What Labor Means Today

How America's been brainwashed to abandon the dreams labor once had for us

The human spirit of workers, seen here, flourishes with the dignity of processing Twinkies™ every weekday for years. (Koyaanisqatsi.)

Labor Day is when we celebrate the history of the American labor movement, when we exalt the dignity of work and affirm the right to work.

Because we’ve been brainwashed.

The federal holiday was literally created to defuse public outrage over government strikebreaking and vent energy from a surging labor movement. A movement pissed at the time about being murdered by the government and illionaires.

In 1894, railroad workers went on strike. Rail tycoon George Pullman had cut wages and fired workers, some of them already hard-pressed to pay the rents being raised by their landlord, rail tycoon George Pullman. More than 150,000 workers in 27 states struck.

The U.S. government struck back. Pres. Grover Cleveland unleashed 14,000 U.S. Marshals, who proceeded to gun down as many as 90 workers. Six days after busting the strike, and killing more than 30 workers, Cleveland signed Labor Day into law as a federal holiday. (Credit to Jacobin for the history lesson.)

Today, hard-fought victories of America’s revolutionary labor movement — weekends and the eight-hour workday — are a ceiling beneath which we huddle for safety instead of using it as a launch pad.

The dignity of work was originally a religious concept. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has a whole page about its biblical origins. Promoting the dignity of work can be well motivated. But even defenses of it betray toxic thinking about the labor to which we dedicate something like a third of our waking adult lives.

Consider what I’ve highlighted from the USCCB:

“Work is more than a way to make a living; it is a form of continuing participation in God’s creation. If the dignity of work is to be protected, then the basic rights of workers must be respected--the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions, to private property, and to economic initiative.”

Work is how humans are meant — by The Lord Almighty! — to participate in His creation. We have the right to work. The right to provide someone with our sweat.

Meaning, someone somewhere better damn well give us a job or there’s gonna be literal Hell to pay.

Unidentified workers achieve their full human potential assembling an endless procession of whatever the fuck that thing is. (Koyaanisqati.)

The concept of the dignity of work has been wielded by the left to champion those whose jobs are seen as menial or unskilled. There is, of course, dignity in doing whatever work it takes to sustain oneself and one’s family.

But it’s been twisted and now it’s not that necessary work has dignity, it’s that work is necessary to have dignity. Work is the predicate on which an entire political party conditions food. Even many Democrats demand work to qualify for health care.

“The dignity of work” has been weaponized to exalt work for work’s sake, which means exalting the system that sustains work. Which is a system that exploits workers.

We are so turned around that we cheer them on; the job creators, employers, innovators, tech lords, and disruptors to whom we are grateful for whatever physical or mental drudgery they might permit us.

Today’s George Pullmans just last month decapitated the National Labor Relations Board, the front-line defender of union rights and worker rights created by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

And the masses? Across the blue fields of LinkedIn march an endless host of fresh-faced young people — their banner a passion for marketing, branding, and corporate strategy — their numbers dwarfed only by the hordes of unemployed elders faking the same passion. They use AI to pursue the jobs AI hasn’t yet taken.

Even the mainstream left — hell, even some of the progressive left — has internalized this blinkered view of work. We have built a wall around how we even imagine work. The best we can conceive of is the dignity of work and the God-given right to dedicate vast chunks of our mortal lives to the enrichment of the rich.

We demand that our politicians ensure we can all spend our days toiling for others.

Former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the ur-populist of our time (not counting democratic socialists), earlier this year literally founded The Dignity of Work Institute.

“The Dignity of Work is the idea that hard work should pay off for everyone,” the institute writes. Which sounds reasonable except, um, why must it always be hard? Especially since, also um, we’re fabulously rich.

America has never had as much money as it does today. But what doth it profit us? Productivity, as Brown said, “keeps going up and up, but wages aren’t rising along with it.”

The fruits of our productivity have gone almost entirely to the rich. And workers aren’t supposed to demand equal, let alone fair, participation in those spoils. After all, workers get that awesome dignity of work.

But if hard work were to pay off someday, as Brown demands, wouldn’t that at some point involve no longer doing hard work? Or at least our kids not having to?

