The world's most visibly dysfunctional family business

On Labor Day, artistic ego dynamics, and why there's something a little poetic about Oasis performing in the US over Labor Day weekend

There's something almost poetic about the choice to have Oasis perform most of the brief American leg of their Live '25 tour over the Labor Day holiday weekend. The band is, after all, among the world's most visibly dysfunctional family businesses.

■ Labor Day, of course, originated with the labor union movement, not with family businesses. But union membership has long ago shrunk to a small fraction of employment -- just 9.9% of the US labor force overall, and less than 6% in the private sector -- while at least one estimate holds that 63% of the workforce is employed at family-run companies. So, in a sense, Oasis is right at home in the USA.

■ The Brothers Gallagher simply take the family business model to a higher level of difficulty: Combining work and family is inevitably complex, but to do so quite literally in the spotlight as performing artists makes it an order of magnitude harder. (Not to mention that most family businesses don't involve the arts and the big personalities that come with them.)

■ People talk a lot about work families, but it's a concept that has a lot more superficial attraction than real, deep meaning. Co-workers often become friends, even extremely close friends on many occasions, but rarely do they actually behave quite like family.

■ That's probably for the best, since we should be careful to distinguish between those two spaces in life whenever possible. In one, each person is irreplaceable. In another, everyone is (in the end) completely replaceable. Navigating the overlap between the two is such an innate challenge that it attracts no small amount of academic interest.

■ Whether or not Oasis ever toured again, the brothers would still be brothers -- just with a whole lot more work-related baggage attached to their personal relationship. So it's to their credit and worth celebrating, even for those who don't care for their music, that this particularly high-profile family enterprise has overcome its toughest schism.