Already, 1988 is proving to be a year of mass employee dismissals in businesses ranging from America`s largest auto manufacturer to the biggest investment houses on Wall Street. So we might do well to observe Abraham Lincoln`s birthday by recalling a job-related theme he frequently used in speeches.

''There is no permanent working class of hired laborers among us,''

Lincoln reassured voters in the 1850s. In contrast to Americans in the late 20th Century, the citizens of Lincoln`s time were very worried that they might never escape the servitude of working for a paycheck. They worried that they would become what the heated economic rhetoric of those times referred to as

''wage slaves.''

Lincoln, reflecting the values of his constituency, energetically espoused the virtues of individual capitalism as the best and only morally correct way to earn a living. ''The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him,'' he lectured.

What Lincoln was describing is capitalism in its essence, the definition of capital formation in its purest form: a surplus of wealth, monetary or otherwise, that results from production being greater than consumption. Pre-industrial Americans understood that concept well, and cherished it. For many of them the possibility of accumulating capital had been the overriding reason for coming to the New World.

Consequently, the transition to an industrial wage-working society was one that was, for many American families in the latter half of the 19th Century, a time of devastating economic and emotional defeat. A decision to abandon economic independence and the chance to acquire capital by taking a paycheck job brought great shame. It was an inherent admission of personal failure. The paycheck-based work arrangements Americans today fight to keep were abhorrent to most of our forebears.

Indeed, America at the start of the Industrial Revolution was populated by pioneers, iconoclasts, religious zealots, adventurers, rebels and artisans- and their sons and daughters. They or their parents had come here, wild and untethered, to escape the economically frustrating class systems of their homelands. But most of them stumbled, instead, into the steel-jawed trap of working for wages that was set by the dawn of the industrial era, and their offspring were left with little choice but to pursue the same fate.

Yet today most of us labor under the almost-religious delusion that we are living our economic lives in the way that is right, just and part of a great, centuries-old American tradition. Like cookouts on the Fourth of July, paychecks are America.

Except for a brief period in the 1970s, when the Arab oil embargo and ensuing energy supply disruptions scared us out of our paycheck-lined groove, most of us have never had a strong enough reason to fully appraise the advisability of putting on and staying in the wage harness. So virtually every aspect of our lives has been constructed upon the expectation of a regular, predictable paycheck. We have huge 30-year mortgages, multiple auto loans and bank credit cards with five-digit limits, all made possible by the presumption of the long-term steady wages that are becoming ever more difficult to find.

We`ve passed an economic point of no return. We picket, protest and sometimes even become violent in attempts to keep alive that which was, ironically, our forebears` greatest humiliation-and really just a flash in the pan of our economic history.

Instead of using America`s postwar affluence to escape the wage-earning class, as an economist of 40 years ago might have predicted, most of us have entrenched ourselves ever more deeply in it and are working hard to train future generations to wear the harness well.

By the mid-1990s, statisticians predict, more than half of all U.S. households will need two incomes to get by, and a full 70 percent of the families created by children of the baby boomers will need the income that comes from both parents earning paychecks to stay economically respectable.

Consequently, we are beginning to define a good job as one that provides a hired person to nurture our children while both parents work, or that allows a mother a few weeks off without pay to recover physically from (and savor emotionally) the arrival of a child without acquiring someone to replace her in the meantime. Female draft horses enjoyed approximately the same courtesies back in Lincoln`s day.

Simultaneously, and most ironically, economists are predicting a substantial diminution of the material comforts of the American standard of living-despite the growing prevalence of the two-paycheck household.

By the values of Lincoln`s time, it certainly has been a tragic evolution. The wage slavery Lincoln cautioned against inevitably creates a disproportionate distribution of profits in favor of the person who owns the fields, the machines, the factory or the office; that`s how capital formation progresses. Since most Americans have, in effect, disqualified themselves from individual capitalism through paycheck living, we now need to work longer and longer to obtain less and less.

Most of us were, regrettably, born into this culture of unwitting wage bondage, and like the unpaid Southern slaves who stayed on the plantations after the Emancipation Proclamation became law, we were comfortable with our relatively controlled situation. Until America`s postwar domination of the world economy began to crumble, we saw no reason to leave the familiar ground. We eventually came to worship the yuppie lifestyle, the ultimate orgy of wage-working folly, and bought expensive cars, wristwatches and second homes in the sophomoric belief that there would always be another, bigger paycheck for us next week, next month or next year. But then came the stock market crash of last October and the resultant unpleasant re-examination of our economic situation. ''Entrepreneurism,'' a trendy euphemism for individual capitalism, is the buzzword now: We can see that our master is growing old, and it appears that he won`t be around to take care of us for the rest of our lives. Perhaps we shouldn`t have waited more than a century to heed President Lincoln`s advice.