Service Workers Day

When I woke up this morning, I started my day at Google:

Ah, Juneteenth. My favorite new Holiday. Why do I love it? I only had to work 3 hours today instead of 8-10. (Why did I have to work at all? That's a long, boring story about an entity that had poor communication skills with my employer.)

CNN promoting their own Juneteenth Special? Not exactly news, but that sounds about right.

Hmmm, Juneteenth is counteracting the GOP's whitewashing of history? I suppose that's one interpretation of what's going on in America. Well, if you're a Hack partisan website.

Just a reminder on Juneteenth that the GOP is the Neo-Confederate Party? I am starting to see a trend.

According to the USA Today "Juneteenth is typically celebrated with educational activities for children, parades, concerts, beauty pageants and readings of the Emancipation Proclamation, Steve Williams, president of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, told USA Today in 2020."

Yeah, I don't remember reading the Emancipation Proclamation at all, except for in school, studying about Lincoln freeing the slaves.

Here's my former college reminding me to celebrate Juneteenth. As a Libertarian Leaning website, I bet you're not going to be able to guess what I'm going to say next....

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I remember working as a night manager at Taco Bell in graduate school in the mid 90's. The city of Mankato, Minnesota was deserted on Madison Ave, the city was gathered around the July 4th fireworks display in town.

There were only 2 holidays at Taco Bell, Christmas and Thanksgiving. We were open every other day of the year. I worked most holidays and at least one weekend day, for ten years. By grad school, I knew the July 4th drill: Busy until about 8-8:30, empty around 10, then drive thru wrapped around the building after the fireworks would end.

The night is question, I could hear the fireworks in the distance, and one of my employees came up to me and said "you ever want to race shopping carts down Madison Ave?"

I looked at him and shook my head. He ran next door to WalMart, grabbed a cart, asked a female co-worker if she wanted a ride, then promptly pushed her down Madison Ave at full speed. I sat on a dining room table with the headset on, watching my employees streak across the road, thinking about the life decisions I had made up to that point.

One of the things I thought about was that there should be a Service Workers Day. Saturdays are often the busiest day of the week in the service industry, there should be one Saturday a year, like in August, where all business shut down for the day. Everyone else had their own day, and I had worked more Labor Days than I had off, where was our holiday?

Which brings us back to today. You know what our family did on Juneteenth?

We visited my parents.

We ran around and did errands.

We ate dinner at Jersey Mike's.

We did NOT recite the Emancipation Proclamation.

And, to end the day, we went and did our grocery shopping at WalMart. Nowhere that we wanted to go was closed for the Holiday. We didn't get bills in the mail today? I'm sure they'll still come tomorrow.

I noticed about a third of the WalMart crew was Black at our visit tonight. I asked my wife if I should ask a few workers if they appreciated working at WalMart on Juneteenth. She gritted her teeth and growled "don't you dare."

You know what I see? I see that Joe Biden created another holiday for political gain and his allies in the media used the occasion to blast political foes.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics "Blacks and Hispanics were more than twice as likely as Whites and Asians to be among the working poor."

Maybe we should re-visit the concept of a Service Workers Day. What could go wrong shutting down the country one Saturday a year?