Happy Earner (Labor) Day

Childbirth is classic labor. It’s painful, arduous, sweaty and miraculous. Most of us don’t consider ourselves laborers anymore, and for those that still do, the thinking to laboring ratio keeps going up. We owe a great debt to the laborers of the past who brought  Labor Day to the US 115 years ago, during a time when child labor and 7 days per week, 12 hour work days were standard through out the industrialized world. They changed the norms such that we now expect kids to be educated, rather than made to work, and we believe weekends off and retirement are normal. CEOs and everyone else have benefited from their efforts.

What’s different today is “how” we work. There are easily 100 times as many kinds of jobs today as there were in the 1890s when Labor Day began. The “how” defies broad classification. But, the “why”, does not. Whether CEOs, or janitors, we’re Homo Economicus. We work to earn to live.

Earning unites us. Renaming Labor Day as Earner Day places the emphasis squarely, where it belongs, on the need to earn, not  the means (laboring).

You may remember Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs from Psych 101. Mazlow studied the lives of Albert Einstein, and other greats to arrive at a hierarchy of human needs. Needs at the bottom of the triangle must be satisfied before needs at the top can be. What’s curious is to notice that about 50% of what we need derives directly from earning. It’s fundamental. One wonders how the world might change if we put  one tenth as much systematic effort into distributing earning, as we now invest elsewhere. Would the need for prisons and war be reduced?

Have a happy Earner Day, and a good Earner Year!