Labor Day and the New American work ethic

When a car company chooses "When did it become an act of courage to leave work on time". as its advertising slogan, you know we've reached a cultural crisis point.   As a child touring model homes with my parents in the early 1960s, we were told the electricity used to run them would soon be so cheap no one would bother to meter our use of it.  Productivity was up in all industries and some work weeks were being shortened to 35 hours.  Now, politicians say we need to work harder and longer hours from the end of formal education until our 70s, often toiling at two or more jobs in order to pay for electricity among other "too cheap to charge for" products and services.  Meanwhile the specter of robots taking over many middle class jobs raises the possibility of an impoverished class of workers unable to find the jobs they were trained for and sinking into a desperate poverty.    Even those who think about these contradictions on a regular basis don't have any prescriptions for dealing with these looming crises.  So we labor on, celebrating our ability to do so with a long weekend.  Then it's back to the 24/7 reality of American labor in the 21st century.