Labor daydreams

By Lowell Ponte

Celebrate Labor Day all this week. In a few years this federal holiday to honor workers will be marking only the labor being done by taxed robots that have replaced blue-collar humans.

America’s Labor Day on the first Monday in September is unusual. Much of the world celebrates May 1, the ancient pagan day of fertility known as May Day, as “International Workers’ Day.”

This quasi-religious day was culturally expropriated by the Socialist, Anarchist and Communist parties of Europe, the United States, and elsewhere as a tool of class warfare – a day to teach workers they are the enemies of bourgeois companies, and to celebrate the coming destruction of capitalism.

The “last good Democrat president,” conservative Grover Cleveland, opposed having a worker holiday that honored worldwide socialism set on a day that celebrated radical events such as the Haymarket Affair. President Cleveland worked to establish a very different worker day that became a federal holiday in 1894.

Thus the ideological left has a worker holiday on May Day, when plowed fields are being planted in hopes of a future harvest. It would become the day that the Soviet Union paraded its missiles through Moscow. But in the United States, we honor workers in early September in a time when bountiful crops are beginning to be harvested.

May Day is a time of hostility, when proletarian workers have labor daydreams of confiscating capitalist property. But Labor Day is an American day celebrated by prosperous workers who have become consumers and enjoy the fruits of capitalism at abundant holiday sales.

A major goal of the left was to organize workers into labor unions, which would extort dues from worker paychecks and then kick back a hefty piece of that money to the Democratic Party in campaign contributions. The Democrats, in turn, would give union fat cats the power to compel such dues. Ironically, the unions were so good at coercing higher pay from companies that 35 percent of blue collar unionized workers began to think like Republicans, concerned about how high their taxes had become.

Soon after World War II, nearly 35 percent of American factory workers were unionized. But today only about 6 percent of American blue-collar workers are union members, and union bosses keep trying to collect from them dues that can no longer be forced.

The Democratic Party now pushes to end secret ballot elections where workers can choose whether to join a union or not. Democrats instead want to impose “card check,” which means a single worker can be surrounded by a dozen union goons with baseball bats, who demand that he sign a card “voting” to unionize his company.

This, of course, is the kind of coercion, violence and organized criminality that has long been associated with organized labor. Before the Democratic Party unleashed its masked gangs of Klansmen and Antifa to strong-arm its way to power through intimidation, labor unions set the standard for political violence in America.

The one sector in which unions still hold significant power is not among blue-collar factory workers, but among white- and pink-collared government workers. Roughly 37 percent of government workers are unionized, largely because they have little or no say in the matter.

Local or national Democrat politicians or bureaucrats simply order whole government departments unionized. It is a perfect example of money laundering. A local politician elected with union support and cash sits across from this union at bargaining time, giving union members lavish and unaffordable pensions and other rich goodies funded by taxpayers in exchange for his reelection. Such unions have bankrupted many American cities.

How much longer will a Labor Day remain that celebrates such work? The robot workers that are beginning to replace human laborers will not wear a collar of any color. As a stopgap, politicians may create no-show, make-work government jobs that will provide people with paychecks and pensions. These will be replaced by a Universal Basic Income that all humans will receive, whether they work or not – to be funded by heavy taxes imposed on the robots that occupy the jobs.

Companies will not like high taxes on their robots, from hamburger flippers to automated truck drivers. But investors will be content to have workers who work 24 hours per day, never get sick or lazy, never betray their company or bosses, never take Labor Day off or retire, and never go out on strike or threaten to depose capitalism.

Businesses have their own labor daydreams, too.

Lowell Ponte is a former Reader’s Digest Roving Editor. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other major publications. His latest paper co-authored with Craig R. Smith, “Protecting Your Wealth in Today’s America: How You Invest Your Savings Requires New Thinking,” shows how to rethink several areas of investment to protect and grow your savings in our new schizophrenic politics. For a free, postpaid copy, call toll-free 800-630-1492.

Lowell Ponte

Lowell Ponte is a former think tank futurist and retired roving editor at Reader's Digest. He is coauthor, with Craig R. Smith, of "Money, Morality & the Machine: Smith's Law in a Lawless, Over-Governed Age." Ponte's articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and major other publications. Read more of Lowell Ponte's articles here.


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