Labor Built Your House
Yesterday was (American) Labor Day, in which we recognize the efforts of the American labor movement. It is a celebration of unions specifically, and the working class generally, and the many people who were killed trying to end child labor, and provide a modicum of protections for adult workers.
(Fun fact: we don't celebrate Labor Day with the rest of the world on 1 May, even though it marks an American worker's riot because, eww, socialism. What an eye-rollingly American take on 'honoring' the working class and standing in solidarity with the rest of the world.)
It's intended to be spent in the streets, reminding the ruling class of the precariousness of their position, and everybody else that the bare minimum of wage and workplace condition protections were won through actual bloodshed, not sternly worded emails to your representative. And that honoring labor, at this wild, exhausting, hope-filled moment on earth, is still about social change, and the making of beauty.
I think about labor as a concept because I speak to a lot of people about how they feel about workers in their home. Your relationship to labor impacts how your house sustains you spiritually and financially, and how much beauty you get to live with. Honoring labor, from an animist perspective, produces beauty. Much more than, “you get what you pay for”, it’s about the through line of energy and intention in the monetary exchange for the work being performed, and the investment of attention of detail you are willing to put into the things you live with.
Why? Because labor is material. It's working with the tangible, rather than the conceptual. And that, my friend, is the animate force at work. And labor (and the animate force in the lumber and the tools and the hands holding them) built your house. Consultants did not build your house, nor pretty images you collect online.
There are two things I see stand in the way of amazing work getting done in your home.
First is that we are starved for created beauty, for the sort of spaces and objects that inspire, where the effort to make it, and the dance between material and maker echoes years after the work was completed. Done well, and properly maintained, these places come alive.
If most of the spaces you are in are wall to wall cheap garbage, you forget how transporting a beautifully made piece of furniture is, or a doorway, or the value of this thing called fine art. In that way we've lost our discernment. It's why a coat of white paint on rotting siding tricks people into paying more for a home. Nobody benefits from that in the long run, not least of whom is the siding itself.
The second is our fear of The Working Class. The working class bogeyman was the thing our immigrant nation aspired away from. But now, leaving the C-Suite to farm seaweed or buy a loom are peak career flexes. In a world where 40 year old PhDs are still paying off their education and cannot afford a home, (and wearing a hoodie is something only the boss can do) tell me the difference between white and blue collar. It's obsolete as a signifier in every way.
Minimum wage, which hasn't moved in almost 20 years (!) at $7.25 has not kept pace with the price of a pack of butter, which is $8 now. Meanwhile, we keep creating billionaires. (And I do mean, “we”.) The nature of the inequities are so axiomatic of the broken system we continue to uphold at our own peril, that the heartbreaking vulgarity of it no longer shocks us. But it should.
Craft and labor suffer in this system. And by extension, our relationship with the animate, which is ultimately about respect for and relationality with material.
What I'm saying is: Our national relationship to the trades, and to craft, and to the lower arts, (again, with the language) in general is complicated, classist, and creating a cheap, sad world in which to live. We need to honor labor again, in substantive ways, if we are to make beautiful spaces again.
Labor built your house. The dignity of your space is in direct proportion to the respect afforded craft, and craftspeople. Drywall is an artform. A flat floor is too, though you may only complain when you notice its absence. So is the composition of plants in your yard, and the colors selected to harmonize together. So is the graphic designer who thought of how the repeats in fabric look on a chair, the furniture designer who understands proportion and ergonomics, and the upholsterer who knows what to do with that bolt of fabric. Your entire space is either a reflection of someone's training in their specialist field, or the absence of care for these things.
When we honor labor, we place ourselves back in the system that sustains us. It re-animates anything laying latent, asking for care, and in that way allows us to again participate in the world of the material around us. It's not more complicated than that.