First off, HAPPY LABOR DAY! I read in the Washington Post on the way home that New York is the best state because it has the highest percentage of unionized employees — well over 20 percent of all workers. Meanwhile, the southern states are the worst states — because in most of them less than 5 percemt of all workers are unionized.

That judgment is probably more wrong than right. My Georgia is ranked at the top of the states for friendliness to business, and the jobs and economic-growth numbers do reflect that fact. Still, there’s no denying that comparable jobs — even accounting for the standard of living and all that — pay less in Georgia than in New York.

Some porcher conservative recently sent me the following as fact, and right now I have no reason believe that it isn’t: Forty years ago, the top American employer was General Motors, and the average wage was about $50 an hour in today’s money, with fine benefits. Today, America’s top employer is Walmart, where the average wage is about $10 an hour, with no benefits worth talking about. We postmodern conservatives do worry some about the so-called proletarianization of the middle class. And so we allow ourselves a measure of selective nostalgia for the clearly unsustainable (in the 21st-century competitive global marketplace) industrial unions. (We’re completely against public-employee unions of all kinds.)

Not only that, we say HAPPY LABOR DAY in admiration of people who do “real work,” remembering that there is a strong mental (as well as, of course, physical) component to jobs such as motorcycle maintenance and construction, and that many others do indispensable work that requires not only skill but the personal concern — called “caregiving.” We admire the people– as much better than us — who can really say “we built this.” And we know that a lot is being lost when people who do real work must subject themselves to being scripted or micromanaged by the “intellectual labor” of experts located in undisclosed locations — think Walmart and the Amazon warehouse to begin with here.

So we postmodern conservatives have more localism and porcherism in our souls than do libertarian economists. I was glad to hear that Jim Ceaser has moved a bit in this postmodern and conservative direction in his brilliantly engaging comments at the APSA. He actually praised the “agrarian” southern poets John Crowe Ransom and Wendell Berry for telling some truth against the unbounded concern with power or productivity of purely liberal theory. That’s not to say that Jim has gone ((or, for that matter, that I have gone) very far down the road toward Berry’s farm.

We don’t have to become Marxists or porchers to realize that increases in efficiency and productivity sometimes come at the expense of the personal dignity of women and (especially) men who, like us all, need worthwhile work and the responsibilities of relational love to live purposefully significant lives. We don’t go as far as the Marxists or the porchers, because we don’t see that tradeoff as inevitable or even anywhere near always the case.

One reason we postmodern and conservative professors can find common cause with other kinds of struggling middle-class employees is that we see the expert/administrative effort to proletarianize us with “best practices” scripts designed by efficiency-and-productivity experts, online education, the withering away of tenure and “faculty governance,” the focus on “measurable outcomes” oriented around skills and competencies, and “the culture of assessment.” That doesn’t mean I’m in favor of unionizing professors. Said unionization, where it has occurred, had the effect of playing into the hands of administrators who want to regard professors as industrial workers.

We postmodern conservatives certainly aren’t ready to replace Happy Labor Day with Happy Free and Independent Contractor Day.

I meant to say only a word or two about LABOR DAY and then go on to talk about my “work” at the American Political Science Association Meeting. More on that next time, with reports on True Grit (which was followed by a postmodern and conservative breakfast that included, in Carl’s case, true grits), hailing Ceaser, and the future of the Republican party.

Well, one more thing: Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish has included quotes from three postmodern conservatives to show the diversity of opinion on the political soundness of Marilynne Robinson. The quotes — from Paul Seaton, Carl, and me – differ in terms of emphasis but really aren’t evidence of any deep disagreement.