Appreciating Workers: A Personal History & Post Labor Day Thoughts

Labor Day is when we celebrate those who work, whether for pay or as a volunteer. We celebrate ourselves once a year with a day of rest, no with a day of mega sales!  We work so that we can consume!  Every year I think about the folks who work at minimum wage jobs, sometimes more than one of them, in order to feed and house themselves and their families.

Most Americans are descended from immigrants.  My grandmother came to this country at the age of 16 with nothing in her pockets.  She would not have been able to eat had it not been for the Salvation Army. They didn’t care that she was Jewish, not Christian. Later, once she was established, she donated money every year to them, in gratitude for their help for a poor immigrant. This happened in the early 1900’s. She found a low-wage job in one of the clothing sweat shops on the lower East Side of NYC, where she was able to work her way up from sweeper, to seamstress, to foreman, to designer.  She married an American-born man with 6 sisters.  A sign of his love for her was that he was willing to relocate from NYC to Cincinnati, OH.

My mother and her sister were born in Cincinnati in 1925 and 1923 respectively. My grandfather worked selling life insurance, and he used his savings to buy an apartment building of Single Room Occupancies with weekly rents in the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood. He had a vision that Cincinnati would expand into the OTR (as it is now known), because it was adjacent to the downtown, but he died decades before the neighborhood became the chic, restaurant and entertainment district it now is.  I was looking at Zillow listings in the neighborhood and saw that they have been turning some of those old apartment buildings into luxury (multi-million dollar) single family homes.

I tell this story, because although many immigrants come to this country to go to college and have good careers, there are also many immigrants who come to this country hoping just to have a safe and comfortable home for their families. They live in SRO’s, they work in factories, restaurants, hospitals, and home healthcare.  They work on farms, moving with the harvests across the country. They send money home to their families. These immigrants work hard, and their labor is crucial to the economy here and where they come from.

Many sources say that over 1 million immigrants have left the US workforce in the past 9 months, including many with legal documentation! They are afraid! This is creating a big hole in the economy, but more importantly, this shows us that our nation has abandoned its promise to welcome those in need. Emma Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus” from 1883, engraved on a bronze plaque mounted on the base of the Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your tired, your poor; Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

On this post Labor Day morning, join me in thanking all workers, here and around the world, whose labor make our lives possible.