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Labor means workBy Trent Loos Labor Day as a day to be labor free? Not any more. I have read and heard more people this year talking about the irony of Labor Day as a national holiday than any year before. In fact, early reports indicate that 40 percent of the American workforce worked on Labor Day, not because they wanted to celebrate the day in authentic style but rather because they needed the revenue or there was a job that had to get done. Labor Day may have started in New York City in 1882 as a day to celebrate the labor of the hard-working American citizen but, today, it has more to do with the end of summer than it does celebrating those who actually labor. Since 1979, hourly earnings for 80 percent of American workers-those in private-sector, nonsupervisory jobs-have risen by just 1 percent, according to The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, a book by New York Times labor correspondent Steven Greenhouse. At the same time, Greenhouse writes, “worker productivity has increased 60 percent. We’ve lost one in five manufacturing jobs since 2000, more than 2.5 million good jobs that paid middle-class wages and benefits.” Couple those statistics with this recent trend analysis and it isn’t too hard to figure out where all of the high paying jobs have gone. In 1980, foreign transactions of all kinds -trade of goods and services as well as investment earnings -equaled about one-quarter of the economy. In 2006, the most recent figure available, they reached nearly 39 percent of gross domestic product, according to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. Hey, the good news is that our nation’s largest employer has shown tremendous growth since 1980. The U.S. Census Bureau actually shows a decrease in the number of civilian employees of Uncle Sam in the past 15 years but that number is severely misleading. In the past 20 years, the government has been using contractors instead of hiring full-time employees. The number of full-time employees stands right at 3 million but, when you include all military and contract workers, that figure is closer to 20 million people. Last week a new government report found that federal workers missed nearly 20 million hours of work in the past 6 years, costing taxpayers between $7 and $10 billion a year. In addition to that bit of discouraging news, the Heritage Foundation has taken this all to heart and developed an Index of Dependence on the Government. Their data uses 1980 as the benchmark with a score of 100. In the past nearly 30 years, the index shows that American citizens have grown in dependency on the government as indicated by their index in the year 2006 which is 227. More than one out of six Americans (18percent) may or may not be a sufficiently high percentage to trigger this as a concern. However, this percentage grows to 25 percent when federal and state employees are included. In 1962, the sum of these two categories (index participants and government employees) stood at 33.9 million. This total grew to 81.7 million by the end of 2005, an increase of 14 percent. This is two-and-a-half times the growth rate of the U.S. population over the same period of time and 1.3 times the growth rate of the population age 65 and above. Well, it appears as though we have figured out the make up of the 60 percent of the population that did not work on Labor Day. With the exception of our men and women in the military, who work every day to protect our freedom, government employees represent far too high of a percentage of the nation’s citizens. The worst part is that, unless we each step up to the plate and contribute to providing a solution, the landslide towards socialism will continue. People agree with me on a daily basis that we need smaller government and not larger; yet, they believe that because they are just one person nobody cares what they think. That is a mentality we cannot continue to have. Yes, I agree that it will take a lot of work to turn the tide away from dependence on Big Brother but isn’t that why the whole concept of Labor Day was initiated to begin with? Come to think of it, I think that is the concept that this great nation was built upon. Editor’s note: Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.FacesOfAg.com, or e-mail Trent at trent@loostales.com. 9/8/08 Date: 9/4/08
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