The past Labor Day weekend was observed by families and friends throughout the nation with various trips, outings and other gatherings in celebration of the end of summer vacations and the beginning of September, the month of the autumnal equinox.
In 1882 Peter J. McGuire, founder of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters suggested a national holiday to honor the nation’s working people. In September of that same year, workers staged the first Labor Day parade in New York City. Organized labor then campaigned to make the day a national holiday. Oregon became the first state to do so and, in 1887, President Grover Cleveland signed a bill making Labor Day a national holiday in the United States.
Although the term labor defines physical, mental, or manual work for wages, there has always existed an attitude problem between management and labor (if nothing more) which adversely affects relations. Today, however, in many cases the only difference between the two, (aside from wages) is, as one elderly gentleman once told me, referring to city folks and country folks, “they’re just dumb about different things.”
Highly advanced science and technology in recent years has changed the face of labor. In ancient times labor was closely related to slavery. Victorious nations often made slaves of prisoners captured in war. Also many thousands of people were born into slavery. Aristotle described a slave as “a tool with life in it,” which defines the inhumane treatment which many have had to suffer for centuries.
How diametrically opposed is the concept of labor introduced by the Revelation of Baha’u’ llah in this Baha’i Era which elevates labor to the station of prayer when done in the right spirit. In this new Day of God, work, the arts, sciences and all crafts, are counted as worship when performed to the best of ones ability, conscientiously concentrating all of one’s forces on perfecting it, not for ones own profit but for the benefit of mankind.
Awareness of such theory is discernible in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s immoral Psalm of Life which begins: “Tell me not in mournful numbers Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, and things are not as they seem. Life is real, life is earnest and the grave is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returnest; was not spoken of the soul …” And, for the sake of brevity ends with: Let us then be up and doing with a heart for any fate. Still achieving, still pursuing. Learn to labor and wait.”
Both are becoming lost arts as giant corporations move their plants out of this country to take advantage of cheap labor and our impatient spoiled material society increasingly insists of getting everything they want NOW.
“Economy is the foundation of human prosperity,” we read in the Baha’i scriptures. “The spend thrift is always in trouble. Prodigality on the part of any person is an unpardonable sin. We must never live on others like a parasitic plant. Every person must have a profession whether it to be literary or manual and must live a clean, honest life, an example of purity to be imitated by others … The mind of a contented person is always peaceful and his heart at rest.”
