Labor Day Quotes
The Veteran in a New Field by Winslow Homer, 1865 (public domain - The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely. I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday. Sign up to receive yours:
Usually, this is where we dig into words and their history. Rather than the usual etymological discourse, the recent Labor Day weekend afforded us a chance to reflect on its origins, peppered with observations and utterances about the nature of work.
The first Labor Day was marked in New York City in 1882, with a parade of some 15,000 marchers. The goal was to indicate the importance of workers in the Industrial Age.
The Industrial Age has given way to the Information Age, but the outputs of physical labor still happen with manufacturing and manual labor: our phones, our houses, and our transportation, despite encroaching automation, still require human hands to touch them, somewhere in the chain.
And those hands, tethered to an assembly line or a keyboard, serve a purpose, whether our own or someone else’s.
This is a fundamental drive of human existence: to live for a purpose.
In order to give a little purpose to Labor Day, I have assembled appropriate quotes for the occasion.
“The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
“Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.”
“I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes every man an opportunity to make a living.”
“It showed clearly to all wise and far-seeing men that the labor problem in this country had entered upon a new phase. Industry had grown. Great financial corporations, doing a nation-wide and even a world-wide business, had taken the place of the smaller concerns of an earlier time. The old familiar, intimate relations between employer and employee were passing.”
“A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.”
“I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.”
“It is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to regard them merely as so much muscle or physical power.”
“The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.”
“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
“The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us, and therefore in public life that man is the best representative of each of us who seeks to do good to each by doing good to all; in other words, whose endeavor it is not to represent any special class and promote merely that class’s selfish interests, but to represent all true and honest men of all sections and all classes and to work for their interests by working for our common country.”
Enjoy your weekend.
There’s so much to learn,
