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 The
City of Burbank
Celebrates
Labor
Day
Labor Day is a holiday honoring working people. It is observed as a legal
holiday on the first Monday in September throughout the United States,
Puerto Rico and Canada. Labor organizations sponsor various celebrations,
but for most persons it is a day of rest and recreation. It also has become
a symbol of the end of summer. In Australia, Labor Day is called Eight Hour
Day, and commemorates the successful struggle for a shorter working day. In
Brazil, as well as in Europe, Labor Day is on May 1. Two men have been
credited with suggesting a holiday to honor working people in the United
States - Matthew Maguire, a machinist from Paterson, N.J., and Peter
McGuire, a New York City carpenter who helped found the United Brotherhood
of Carpenters and Joiners. Both men played an important part in staging the
first Labor Day parade in New York City on September, 1882. In 1887,
Colorado and Oregon made Labor Day a legal holiday. President Grover
Cleveland signed a bill in 1894 making Labor Day a national holiday.
History
Labor Day is a national legal holiday. Over
the years, it has evolved from a purely labor union celebration into a
general "last fling of summer" festival.
Most of us enjoying this holiday are unaware of the fact that the
legislation which enacted Labor Day as a national holiday was forged amid
labor unrest in which people lost their lives and that it was signed by
President Grover Cleveland as a reluctant election-year compromise.
The events which precipitated this political compromise began in Pullman,
Illinois. Pullman was founded in 1880 by George Pullman, president of the
railroad sleeping car company. Its residents all worked for the Pullman
company. It was a Utopian community which operated successfully for over a
decade.
Unfortunately, in 1893, a nationwide economic depression affected the
company and George Pullman was forced to lay off hundreds of employees.
Those who remained endured wage cuts, even while rents in Pullman remained
consistent. Consequently, the employees walked out, demanding lower rents
and higher pay. The American Railway Union, led by a young Eugene V. Debs,
came to the cause of the striking workers and railroad workers across the
nation boycotted trains carrying Pullman cars. Rioting, pillaging, and
burning of railroad cars soon ensued.
President Grover Cleveland, faced with nervous railroad executives and
interrupted mail trains, declared the strike a federal crime and deployed
12,000 troops to break the strike. Violence erupted, and two men were killed
when U.S. deputy marshals fired on protesters in Kensington, near Chicago,
but the strike was doomed.
On August 3, 1894, the strike was declared over. Debs went to prison, his
ARU was disbanded, and Pullman employees henceforth signed a pledge that
they would never again unionize. Aside from the already existing American
Federation of Labor and the various railroad brotherhoods, industrial
workers' unions were effectively stamped out and remained so until the
Great Depression.
The movement for a national Labor Day had been growing for some time. On the
first Monday in September 1882, 10,000 members the Knights of Labor,
organized by Matthew Maguire, a New Jersey machinist and Peter J. McGuire, a
New York carpenter, took an unpaid day off and marched around Union Square
in New York City in support of the holiday. The Knights passed a resolution
to hold all future parades on the same day, designated by them as Labor Day.
The Socialist Party held a similar celebration of the working class on May
1. This date eventually became known as May Day, and was celebrated by
Socialists and Communists in commemoration of the working man. In the U.S.,
the first Monday in September was selected to reject any identification with
Communism.
After the events surrounding the Pullman strike, protests against President
Cleveland's harsh methods made the appeasement of the nation's workers a top
political priority. In the immediate wake of the strike, legislation was
rushed unanimously through both houses of Congress, and the bill arrived on
President Cleveland's desk just six days after his troops had broken the
Pullman strike.
1894 was an election year. President Cleveland seized the chance at
conciliation, and Labor Day was born. He was not reelected.
In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called it
"the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their
rights and their wrongs would be discussed...that the workers of our day may
no only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may
touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it."
Today, Labor Day is seen as the last long weekend of summer rather than a
day for political organizing. In 1995, less than 15% of American workers
belonged to unions, down from a high in the 1950's of nearly 50%, though
nearly all have benefited from the victories of the Labor movement.
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