Labor Day may be one of the few holidays we celebrate but don’t actually celebrate. Hell, even TCM, which plays movies to honor almost every conceivable holiday. didn’t run one worker-related movie today
Okay. they ran “The Prince and the Showgirl,” though I’m thinking this wasn’t a love song to working class issues.
Most of us have spent an appreciable length of time working at jobs that paid by the hour, but try to find a realistic look at the life of of an American worker in mass entertainment today.
Even beyond that, we really don’t talk too much about. We talk about raising the minium wage, but we don’t talk much about folks who make more than that, and the struggles they have just staying afloat in today’s America.
Developers running rampant in working class areas are driving many woking class renters from their homes, yet we don’t talk about that vey much – it seems rude, I suppose, to criticize developers
I don’t mind, though.
We don’t talk much about what it’s like to simply come to work, sit or stand for hours at a time, doing the same thing over and over and over again.
Even politicians who extoll coal mining are a little squeamish when it comes to the reality of coal miners’ jobs, their health, their lives.
Some hold hourly workers in some disdain, but they keep America running. They are ur life’s blood. And yet, for all too many of us, the working class is an idea, or a cause, but not hard, cold, naked reality.
And that in itself is a form of disrespect.
rsdrake@cox.net