A Labor Day message from WREN - thank you rural America.
Sue Lani Madsen, Founder & President
When a politician wants to show solidarity with the working class, it's never a photo shoot with workers in suits and white shirts around a conference table,
or a field of heads focused on computers in cubicles. As necessary to a modern society as that work might be, when we talk about labor it brings to mind blue collars and big equipment. Many times that photogenic labor is posed in a rural setting. Farm and ranch work meets the modern definition of a blue-collar job as the kind of employment where you take a shower after work instead of before.
No civilization has ever survived without valuing the rural agriculture that feeds its urban population.
Modern agriculture at every scale of operation makes use of all the internet apps and accounting software as any other business, but when done well it means being tuned into the land, the soil, and the seasons. Agriculture is an art as well as a science, a culture and not just a business. It is a culture that demands calendared holidays take a back seat to the needs of tending to livestock or the cycle of planting, nurturing and harvesting crops.
Which explains why on the Labor Day holiday weekend I am at my desk typing this post while waiting for my husband to move our goat herd.
Today he and the goats are coming back to the ranch after grazing the western edge of the City of Spokane to reduce fire fuels.
Physical labor and its immediate tangible results bring an intrinsic satisfaction that one doesn’t often get from “totting up a ledger” like the bankers’ song in “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank”. He’ll be tired tonight but it will be a good tired, better than my day spent at a desk sorting out the never-ending filing and bookkeeping necessary for every small business.
Rural communities share the working class, heartland values identified by Newsweek Editor Batya Ungar-Sargon in her book “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed American’s Working Men and Women.”
It’s a belief in the value of all hard work and the appreciation of a good job defined as something that needs doing, brings satisfaction when done well and pays “enough.”
Not too little, not lavishly compensated and extravagantly bonused, but enough.
My colleague and administrative right-hand (but semi left leaning) man on this project launching the WREN, Jim Hedemark, reminded me to put in a plug for organized labor and the union roots of Labor Day.
“There is a reason why we see the imagery of the American blue-collar worker at Labor Day. Machinists, high-voltage line workers, nurses, pipetrades, truck drivers, farmers - politicians want to convey a connection with honest, hardworking heartland values,” Hedemark texted me today.
Hedemark continued, “Then months after the election season the very same folks who were so sought after for the photo op are dismissed as rubes when it’s time to ramrod virtue-signaling aspirational legislation through committees. ”
The WREN has a mission to keep those voices and heartland values singing loudly in Olympia.
Today remember to take satisfaction in any job well done, whether washing the dishes or mending a fence. Join me in celebrating Labor Day with this timeless wisdom:
So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him?
Ecclesiastes 3:22