Does Brown or any other politician consider hard work an intrinsic function of biological life? Because, have you met dogs? Or cats, for fuck’s sake?

Human thinking about work has become so warped that even Democrats aspire at most to collect taxpayer money from the masses to pay rich people to give the masses work. Because God forbid we just tax the rich — or make sure our money never gets to them in the first place, deluding them into thinking it was ever theirs — and then share our money so that we don’t need to work as much.

To pigeonhole this as communism is to ignore the vast tapestry human history offers of alternatives other than Soviet communism or American capitalism. ‘Twas not always thus!

The too-long book The Dawn of Everything excavates a breathtaking breadth of human social structures in which a majority treated labor very differently than we choose to. Labor for much of human existence was fluid. Previous cultures had better lives of leisure, learning, human connection.

The Grind is a shitty innovation. Hustle a vile disruption.

They have left us terrified that the rise of robots and automation and artificial intelligence will rob us of our precious, precious jobs. But less than a century ago, non-human labor couldn’t come fast enough to liberate us from the dignity of work and the drudgery of the grind.

Workers enrich themselves and society with the freedom of choosing paper or plastic. (Koyaanisqatsi.)

In 1930, just five years before the National Labor Relations Act moved labor toward a better future, the British economist John Maynard Keynes looked upon the rise of automation with dread not because it would take our jobs but in the mistaken belief that we would struggle at first with all that free time.

In his essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes foresaw seismic social change hitting right about … now. It had already begun:

“We are being afflicted with a new disease … namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”

In 2025 American English, that means people were already losing jobs because we’d run out of bullshit to make people do. There literally wasn’t enough shit-doing to fully occupy the masses.

We’re still stuck in that stage today. That’s why, in April, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick promised to return factory technician jobs to the U.S.:

“[T]his is the new model, where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here.”

Lutnick painted this nightmare as a good thing. As if Lutnick or any human ever dreamt of that for themselves or their kids.

Lutnick’s vision only makes sense in a culture of the dignity of work. He’s filling the job vacuum our productivity created by economising ye olde use of labour.

But shoveling our grandkids into ye olde labour vacuum traps us in Keynes’s technological unemployment stage. Freezing the pendulum in 1930 prevents us from moving toward the destiny Keynes imagined.

There would, he acknowledged, first come an adjustment stage. We had already been brainwashed, he wrote, “trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.” So Keynes worried that we would struggle with all our newfound free time. (There is no record of Keynes foreseeing easy access to porn.)

He had reason for concern, because he saw the shitty performance of the idle rich in his day as they pioneered this strange fourth dimension of free time. “To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing!”

Brother, you have no idea.

Keynes acknowledged that our brainwashing about work, the existential horror at “idleness,” would at first demand some labor, no matter how redundant or ginned up.

“For many ages to come the old Adam [Eden’s landscaper] will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines.”

Outside the home, the labor of industry and commerce would be “as widely shared as possible.” We would, as Keynes dryly put it, “spread the bread thin on the butter.” How would this fantastic World Of The Future of 2030 spread commercial labor to mitigate humanity’s initial unease with free time?

“Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!”

Yes. Jesus, yes.

And ultimately, Keynes predicted, humanity would figure out how to live lives of leisure better than shitty-ass idiots with illions of dollars did then and do today:

“I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it to-day, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs.”

Eventually, the humanity of 2030 and beyond would reject the moral fundament on which politics today stand:

“We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. ... The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

Despite this epic diss track — “disgusting morbidity,” yo! — Keynes’s dream of a hundred years ago is invisible in our politics today.

When Brown launched his Dignity of Work Institute, he said, “Workers keep telling us the status quo isn’t working for them and their families, but neither party — neither party — has an agenda to create the dramatic change that workers want and the dramatic change that workers are demanding.”

But honestly? Even workers today aren’t demanding the dramatic change that Keynes thought we would achieve just five years from now. Neither are the parties. Or Brown, for that matter.

But the days of Keynes — the days in which we did imagine our descendants enjoying the new-found bounty of nature — weren’t that long ago in the scheme of things. They’re just a blink if we look at humanity’s journey since the dawn of everything.

Which means the dream’s not so far removed that we can’t revive it. We just have to remember it. And then we have some work to do.

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TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.