Enjoying your Labor Day holiday? Probably so. It's the end of summer (not really), the kids go back to school in a few days (Yay! Although the fall session for many started a couple of weeks ago.), and most of the country looks like it will have good picnic weather on Monday (as long as you are not in or near Florida and expecting a hurricane).
Why does America have a Labor Day holiday?
Labor unions started the idea of an annual event to celebrate the contribution of employed labor -- separate from management, owners and capital -- to the success of the nation's business and commerce. That's a code-talker way of saying that workers were being cruelly exploited, they wanted better working conditions, and the unions provided them a way of gaining leverage. Labor sought recognition as being equal to capital.
By the second half of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution -- and the demands of the recently-concluded Civil War -- had put the nation well along a path of concentrating employment in industrial and manufacturing enterprises. Seven day work-weeks and twelve hour work-days were common; children supplied some of that labor. Pay was poor. Safety and sanitation were afterthoughts. Employment security was unheard of.
Labor unions agitated for improvements. During the 1880's, with wealth concentrated in the hands of the railroad, banking and oil-drilling oligarchs of the Gilded Age unions and workers were becoming increasingly confrontational. Red flags of socialism made prominent appearances in worker's parades and strikes. Seeing money to be made out of chaos, the Pinkerton Detective Agency degenerated into a thug-army for hire, available to big businesses whose workers were striking. Tense standoffs of workers versus authority, sometimes ending in pitched battles, were becoming common; people were killed.
Rail transportation was the dominant fast, long-distance mode of travel for people and freight. Railroad workers were among the first to unionize. In passenger travel, the Pullman Palace Car Company was preeminent. Early in 1894, Pullman brought labor relations to a crisis when it sought to reduce worker's wages and fire union representatives.
Pullman's workers went on strike. By late June, the American Railroad Union acted to boycott all Pullman railroad cars, thereby throwing a huge monkey wrench into the entire railway system.
In response, the Federal government took the side of the Pullman Company and dispatched U.S. Army troops to break the strike and boycott. This did not end well.
Chicago -- the center of the nation's railroad action -- and other cities saw riots. There were dozens of fatalities. The strike and boycott were soon broken, and the ARU dissolved. Later that year, Congress and President Grover Cleveland, acting to partially mollify organized labor's continuing unrest, declared Labor Day as a national holiday in honor of the importance of workers' efforts.
The Pullman strike was not generally popular, even among other railroad unions and guilds. But labor unions persisted in their efforts to improve pay and fix problems, and as a result we enjoy much improved working conditions: Standard eight-hour workdays, a five-day workweek, paid holidays and vacation time, no child labor, and greater workplace safety.
So, thank you, labor unions, for the holiday and for a lot of other very good things, too.
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