to the laborers

I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it.

―John Steinbeck

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. 

―Upton Sinclair 

On this Labor Day I post in honor of the world's laborers—the poor, the underpaid, the overworked, the struggling, the underaged, the disadvantaged, the enslaved, the minority, the immigrant, the intellectually disabled—who assemble the products, who serve the public, who harvest the crops, who pack the meat, who forge the metals, who sew the clothes, who mine the ores, whose collective voices fought for the rights all of us enjoy, and on whose backs wealthy investors make millions, whether consciously oblivious or willfully blind, to the magnitude of the laborers' toil and the inadequacy of their take.