The Creation of Labor Day Was A Triumph, But Today's Jobless Rate Is A Tragedy

On Monday, countless Americans lived an Onion headline when they spent their Labor Day holiday taking a break from looking for work.

It was cute and all, but not so funny.

In New York, we had our annual parade in Brooklyn where our Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his virtually unheard-of 69 percent approval rating cheered on revelers from a float in the West Indian Day parade.

But when the party was over, many went home and wondered how they would pay their bills in a city where the cost of living keeps rising; deed theft is an epidemic; and the working class keeps getting priced out of the city.

But New York City isn't alone.

While the government underreports the actual jobless rate at 4.1 percent, the real unemployment rate in the U.S. is likely much higher, closer to 25 percent. That means nearly 1 in 4 American adults are out of work. And the number is likely even higher for Black Americans, considering the more than 600,000 Black women who have been pushed out of the workforce since 2025.

Being unemployed or underemployed is a job. And not a rewarding one. Just an endless grind with little to no payoff, as workers stay trapped in a cycle of near-poverty they cannot escape. If our government were functional, they'd enact some kind of modern "New Deal" to reinvigorate the economy and protect workers; instead, grifters are grifting, and the lettuce is trying to kill us.

We're rapidly going backward to the pitiful conditions that created Labor Day in the first place.

History Is In Reruns Again

Labor Day became a holiday in 1894, twenty-nine years after slavery ended in the U.S.

It was the height of the Industrial Revolution, and impoverished and immigrant workers often labored in unsafe conditions for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, just to barely survive. Child labor was rampant, as children as young as 5 and 6 toiled for less than pennies in mills, mines, and factories where workers didn't have access to clean, breathable air and often died in horrid, unsafe conditions.

The Workers' Rights Movement was born out of this tragedy, where workers of all backgrounds were often exploited and crushed by the wheel of crass capitalism, fueled by the greed of the Robber Barons of old. Labor Day was a day of defiance against the wealthy who controlled almost every aspect of the average American's life by controlling the industries where they toiled.

Today, they've been replaced by tech magnates who seek to replace us all with AI because they can't be bothered to do anything without utilizing some form of non-consensual, slave labor—even if it turns into HAL 9000.

So it's no shock that the current occupant of the White House, who spent Labor Day 2026 assailing Democrats, thinks we have too many "non-working" holidays in the U.S., and said as much last year.

At the same time, the Republican Party, under the president's orders, has slashed protections for workers and safety rules for our food and the environment under the guise of "saving money" and maximizing profit that never "trickles down" to workers as part of Project 2025.

People are literally being poisoned by lettuce and foreign beef, as if Upton Sinclair didn't write The Jungle in 1906, sparking the food safety movement.

Welcome to the Jungle

In Sinclair's novel, the character Nicholas Schliemann advocates for socialism as he describes how our unregulated industries have destroyed countless lives.

“So long as we have wage slavery," answered Schliemann, "it matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to find people to perform it. But just as soon as labor is set free, then the price of such work will begin to rise. So one by one the old, dingy, and unsanitary factories will come down— it will be cheaper to build new; and so the steamships will be provided with stoking machinery, and so the dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found for their products. In exactly the same way, as the citizens of our Industrial Republic become refined, year by year the cost of slaughterhouse products will increase; until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing— and how long do you think the custom would survive then?— To go on to another item— one of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption; and one of the consequences of civic administration by ignorant and vicious politicians, is that preventable diseases kill off half our population. And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others. They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them; and so, of course, they remain as centers of contagion, poisoning the lives of all of us, and making happiness impossible for even the most selfish. For this reason I would seriously maintain that all the medical and surgical discoveries that science can make in the future will be of less importance than the application of the knowledge we already possess, when the disinherited of the earth have established their right to a human existence.”

The book is more than 120 years old and is increasingly becoming relevant again.

I learned about The Jungle in middle school when we studied the workers' rights movement and the Industrial Revolution. We also read Charles Dickens and discussed child labor laws. But I went to school before No Child Left Behind deprioritized the humanities, the arts, and critical thinking in favor of math, test-taking, and rote memorization. And I grew up in the wake of the prosperity that came after the WWII boom and ended with President Ronald Reagan's era of greed. Since then, the American worker has experienced a slow death from Republican dismantling of their gains after popular Democratic initiatives like the New Deal, the GI Bill, Social Security, Welfare, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Great Society plan, which all benefited poor and working-class people.

When I was a child in the '80s, if you made $65,000 a year in the Midwest, you had 2.5 children, owned two cars, a nice home in the suburbs, and your mother was likely a stay-at-home mom. That's what I experienced growing up in Missouri: my father worked in the aerospace industry, and my mother, a former school teacher, stayed home to raise my two sisters and me.

Today, $65,000 can barely cover the rent on your studio apartment you live in with a roommate.

In 1989, Homer Simpson debuted on Fox TV as a poor working slob. Thirty-seven years later, he looks amazingly wealthy because who can afford a house and three kids with a wife who does not work?

A rich person. That's who.

What used to be an average, middle-class reality is now a far-away dream, and it's only getting further away with so many out of work.

The cost of living has only gone up since the 80s, while the minimum wage has stayed stagnant as wealth is concentrated at the top. Workers' wages are being stolen to fuel the dreams of people who have no vision for the future beyond their own enrichment. And these are people so bored with their wealth that they have more ambitions about the moon, Mars, and the stars than solving any crisis on Earth. So bored, they seem morally demented, completely detached, on drugs, or all three, as they dream of being modern-day pharaohs.

And with this government, they just might get that status.

Organize, Vote, and Defeat or Rise, Repeat

This is why the Midterms are paramount. And why the current occupant is working so hard to sow discord and confusion around voting.

Just as these notions around exploitation were unpopular in 1894, being broke and unemployed on a day meant to commemorate workers' rights is equally disliked. In fact, the entire GOP platform of wage slavery, forever war, and contaminated food is grossly unpopular. But the United States is so politically polarized that the fear on the Right isn't that they've lost their base; it's that the crowd of racists and billionaire dick-riders simply won't be motivated to show up and vote against their interests like usual. So the solution? Suppress all the votes, try to destroy mail-in voting, send ICE to the polls, and hope no one from any party shows up.

Can't lose an election if no one votes in it!

Black people are pretty aware of what they need to do. From Mississippi to Georgia to Florida, we are organizing, we are registering, and we are pushing progressive candidates. But some disaffected white voters still seem confused and stuck in paralyzing inertia. So to those unsure what to do, I offer the following advice—organize and protest like someone is trying to integrate your neighborhood or school.

Take it to the streets like you're trying to stop the lawful change of power on January 6th.

Strategize like you're preparing to stop the progress and stifle the rights of formerly enslaved people across the South post-Reconstruction.

Learn your history—your real history—so you understand who your enemy actually is. Because the same white people who pushed Black women out of the workplace are the same white people who are denying you your reproductive rights and derailing science. They are the same white people who are exploiting your labor and keeping you poor. They are the same ones protecting abusers and pedophiles.

The white people Black people have problems with are the same white people that other white people should despise. They are those currently in power, with all the money, stealing everything not nailed down, who want to replace you with a robot.

Forget trans people, the word "woke," and immigrants—White people's beef should be with other white people.

So organize, protest, and vote accordingly.