From The Boston Globe
By James Carroll

Labor Day is a marker in time, the end of a season and the beginning of one. As agrarian societies defined their calendars by events of the farm, the school gives shape to the year in contemporary America. Today’s holiday originated as a labor movement observance intended to honor the worker with a break from work, yet it has evolved into the signal that the time of leisure, or simply the slacking off of August, is over. Pencils sharp, shoes shined, show up: September is here. Back-to-school is in the air, and everyone breathes it.

I am often struck by how hard everyone is working. Harder than before, it seems. To be stuck in rush-hour traffic in the early morning is to be surrounded by people who are dutifully making their ways to desks and benches and counters and nursing stations and keyboards and cement mixers and cash registers and stools. At the wheels of their vehicles, they may be blank-eyed or dazed; they may be nodding to the music of the radio; they may be dreamily watching nothing but the bumper of the car ahead. But what diligence they display! What patience! Workers of all kinds — pick up trucks and limos in the same daily snarl — are exactly alike in this. The whole population is driven by the discipline of work, with everyone taking the clock’s demand for granted.

To notice this most mundane fact of life is to be amazed by it. The morning commute puts on full display what makes this nation so productive.

How did human beings come to this ingenious mode of organization? The myth is that life “by the sweat of the brow” was a consequence of the Fall, the wages of sin, in which case work is defined by obligation and necessity. Work is burdensome, a defiance of how we’re meant to be. If we could just keep August going forever, that’s what we would do, no? But why, then, is September so universally marked by the burst of energy with which tasks are resumed? The thrill of the fresh start. Disclaimers aside, not even schoolchildren regret the return to class.

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