Labor Day

Today in many countries around the world we celebrate Labor Day. It's a day to honor, remember and celebrate not only the work many of us do, and which produces everything we need (and also what we don't) for life. As I noted in yesterday's post, perhaps it's not a coincidence that the festivities of fertility and Labor Day happen on the same day.

During Labor Day we honor the work - from the humblest to the most important - that brings bread to the table, but also gets economies moving, countries growing. It has always been hard, and often happened that workers got exploited. Overworked, poorly paid and even not paid at all, mistreated and in some cases to death. The cases of little children worked to death in mines, or the women who sewed but wouldn't get paid enough to support themselves, even less their families. Many fights had to be fought in order to ensure conditions that make work a just and dignified activity, where there no side preys on the other.

The battles were hard and many fell. It wasn't easy to gain the respect and fight for many of the rights we have today, and ensure the world wide watch organizations, such as the ILO, that support workers. In this sense it's upsetting to see Governments and people disregarding them, and even calling those rights "unjustified abuses"  claiming that Unions look only to ensure people get lazy and a few get to be paid while doing nothing. The "flexibilization" of work goes against what was so hard to get in the begining, and the empty talk trashing stability, as if having a job and an income you can relay on where a bad thing, making you "lazy", instead of thinking that it gives you calm, certainly and you can avoid unnecesary stress, not having to wake up everyday without not knowing whether you'll have a job that day or not.

I'd like to take this chance to remember the struggles, how we pair the fertility of work with the human rights and the respect, the peace and the acceptance that we are all alike, that we all must be respected, that workers are not slaves to their jobs, that patrons are not all mightym but have to remember that in order to produce they need the workers, and thus, as we should respect Mother Earth, observe the power of fertility, also we should remember that all jobs are full of dignity, if done with honesty, that no job empowers anyone to look down on the other. No job makes you more and no job makes you less than others. Money by itself doesn't move the world, is work what moves the world and makes it breathe, let's not forget that.