Editorials

The virtue of honest labor

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-28 07:49

Editor's note: We should reverse money warship trend in the society and bring honor back to diligent and honest labor.

We congratulate the 3,000 or so men and women who will be honored during the Labor Day celebrations as national model workers.

Each of them is the epitome of outstanding service, hard work and devotion. But we also want to extend our thanks to everyone who has contributed honest labor for this country.

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The celebration of labor, manual work in particular, may appear a bit out of sync in this time of opportunism. Our ears are full of proud boasts of speculative gains and ways of bringing fortune out of nothing. Diligence seems to have no longer qualified as a fine virtue of the nation.

Yet as was true when the crippling financial crisis gestated on Wall Street, there is no such free lunch as costless gains. As all the bubbles of artificial derivatives evaporate, it is the throngs of ordinary workers who are propping up the economies.

The economy rests on honest labor. That explains the fact that model laborers have been cited at the labor festival for the 14th time since 1950.

Today, however, our snobbish society should learn to rethink the way it sees and treats the working class. The de facto marginalization of honest laborers, in the distribution of income and various other social measures, is shameful and unsustainable. Shameful because it substantially undervalues the contribution of ordinary citizens, and subjects them to naked exploitation. It's unsustainable because it sows seeds of tension that have the potential to render all pursuits of stability into wishful thinking.

It does not matter whether or not the working class retains the nominal leadership role it once had. Equity is more meaningful. The current imperative is to stop, if not reverse, the lethal trend where those contributing the essential building blocks for our economy are reduced to society's underdogs.

This country must learn to value honesty and honest labor.

(China Daily 04/28/2010 page8)