Labor Day was meant to honor workers. To celebrate the people who build, carry, and keep the country alive. But look around. The holiday feels hollow when the American middle class has been gutted and sold off piece by piece to feed the top 1 percent.
For decades, wages have stagnated while productivity soared. The wealth created by workers didn’t flow back to them. It was siphoned upward, consolidated into fortunes so massive they could never be spent in a thousand lifetimes. Meanwhile, ordinary families stretch paychecks just to cover rent, food, and health care. The promise of steady work leading to stability has become a relic.
The Illusion of Prosperity
Politicians still talk about the American Dream, but it has become marketing copy for a country that looks more like a corporate plantation. Millions live paycheck to paycheck. Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy. Education comes with lifelong chains of student loans. Infrastructure crumbles while billionaires lobby for tax breaks.
By many measures, life in the United States now resembles a developing nation. Public services are stripped down. Transportation is outdated. Inequality is wider than at any point since the Gilded Age. The “world’s richest country” hides tent cities under overpasses and food lines that stretch for blocks.
Look East for Contrast
Contrast this with China. While no system is perfect, cities there rise clean and efficient. Public transportation networks move millions affordably and on time. Infrastructure is modern, expanding, and maintained. The middle class is growing, not shrinking. For an average worker, daily life often feels safer, more stable, and more connected than in the supposed “land of opportunity.”
The irony is sharp. The United States once held itself up as the model of modern living. Today, many of its people experience conditions closer to the developing world while nations once dismissed as “backward” surpass it in technology, infrastructure, and collective vision.
The Cost of Capitalism Unchecked
What we see is not the failure of workers but the success of unchecked capitalism. The system is working exactly as designed: to extract wealth from the many and concentrate it in the hands of the few. Every bailout, every tax cut for corporations, every gutted regulation is a transfer of resources upward.
The result is a hollow economy where growth is measured not in the well-being of citizens but in the stock portfolios of billionaires. Labor Day has become a long weekend for shopping sales rather than a recognition of the blood and sweat that built the country.
A Reckoning Ahead
If Labor Day means anything today, it should be a reminder that workers have been betrayed. That the wealth of a nation belongs to those who create it, not those who hoard it. Without a middle class, democracy withers. What is left is an oligarchy, dressed up in flags and slogans, running on borrowed myths.
The United States cannot call itself exceptional while its citizens struggle like this. Not when other nations invest in their people and infrastructure while America strips itself bare.
Labor Day should not be a celebration. It should be a warning.
Read this on Substack where it first appeared — if you’re into that sort of thing.
