bullshit jobs are unnecessary. He talked in some depth about the distinction between bullshit and just plain shit work. Shit jobs may be demeaning, devalued drudgery. They often deal with all the foulness of living bodies. However, they rarely support one living body, so that one body needs many shit jobs in order to eat and pay rent. Shit jobs are shit… but they are absolutely necessary. If nobody did the shit work, the world would fall apart almost instantaneously. No work at all would happen. On the other hand, bullshit jobs often pay very well, often come with status and perks, often involve little actual labor of any kind — but they are utterly pointless and dispensable. If, one Monday morning, all the bullshit workers walked out on their positions forever, nothing at all would be affected. Except a sudden loss of their rather fat paychecks… hence the perpetuation of bullshit jobs.

I don’t have a bullshit job. It is absolutely necessary work. This job has to be done or the economy in my town would founder, probably within days, maybe within hours if a walk-out happened on Monday morning. It’s also not completely shit. I get benefits and a set schedule and am not engaged with filth on a regular basis, flood recovery excepting. But I don’t get paid much, and getting those contractual days off is rather complicated. I get very little respect from either superiors or customers, and I deal with abuse and humiliation that are integral properties of the job. And it is hard work, relentless, exhausting work, from 7:50 am to 5:15 pm every damn workday. So it’s shit-ty, I guess, even if I get out of cleaning the toilet at work these days.

But it does not pay enough for me to get out of cleaning my own toilet. I can’t pay others to do my necessary work. I have to squeeze that into the twilight hours of the day — and the few holidays that come with this job, most of which are actual holidays, holy days, that come with their own burdensome schedules and labors. Nobody with a shit job, or even a shitty job, gets a day off of working for Thanksgiving, for example. For shit workers, that’s a day with ten times the normal workload packed into it. So most of my holiday hours are already spent and can’t be used for necessary work, never mind doing no work at all like a day off is theoretically supposed to be.

I also have to do all this writing and editing when I am not at work. This is my leisure. It is wageless work. It is also unnecessary in most ways. If I quit writing, no body would be adversely affected. My body might benefit because I might reclaim those few late night hours each week that I spend scribbling — I might get to sleep better… But I am vain enough to think that if I’m not saying these things, nobody will be. And I think it needs to be said — and read. Which is why I do this work gratis. I don’t want to make people pay for what I think is pretty necessary information and advice. But… boy do I wish I could… I wish I could do this work, plus a bit more on making it official with references and notes, and not have to do wage work to support it. There are people who make a living doing just what I am doing right now, typing up thoughts for public consumption. But those people often come from more privilege than I do; they get jobs that are well out of reach for low status people like me. They also usually either have a wage-working partner who supports them financially or a care-working partner who supports them in every other way. The lucky ones have a partner that does all the support work. The divinely blessed ones earn so much from their scribbling that they can pay for support work — as well as all the other expenses of living, for themselves, their partners and the rest of their familiars.

Those people are so few you could probably name most of them. Most jobs associated with writing can’t support a body, just like all the other jobs below those top management positions with acronyms and stock options. This is partly because most jobs are now shitty, devalued and poorly remunerated. But it’s also because shitty jobs have to cost business less than revenues — much less if there are to be stock options. In a capitalist system, cumulative wages will never be sufficient to pay cumulative expenses. There must be more consumer expense than wages paid to those consumers, or there is no profit. But lately those who have the wealth and privilege to set price-tags on living expenses have gone right off the map of reality.

Wages are untenably far out of line with expenses right now. I don’t know how this system will not founder — soon! Take publishing, because I have familiarity with those jobs since I am still on many publisher and Indeed alert lists. (Once a book-slinger…) In a fairly good editor job, those above entry level, you could expect to make $50,000 annually, maybe $75,000 for a really high-level position. Which would be great money in most places. But there’s the rub — because you have to live near the publisher (still… for reasons that are probably related to management, ie worker control) — and well-paying publishers are almost exclusively located in expensive cities. An annual income of $50,000, that pretty good editing job, would barely — very barely — cover an average studio lease in New York, where over half of the good editing jobs exist. Similarly, I doubt you could pay rent anywhere near Boston publishers on that $50K a year, because Boston has very little affordable housing for rent within a radius of about a 30-40 minute drive from downtown (or a 1-2 hour train commute, which, at $90/month, costs about the same as gas). In any case, the further out you go to find lower costs in housing, the more your daily commute eats up your wages. Recently, I saw that Stanford was looking for an editorial assistant (the person that does nearly all the work of editing, but does not get to call herself an editor) and offering a salary of $44,000. Two decades ago that might have paid for a lease in San Jose. Now? You couldn’t even be qualified to sign a lease on a place to sleep anywhere near Stanford Press, never mind being able to pay rent and eat or wear shoes or whatever else you need to do besides have a space to live.

It should be noted that editing, even assistant editing, is not a shitty job. There is a good deal of respect for the work, signified by a higher wage than most jobs, definitely higher than shitty jobs, and many other benefits, like have more than 36 hours a week dedicated to the work every body needs doing. And yet, even these not-shitty jobs can only support a body with support from other income streams. A New York mid-level editor has to live with many workers to pay New York rent — an income stream to property owners that is earned without labor. At most the rentier class has to have work done to maintain property — which costs are always paid by renters one way or another. I would put this form of acquiring income in its own category of shit. Shithead jobs…

In any case all that is well beyond my means and experience. Just like it is for most laborers. Maybe that is the point to this scribbling on Labor Day. The only jobs that earn sufficient reward to have an actual holiday, a day without work, a day set aside for purposes other than mundane labor, are jobs that involve no labor at all. Nobody in the working class gets a day off work. Few even have the luxury of being freed from wage-labor adequately enough to have time to do the bare minimum labor that their bodies require. Nobody earns a living through labor — a phrase I deplore (as if any living being needs to merit life). So what is Labor Day for? More work…

Thus I am weeding today. Hopefully, I can pack all that work into one day. If not, I’ll go back to hiding my face in gardener disgrace each day as I scurry between the garage and the house, already behind on the evening task list, no doubt…

Hope your labors are more fruitful… But, given probability, I kinda suspect that they’re not.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023