Labor Day

IN THE fall campaign, you may hear talk now and then about the dangers of "class warfare" when the debate turns to such things as the tax structure, health care and other matters having to do with who gets what in this roiling republic. Don't pay it too much attention. Those who use such language need to acquaint themselves with real class warfare, as practiced, say, in Russia (among other places), where much of the country's vast underclass went on a rampage a little less than a century ago against just about anyone labeled "bourgeois," whatever that meant. The resulting years of warfare, repression and hair-raising atrocities were class warfare. Arguing for marginal income tax rates and changes in health care is not.

That Americans have never gone in much for real class warfare is probably due in large part to the persistence of a sturdy, almost indestructible belief in what can be achieved by work. From its earliest days, America has been a magnet for people who see it as a place where their hard work will be rewarded. Many have failed, but apparently not enough to discourage the millions who continue to come to this country and perform some of its most vital tasks as well as much of its hardest and least appreciated labor. The virtue of work and the rewards due it have always been a basic American principle, the cruel violation of which nearly tore the country apart a century and a half ago. As Abraham Lincoln put it in 1858, the spirit of slavery was: "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it." Better than anyone, he saw how deeply un-American this was, and how it undermined the respect that was owed to the work of a whole class of men and women.

America has hardly been free of exploitation and abuses of working people, but it has managed to maintain, and to some extent achieve, the ideal of a society in which free people can gain some degree of comfort and security through their labors. The people one passes every day -- swinging pickaxes, toting iron rods at construction sites, putting up drywall, making hotel beds -- generally take pride in what they do and in doing it well. But are they becoming invisible to many of us? Is their work regarded as menial, trivial, unworthy of consideration? Is the growing inequality of incomes, residential separation and the unsettled situation of millions of working people who are in this country in violation of its inadequate and outdated immigration laws eroding the sense of commonality that is vital to the country's future? These are things worth thinking about on this first Monday in September -- and on the first Tuesday in November.