Second Harvest Column: Labor Day Thoughts

By Lois Rockhill

I am writing this on Labor Day Monday morning sitting outside on my rustic deck. Grandson Nathan is playing in the tent that he and grandpa Erv slept out in last night.

He has his Thomas train engines and track in there. Oops, here he is again asking a million questions!

We have a Johnny Cash CD playing in my Mom’s room. I listened with her to the ballad of John Henry about the steel driving man who died driving spikes into railroad rails faster than the steam drill could.

My dad was a railroad man and while he didn’t drive spikes, he did the backbreaking work of shoveling coal into the coal burners that ran the steam engines. He didn’t challenge technology like John Henry did but he was replaced too. When the diesel engines took over, Dad was out of work.

Labor Day is about more than hard physical work, but that’s where I’m grounded. Railroads, steel mills, truck-driving.

Those are the sights and sounds of my childhood. Here in East Central Indiana lots of adults are grounded in factory work where their parents worked, they worked and they thought their children would make a solid living. There have been big changes over in North Eastern Ohio where I grew up and here in the community where I’ve lived most of my life. But we all keep chugging. We find new jobs, make adjustments, learn to live with less or with more.

Labor seems defined now by the service industry and technology. I think about United Way when I think of the huge changes in industry. The main stay of this community organization’s good works was the workplace donation program at the factories as well as corporate gifts from those entities. With the decline in workers came the decline in donations. With the relocation of factories came the elimination of corporate gifts.

What I liked about the workplace donation was the compassionate connection between labor — the everyday man and woman — and the community. These people might be taking care of family, giving to their church, lending a hand to a friend, yet they dug deeper into their jeans pockets to make a difference for people they didn’t even know — in their community.

It’s a challenge to harness this grass roots power today. People who may have worked in a factory are working for fast food restaurants, for landscape companies, growers, small businesses. They are still there providing the labor to make our society run, but their wages are smaller and their place of employment more fluid.

I hope we continue to find ways to open the United Way of giving to all laborers. We are helping each other, tightening the human connections by doing so. Whether we have a hammer over our shoulders, operate a steam drill or do any of the thousands of tasks that make up the fabric of our society, we are in this together and for the long haul.

I can’t help but feel good about labor on Labor Day!

Lois Rockhill is Executive Director of  Second Harvest Food Bank of East Central Indiana, Inc.

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