Another Labor Day has come and gone. I hope everyone had an enjoyable, relaxing day. For me, the day was appropriately named because it was a day of labor. My wife had prepared a nice long list of things that needed to be done around our house and property, and not one of the items listed involved sitting in the La-Z-Boy with a cold Bud and binge-watching The Beverly Hillbillies. Each item involved some type of hand or power tools and physical labor on my part. She’d obviously misinterpreted what the originators of the day had in mind when they named it.
Years back, I celebrated a particularly eventful Labor Day by painting our previous house. The current owners were quite upset. No, not really. When I was painting it, we were the current owners. While I was up on the ladder, I began getting pains in my back. My wife drove me to the Emergency Room, where the doctor discovered I had a kidney stone. It was my first one and it felt more like a kidney cinder block. It eventually passed, and the doctor put it in a little jar so I could admire it. It was as if I’d gone through labor and given birth to a tiny, round, ugly baby.
Staying with that line of thinking, some believe Labor Day is the day for expectant mothers in labor to give birth. Actually, in the United States, a woman gives birth to a baby every eight seconds. This woman must be stopped.
Labor Day was created by the Labor Movement in the late 19th Century (not to be confused with the Bowel Movement, which was organized eons earlier and never designated its own special day although Election Day would be a good choice) to honor the achievements and contributions of American workers. Not the Bowel Movement, the Labor Movement. The Bowel Movement was formed for other types of contributions.
I suppose you could include women giving birth in the Labor Movement because they were making a valuable contribution by bringing future union members into the world. Samuel Gompers was a key figure in the Labor Movement, which was initially formed because of the terrible working conditions in factories built in the burgeoning Industrial Age, not to be confused with the High Fructose Corn Syrup Age, which occurred later in the 20th Century. In fact, working conditions in the factories were so bad that the microwave ovens in break rooms only could be programmed for 10 seconds, thereby causing many vending machine chicken tacos to be undercooked, resulting in numerous cases of workers suffering with salmonella, not to be confused with salmon croquettes, which is a game played with hoops, wooden mallets, and a yak.
As a result of inhumane conditions such as these, most manufacturing was moved to China, so their people could have the same horrible work experience, as retribution for saturating the American market with cheap Chinese Finger Traps.
At any rate, Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894 and America has never been the same…my piece of America anyway, as I pull weeds, clean garages, paint walls, and celebrate the birth of my first kidney stone.