Silence of Labor

A holiday for labor without labor.

They hand you a long weekend to erase the long decades.

But the silence runs deeper than rest. It is manufactured. Fear of losing a job, a visa, a health plan, keeps mouths shut. Precarity is the leash. Speak, and the rent comes due in pink slips.

Unions once turned whispers into thunder. Now their decline leaves workers atomized, each alone before the machine. The silence is not apathy — it is the outcome of laws, consultants, and billion-dollar campaigns designed to choke solidarity before it breathes.

Gig work adds another gag. No shop floor, no water cooler, no place to gather except the app’s algorithmic chokehold. The platform decides your hours, your worth, your very visibility. And it decides in silence.

Even when labor moves, it is muted. The headlines reduce strikes to traffic delays, grievances to noise. The system translates outrage into background hum, tolerable so long as profits hold.

Without labor, the empire starves. That truth remains. But the greater crime is this: they have taught labor to starve itself of voice. Exploitation is visible. Enforced muteness is the deeper violence.