Labor Day Belongs to Workers, Not to Planners

Labor Day workers are the people who build, repair, teach, haul, cook, code, and invent. The holiday was not created to hand those people to a ministry, a party slate, or a planner who claims to speak for “the working class” while extinguishing the conditions that make work productive. The dignity of work depends on ownership, wages that function as prices, and the right to change jobs without asking a committee. The distinction matters more than the cookouts. A holiday that celebrates labor can be turned, slowly, into a holiday that celebrates control of labor.

The American meaning of the day is simple and demanding. Work has dignity when a person owns his time, may sell it, may refuse a bad bargain, may start a shop, may keep what he earns, and may change jobs without asking a committee. Wages are not a moral award issued from the center. They are a price. They tell workers where effort is valued and tell employers what skill is scarce. When that price is allowed to move, people migrate toward higher-productivity tasks. When it is suppressed or replaced by political assignment, the country still has workers. It no longer has a reliable way to know what their work is worth.

The first large Labor Day gathering was held in New York City in 1882. Congress made the first Monday in September a federal holiday in 1894, in the aftermath of the Pullman strike. The setting was industrial and often brutal: long hours, dangerous plants, child labor, and employers who treated men as interchangeable parts. None of that history requires us to accept the later claim that only the state can honor work. The durable American answer was not to nationalize production. It was to open legal space for contract, association, safer conditions, and rising productivity—so that a day’s labor bought more food, more schooling, and more leisure than the generation before.

What Labor Day workers are owed

Labor Day workers were not given a holiday so the state could assign their jobs.

That is why Labor Day still fits a commercial republic. The Founders did not write an economic manifesto labeled “capitalism.” They did embed private property, freedom of contract, and limits on concentrated power. A society of free individuals who own tools, skills, and firms will generate more useful work than a society that treats labor as a raw material to be allocated. Equality of opportunity is the labor policy consistent with that design. Engineered equality of outcomes is not. The first multiplies the number of people who can rise. The second requires someone in office to decide what “fair” looks like and then rearrange lives until the chart agrees.

Ludwig von Mises identified the underlying failure more than a century ago. Without market prices, no authority can calculate which jobs should exist, which plants should run, or how long a protected industry should be kept on life support. Friedrich von Hayek added the knowledge problem. The information that coordinates work is dispersed in millions of local facts: a machine about to fail, a customer who will not pay that price, a young worker who can learn a trade if someone will hire him. Milton Friedman put the consumer point bluntly: a tariff “protects the consumer against low prices.” The same logic applies to labor-market intervention dressed up as compassion. You can freeze a paycheck in place. You cannot freeze the value of the work behind it.

The other workweek, one sea away

Theory becomes concrete when the lights fail. On September 1, Cuba intends to open the 2026–2027 school year for roughly 1.4 million children. The education minister has already described the year in the language of endurance rather than competence: the great victory will be that classes happen at all. Teacher coverage is officially around 73 percent. Many instructors have emigrated or left for better-paying work. Uniform factories, idled by blackouts and missing fuel, have produced only about 12 percent of what primary students need. Havana will import thousands of teachers from the east. Meals are planned, for now, in two-week increments. Families are told to expect flexibility—meaning darkened rooms, shortened days, and improvisation presented as policy.

This is what happens when labor is treated as an input in a plan instead of a choice in a market. Teachers leave because a state wage cannot feed a household. Officials can raise the peso number on a pay stub; they cannot raise the command over goods that number is supposed to buy. Factories miss their quotas because there is no electricity to run the line and no price that would have signaled, years earlier, that the plant should have been repaired or replaced. The regime will blame the blockade. Sanctions can tighten a vise. They do not explain six and a half decades of shortages, emigration, and a grid that cannot keep classrooms lit. A system that cannot retain teachers or stitch uniforms is not failing because workers lack patriotism. It is failing because no one in the planning office can perform the calculation that prices perform every morning in a free country.

Vietnam learned a related lesson after it abandoned rigid central planning in 1986. Ordinary work began to pay again when people were allowed to farm, trade, and export under rules closer to the market. Cuba has spent the same decades insisting that the plan is the honor due to labor. The result is visible in the dark.

That is what happens when Labor Day workers are replaced by a plan.

The domestic substitution

The United States is not Cuba. That is precisely why the rhetorical capture of “workers” should be resisted early. Democratic socialists need not win a revolution to change the meaning of Labor Day. They need only persuade a large share of the public that wages, housing, and medical care are things the state issues, and that private ownership of the firms that employ people is a moral defect. Specific policies—higher minimum wages, broader health access, housing aid—can command majority support. The systemic goal of putting production under political direction does not. Conflating the two is the method.

