First Monday in September

The platform for the Republican Party this election year declares that “the greatest asset of the American economy is the hard-working American.”  In an effort to demonstrate that hard work is exclusively a Republican value, all Republican voters were urged to go to work on Labor Day and forgo the national celebration of beer and barbecue. 

“It’s called Labor Day, not Lazy Day,” shouted Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan at a campaign stop in Las Vegas.  “Labor Day is another liberal invention designed to give workers something for nothing, just like Obama’s welfare plan.  We Republicans are different.  We built it!”

Republican leaning voters across the nation were urged by their job creating employers to show up voluntarily Monday, September 3^rd to catch up on emails, make some sales calls, or clean the public areas at their office.  The work would be uncompensated, but a spokesperson for the RNC assured workers that their efforts would not go unnoticed.

“The Founding Fathers worked on Labor Day, and their only reward was building a great nation in God’s image,” said John Galt, Romney field leader.  “That should be compensation enough for those people.”

“How can we credibly say “We Built That” at our convention if on the following Monday we stay home and eat hot dogs and drink beer?  If we didn’t go to work without compensation, it would be un-American.  We’d be Democrats.”

The Romney campaign pointed to studies that show GOP voters to be more generous than Democratic voters, and they are counting on this spirit of philanthropy to discourage any Department of Labor claims against employers stemming from the unpaid work. 

 

 Some Republican voters who were interviewed seemed supportive of the concept.  Junior insurance claims analyst Ben Dover was going to work Monday with no expectation of being paid for his efforts.  When reached at the office on Friday afternoon, he said, “My boss is a job creator, and he said he might show up during the day to check on us.  If he does, I’d better be there.  I’ll never reach the American Dream of owning my own business if I don’t show up on holidays, like he says he used to before he hired us to do it for him.”

“I have to hang up.  I think someone else is listening on this line.”

Organizers of the Take Your Lazy Ass to Work Day saw this campaign as a natural extension of the We Built It campaign, highlighted during the GOP convention last week held at a taxpayer financed arena in downtown Tampa.  The hope was to demonstrate a true contrast to Democratic voters who were content to take the whole day off, watch football, get drunk, beat their spouses and expect a full day’s pay.

Mitt Romney sold his support to the TYLATW Day campaign by releasing this statement:  “You people should all be at work on Monday, helping fix the Obama economy with your sacrificial labor.  This is exactly the kind of hard truth I’ve been talking about the entire campaign.  We built it!”

 

Sheldon Adelson, a prospective Attorney General in a Romney administration, also loved the idea.  “Everyone should show up and work on Labor Day.  Of course, it is voluntary so there’ll be no pay or bathroom breaks.  It’s all for a greater cause.  We built this!”

Not all groups were behind the Take Your Lazy Ass to Work Day.  Hard working illegal immigrants, who Romney referred to as “Obama’s base”, stayed home in protest.

Multi-national banks, Wall Street firms, and swing state manufacturing companies were exempted from the call for unpaid work.