Last week, students and staff alike enjoyed the district’s first long weekend after a busy first three weeks of school. We take the extra day to catch up on shows, extra homework or to just relax. But the highly anticipated day off from work to celebrate work itself was once a dream that people across the nation fought for.
Though first celebrated in 1882 and officially established in 1894, Labor Day traces its roots back to the Industrial Revolution and some of America’s first labor unions.
Emerging in Great Britain and soon finding its way to American soil, the Industrial Revolution completely transformed workers worldwide. Innovative machines turned the tedious art of handcrafted goods into semi-mechanized manufacturing, but even though the economy was reaching new highs, working conditions were reaching new lows.
Fast-paced production encouraged employers to subject their employees to grueling and long days to meet new demands. Women and children as young as five joined their families in factories, working 12-hour days in dangerous environments where accidents, injuries and deaths were unsurprising and frequent.
Soon, many would realize that, for them, the revolution meant little more than extra money in the pockets of bosses and strenuous labor on the backs of employees; it would take decades before the struggles of impoverished workers were addressed by the masses.
In 1866, the American Federation of Labor was founded, America’s first labor union. As the years passed, more American workers found themselves banding together to improve their collective rights as the builders of our nation.
On Sept. 5, 1882, members of the Central Labor Union celebrated the first unofficial Labor Day in New York. They paraded around the city and threw parties with their families, enjoying their day off and some much-needed rest.
Celebrations like this and movements like the Haymarket Riot and Pullman Strike led to state-instated Labor Days nationwide. With Oregon leading the pack in 1887 and others following suit, 23 states had established Labor Day as a holiday by 1894.
Pressured by workers’ success in individual states and the growing unrest of others, President Grover Cleveland would sign a bill on June 28, 1894, that instituted Labor Day as a national holiday, marked by the first Monday of every September.
Since the founding of Labor Day, workers have continued the fight for fair labor laws, driven by the same unwavering desire for justice once held by the settlers and immigrants of this nation – a quality woven into the very fabric of the American mentality.
As high school students, some of us already have job experience, and others will join within the decade. The workforce we will be entering vastly differs from that of laborers in the 1800s.
Laws attempt to protect workers from corrupt employers, and there are booming careers in fields that didn’t exist a century ago. We enjoy a myriad of rights and opportunities that generations before us fought for – and yet struggles within the workforce prevail.
Though workers are not fighting for the same laws their predecessors did, they are fighting for the same purpose. Movements like the recent SAG-AFTRA strike and others are proof of the never-ending quest for fairness within all different types of careers.
Labor Day celebrates and recognizes the hundreds of millions of workers, past and present, upon whose backs this nation was built. It tells a story of persistent peoples whose collective strength would shape the workforce for centuries after their fight, and it serves as a beacon of hope for the story being written today.
