Labor Day’s meaning lost amidst beach supplies

By Jacob R. Wheeler
Sun editor and occasional columnist
What is marked in your calendar for Labor Day Monday: a day on the beach; a barbecue on the deck; a cocktail party in the garden?
How about 12 hours toiling on the assembly line in a hot factory? Or maybe you’d like to march in a picket line from dawn until dusk with a heavy sign in one hand and a helmet in the other, just in case the police show up to break your strike.

Catch my drift?
Fact is, very few of us understand what this holiday is really about, or why and to whom we should express thanks for the eight-hour workday, for weekends off and for those vacations that find us tanning on the beach, content with our lives.
I’ll admit it. I didn’t know how Labor Day came to be celebrated in the United States, beyond an inclination that some guys in blue collars had it rough a long time ago. So I researched the Internet for a historical perspective and discovered along the way that Labor Day’s significance is not relegated to history. It jumps out at us every day — from the pages of a newspaper, from the sweat dripping down a roadside construction worker’s back, or from the sight of dilapidated homes in every corner of this rich country.
Here, then, is a synopsis of how Labor Day came to be declared a federal holiday, courtesy of several websites:
“In 1893, in the midst of a nationwide economic depression, George Pullman, president of the Pullman railroad sleeping car company located in the Illinois town of the same name, laid off hundreds of workers and forced wage cuts on others even while rents in the company town remained the same. The American Railway Union came to the cause of the workers, who went on strike for higher pay and lower rent, and railroad workers across the country boycotted trains pulling Pullman cars. Rioting, pillaging and burning railroad cars ensued.
“Nervous executives convinced United States President Grover Cleveland to declare the strike a federal crime and deploy 12,000 troops to squash the rebellion. Deputy marshals shot two men in Kensington, near Chicago. Pullman workers were forced to sign a pledge stating that they would never again unionize. Meanwhile, union workers in New York City took an unpaid day off in September, 1892, and marched around Union Square to drum up support for a national labor day.
“As 1894 was an election year, Cleveland’s harsh methods made the appeasement of America’s workers a top political priority. In the immediate wake of the bloodshed in Illinois, 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.
Thus, Labor Day was born.
“In 1898 Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called the new holiday ‘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 not 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.’”
And yet Labor Day for us, more than a century later, has little to do with blood, sweat and sacrifice. It is known as the last weekend of summer; a chance to relax on the beach and tone that bronze hide before driving south and returning to the office. Yet every one of us has benefited from this country’s labor movement, and ought to notice those still suffering.
Many of us live in comfort and prosperity, at a time and in an empire known for “the good life”. But we still lack health insurance across the board. We still lack public transportation for those who can’t afford a car. We still fear that our employers are releasing poisons into the air and groundwater that may slowly kill us. And we still lack respect for those who truly “work for a living”.
We have a long way to go.
Jacob Wheeler is the founding editor of the Glen Arbor Sun. He can be reached via e-mail at jacobrwheeler@hotmail.com