Labor Day

When Work Remembers The Worker

Tomorrow we celebrate Labor Day.

For most of us, that means a long weekend, a barbecue, maybe one last trip before summer disappears. But Labor Day began with a much more disruptive question:

What is a human being worth?

Not what can they produce. Not how much can they accomplish. Not how efficiently can they work.

What are they worth?

By the late 1800s, America was exploding with possibility. Railroads were crossing the continent. Factories were filling cities. Steel was rising. Industry was booming. Fortunes were being made.

America was becoming an economic powerhouse.

But underneath all that prosperity were millions of people working incredibly long hours, often six or seven days a week, sometimes twelve or fourteen hours a day. Children worked. Factories were dangerous. Job security was almost nonexistent. Workers had few protections and very little power.

The system was creating enormous wealth.

But it was also raising a question we are still asking:

Who gets the benefit of the system?

In 1882, about 10,000 workers walked through the streets of New York City in what became the first Labor Day parade.

Think about that.

They stopped working.

And walked.

Together.

Their presence was the message:

Look at us. We are here. We built this. We matter.

There is some debate about who first imagined Labor Day. Peter McGuire, a carpenter and labor leader, often gets the credit. Matthew Maguire, a machinist and union organizer, may actually have been the one who proposed it.

Maybe there is something fitting about not knowing exactly whose idea it was.

Because Labor Day was never really about one person.

It was about the people whose names don’t end up on buildings… the carpenter, the machinist, the railroad worker, the seamstress, the miner, the factory worker, the immigrant. The person who shows up every morning, does the work, goes home tired, and does it again tomorrow.

And somewhere in the middle of that history another idea began gaining momentum:

Eight hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what we will.

That phrase gets me.

Because buried inside it is a deeply spiritual idea:

You are more than what you produce.

You need work. But you also need rest. You need relationships. Play. Worship. Time when you aren’t accomplishing anything at all.

Which sounds remarkably like something God said thousands of years earlier.

Six days you shall labor.

And then…

stop.

Sabbath.

It is striking that one of the commands God gave Israel after freeing them from Egypt concerned their work.

Egypt had taught them another way.

Pharaoh’s economy said:

More bricks.

More production.

More output.

And when the people couldn’t keep up?

Take away their straw and demand the same number of bricks.

That is Pharaoh.

More.

Faster.

Again.

So God leads these slaves into freedom and says something revolutionary:

One day every week, you stop.

You don’t make bricks. You don’t build cities. You don’t increase production. You don’t prove your worth.

You rest.

And not just you. Your children rest. Your servants rest. The immigrant rests. Even the animals rest.

Because Sabbath wasn’t simply a day off.

It was a declaration:

You are not a machine.

You are not property.

You are not what you produce.

Your worth does not come from your productivity.

Your worth comes from God.

Perhaps this is why Labor Day matters more than we realize.

By 1894, after years of strikes, violence, organizing, conflict between corporations and workers, and growing social unrest, the United States made Labor Day a federal holiday.

The nation was trying to say something:

Workers matter.

The people doing the work matter.

Human dignity matters.

And over the decades that followed, the labor movement helped secure things most of us now barely think about: shorter workdays, weekends, restrictions on child labor, workplace safety, overtime protections, minimum wage, and workers’ compensation.

Those changes did not happen because powerful people suddenly decided they were good ideas.

People struggled for them.

People marched.

People organized.

Some lost jobs.

Some were beaten.

Some died.

That makes Labor Day considerably more interesting than a mattress sale.

And maybe there is another question worth asking.

Because Pharaoh hasn’t disappeared.

Pharaoh just changes clothes.

Sometimes Pharaoh is a corporation. Sometimes it is an organization. Sometimes it is a church.

And sometimes…

Pharaoh lives inside us.

More.

Accomplish more.

Build more.

Grow more.

Earn more.

Answer another email.

Take another meeting.

Prove yourself again.

Until somehow we begin believing that exhaustion is evidence that our lives matter.

It isn’t.

I say this as someone who loves vision, movement, possibility, and the next thing. I can turn even meaningful work into something that consumes me if I’m not careful.

Which is why perhaps Labor Day is not merely a celebration of work.

Maybe it is also a reminder of the limits of work.

Work is good. Meaningful work is a gift. Creating something matters. Building something matters. Serving people matters.

But work makes a terrible god.

Because eventually it will always ask you for one more brick.

Jesus offers another way:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

Not increased productivity.

Rest.

Maybe that is the word worth carrying into Labor Day.

You have work to do.

Absolutely.

There are things in this world only you can contribute. Places where your gifts matter. People who need what you carry.

But you are not valuable because you work.

You work because you are already valuable.

There is an enormous difference.

So tomorrow perhaps we raise a glass to the workers who came before us – the people who marched, organized, struggled, and insisted that human beings were worth more than the economic value they could produce.

And then perhaps we practice the freedom they fought for.

We stop.

We eat.

We laugh.

We sit around a table.

We take a walk.

We notice the people we love.

We receive the world again.

And for one day, at least, we leave the bricks where they are.

Because there will always be more bricks.

But there is only one life.

And it is far too sacred to spend all of it working.