Labor Day: The Work That Actually Feeds Us
Labor Day gets dressed up as a long weekend, a sale at the mall, or maybe a cookout with burgers and beer. The original meaning is buried under discount flyers and corporate slogans about “honoring workers.” Most of it is noise. The day isn’t supposed to be about buying more things you don’t need. It was meant to acknowledge labor itself, the sweat, the calluses, the effort that keeps everything moving.
But here’s the catch: most of the labor we celebrate today feels abstract. It’s meetings, emails, quarterly reports. It’s a layer of work stacked on top of other people’s labor, disconnected from anything you can touch or eat. If you stop and ask what actually keeps people alive, what actually sustains us, the answer is much smaller and much more direct. Food, shelter, heat in the winter, care for the sick, teaching the young. That’s the core. That’s labor in its most honest form.
On our farm, labor looks like collecting eggs at sunrise. It’s butchering rabbits when orders come in, breaking down feed bags, or pulling weeds before they choke out the beans. None of it is glamorous, but all of it is necessary. The kind of work where, at the end of the day, you can point to a meal, or a pile of hay stacked in the shed, and know you did something that matters.
That’s not the labor most people celebrate on Labor Day anymore. Instead, we celebrate consumption: the grill at the cookout, the beer in the cooler, the deals at the big-box store. The labor that produced those things, farming, trucking, factory shifts, goes unseen. The holiday has been flipped inside out.
Maybe it’s time to reclaim it. Not with speeches or slogans, but with recognition. Instead of asking what we can buy on Labor Day, ask what labor actually feeds you. Who grew the food, raised the animals, fixed the roof, stacked the firewood? That’s the labor worth honoring. The kind that doesn’t get an email from HR or a thirty-second commercial, but still makes life possible.
This year, we’ll spend Labor Day the same as every other day, working. Because animals don’t care what the calendar says, and weeds don’t wait politely for Tuesday. But that’s fine. Labor Day isn’t supposed to be about rest from work. It’s supposed to be about valuing work itself. And in a world that confuses consumption with celebration, maybe the truest way to honor labor is to get back to the kind that feeds, shelters, and sustains.