A second substitution is appearing on the right: the claim that honoring workers now requires the government to pick sectors, tax imports as a general rule, and treat ordinary commercial competition as an injury. Free trade remains the right default. Limited, time-bound exceptions can be justified only for genuine national-security vulnerabilities or severe transitional shocks. A tariff that saves a visible mill while raising costs for every downstream plant is not a workers’ policy. It is a transfer from the many to the few, paid in higher prices and lost jobs that never make the ribbon-cutting.

That is not a program for Labor Day workers. It is a program for the industries that can hire lobbyists.

Labor Day workers need open work, not a protected list of jobs.

Why planners cannot speak for workers

Three failures recur whenever the state claims the labor file.

First, knowledge. No department knows which skills next year’s employers will pay for. Firms learn that by bidding. Ministries learn it late, if at all.

Second, incentives. The benefits of a subsidy, a tariff, or a staffing mandate are concentrated and loud. The costs are spread across consumers, taxpayers, and other workers whose products become more expensive. Temporary help becomes an entitlement. The protected industry hires lobbyists. The displaced worker is told that leaving would betray his town.

Third, calculation. A wage set by politics is not information. It is a command. If it is set above the value of the output, hiring shrinks or goes informal. If it is set below, people exit. Cuba’s official scales, revised again this summer, illustrate the dead end: the state can print a new number. It cannot print the goods that number is supposed to buy, and it cannot force competent people to stay when the number is a fiction.

American political culture still resists the full version of that system. Homeownership, small business, retirement accounts, and consumer abundance give millions a stake in the existing order. The Constitution disperses power so that nationalization cannot be accomplished by a single excited majority. Those barriers are not automatic. They require citizens who can tell the difference between a raise earned in a growing firm and a promise issued by a candidate who has never met a payroll. An uninformed public loses that capacity.

Practical principles

Honor labor by widening the range of productive work, not by freezing yesterday’s map of jobs.

• Treat rising real wages as the test, not headcount in a favored industry.
• Prefer adjustment policies that move people toward higher-productivity employment over barriers that trap them.
• Keep any national-security exception narrow, time-bound, and paired with capacity that allies and private firms can actually build.
• Reject the claim that envy of successful firms is a labor program. Capital that employs people is not a vault of idle cash.
• Measure “pro-worker” policy by whether a young person can learn a trade, change towns, start a firm, and keep the fruit of the effort.

These rules are harder to sell than a parade. They are also the only ones consistent with a republic that still expects people to govern themselves.

My own position

Labor Day workers do not need a planner. They need prices, property, and the chance to move toward better work.

The holiday belongs to them, not to ministries, party slates, or movements that use the word “worker” as a battering ram against private property and voluntary exchange. I remain where Mises, Hayek, and Friedman left the argument: ownership and open entry do more for ordinary people than industrial assignment. The real frictions—thin local labor markets and strategic dependence on a rival for certain inputs—require care, not abandonment of the default. Care means helping people move. It does not mean building an apparatus that claims to love labor while deciding, from the center, which work shall be allowed to exist.

That danger is not theoretical for those who have lived under systems that extinguished markets, choice, and individual agency. Alejandro’s Journey: From Cuba’s Communism to America’s Freedom is the story of that crossing—told through one family’s rupture under Cuban communism and their hard-won rebuilding in the United States. It is a narrative of totalitarian control, the execution of a resistance-fighter father, exile, and the subsequent recovery of education, work, family continuity, and personal agency. Faith, free will, and perseverance are not background themes; they are the forces that make the passage possible. Freedom appears not as an abstraction but as a hard-earned gift.

The book speaks especially to immigrants and their children, to readers of faith who see purpose in hardship, and to anyone who prefers lived testimony to ideology. It shows what communism took, what determination and belief preserved, and what America made possible—so the story itself becomes both remembrance and warning.

This week Cuban children walk back into schools that may or may not have power. Next week Americans mark a holiday invented to honor work. The contrast is the argument. A free country honors labor by leaving it in the hands of the people who perform it.

With deep gratitude for America’s refuge, unquenchable hope for #CubaLibre2026, and unwavering faith that common sense and moral courage will ultimately prevail.

Read Alejandro’s Journey on Amazon.

Gerardo Manuel Fundora
Miami Lakes, Florida