Celebrate jobs — while we still have them — on Labor Day

     We lose jobs, find jobs, love jobs, hate them, sometimes all at once.
     A lucky few snag their dream, early, then work with growing satisfaction and success.
     But most of us are like English poet Philip Larkin who, at 31, was stuck in his fourth year as an assistant librarian. He saw his job as a fat frog, plopped atop his true spirit, crushing it, and wrote the poem “Toads,” which begins:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

     No, he couldn’t. Larkin was a librarian for 30 years. We need that job, Larkin writes, “Just for paying a few bills.”
     With Labor Day this Monday, and the future of employment in question, thanks to AI and other disruptions, it might be worth pausing to consider the central role work holds in our lives.
     Our jobs define us. You can’t call someone “a housewife” in an obituary anymore — it’s considered demeaning. She “manages a household.” But nobody is “a person who plumbs.” We are plumbers, accountants, newspaper columnists.
     We also define our jobs, if we can, molding them to our purposes.
     “At first I was impressed with the time he spent in his office, arriving early and leaving late,” said Larkin’s employer. “It was only later that I realized that his office was also his study where he spent hours on his private writing as well as the work of the library.”
     For many, a job is the most significant part of their lives, second — maybe — to family. In that light, Labor Day should be more than a long weekend. It should be a big celebration, and once was, with Labor Day parades filled with professions, proud street sweepers in their dress whites, carrying their brooms like rifles.
     But machines sweep streets. Technology, that great job killer, looms over employment, threatening “the AI jobs apocalypse.” Half of white-collar jobs could be taken over by AI, according to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, with unemployment at 20%. Some think that view too dire.

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