No, Low-Wage Workers Aren’t Lazy. They’re on Strike.

I write these words on Labor Day, a holiday that President Grover Cleveland decided should come around in September rather than May because he worried about the socialist connotations of May Day, and the fact that May 1 was too close for comfort to the anniversary of the Haymarket affair, which happened on May 4, 1886.

We’ve long since ceased celebrating labor in this country. In fact, what we mostly do now is talk smack about workers of all kinds. This has taken on a special ferocity in right-wing circles since the onset of the pandemic and the government’s response. The checks the government has been sending people, according to the right, prove that America’s working poor are a burden—a bunch of indolent do-nothings who’d rather sit at home and collect a government check than be out there in the world sprinkling salt crystals on pretzels or wiping down the leatherette interiors at the local car wash.

I take the opposite view. The fact that people would rather cash a government check than perform menial, underpaid work is an encouraging sign. It’s a form of protest against the way our economy has evolved over the last 40 years, and it’s a welcome development that we can only hope forces a change in the way our corporate and political classes think about labor.