Fruits of our Labor Day

Last year, the Bloomington Faculty Council finally voted to institute Labor Day as a holiday in the 2008-2009 academic year. Alas, today our classes on the Bloomington campus continue to meet, while our satellite campuses (and Purdue) frolic, presumably in flower-filled fields flowing with rivers of Rolling Rock. \nOK, you’re probably wondering why we’re complaining at all, especially if the schedule is changing next year. Well, just because Labor Day will rightfully become a holiday in 2008 doesn’t eliminate the injustice of our laborious Labor Day at IU. Administration offices will be closed today, as well as those of various other support staff, but professors and grad students will still toil. We’re not trying to suggest that the act of coming into class counts as work for undergraduate students. Can’t we agree, though, that if President Michael McRobbie gets the day off, professors should as well? \nAlso, consider that IU’s Labor Day addition for 2008 only passed the Bloomington Faculty Council by a sliver-thin 23-22 vote. We still have to persuade hearts and minds that losing one day of class in the name of labor solidarity is in the best interests of all. Our calendar already has substantial holes as far as federal and state holidays go. While state employees get Columbus Day, Veterans Day and Labor Day off, IU’s faculty and graduate student instructors will still come to work, as will we students.\nIt’s not that we hate coming to class. If there’s one thing we love, it’s class! (OK, maybe there are other things we love more, but not many.) We’re just asking for a little equality, please. We understand the appeal of having an extra class on Monday to avoid a hole in the schedule, but why should convenience stand in the way of what’s right?\nSamuel Gompers, the famed labor organizer and founder of the American Federation of Labor, said of Labor Day: “All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day... is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.”\nWe’re not nearly as deserving as steel mill workers without a union or seamstresses chained to desks, but as Gompers himself notes, Labor Day is a holiday for all people, a day of rest to memorialize all the days of toil. Doesn’t anyone see the irony in Labor Studies students having to come to class on Labor Day?\nSo, this fine Labor Day, we do not endorse the cutting of class. We wouldn’t encourage such civil disobedience in the case of a cause that has already been won. We just ask that you think about the importance of such a day where all people can gather, liberated for one small day, and talk smack about Purdue and our own administrators as they sit at home and bask in the fruits of our Labor Day.