A Day without Labor

During the Gilded Age (ca. 1877-1900), the United States was in many ways a third world country.   In particular, many cities  throughout the East coast and Midwest were teeming with squalor.  Each day, overcrowded slums became home to more people and animals than anyone had thought possible.  During the warmer months, streets were filled with pedestrians, push carts, children, rooting pigs, stray dogs, and the bloated and rotting corpses of overworked horses who had pulled their last load.

Millions of immigrants, both foreign and domestic, flooded the cities in search of jobs.  Indeed, the Industrial Revolution was creating them by the thousands.  But more and more openings were for semi-skilled and even unskilled manual laborers.  They were trained quickly, paid cheaply, and replaced easily.  Factories chewed  workers up and spit them out at an alarming rate.  Many jobs entailed long hours, hard work, and dangerous conditions.

In 1890, the average American worker clocked in for 10 hours per day, 6 days per week, with few if any breaks, and no sick days or paid vacations.  Of course that was just the average.  Steelworkers, for example, typically went at it for about 63 hours per week.

There was also real risks to life and limb.  From 1880-1900, on average 35,000 American workers died on the job every year, while another 536,000 were seriously injured.  From 1905-1920, at least 2,000 coal miners perished in the mines each year.  The textile industry, which relied mostly on female labor, was so dangerous that its manufacturing epicenter in Lowell, MA had one of the highest death rates in the nation during parts of the 19th century.  Railroad work was particularly perilous.  In 1901, 1 out of every 399 railroad workers was killed on the job, and 1/26 was seriously injured.  For operating train men specifically, the numbers were 1/137 and 1/11.

Such staggering figures are made possible by the tally of daily tragedies, the kind to which society becomes numb.  However, the steady, horrifying toll was also punctuated by the occasional catastrophe.  In 1909, 180 men died in a coal mine explosion in Cherry, Illinois.  In 1911, 146 women and girls either burned alive or leapt to their deaths during a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City.  In 1917, 164 copper miners were incinerated in a conflagration at the North Butte Spectacular Mine in Montana.

Amid long hours, low pay, backbreaking labor, and ever present risk of calamity, there were no national holidays, and most states only recognized two: Christmas and Independence Day.  They were both unpaid.

The emergence of Labor Day as a holiday in honor or America’s workers was tied to the rise of struggling labor unions.  As the Industrial Revolution decimated the ranks of independent skilled craftsmen, transforming them into mere employees, the butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, and dozens of other artisans went to work for larger businesses, and some of their erstwhile trade guilds began evolving into labor unions.  Sometimes these new unions teamed with other semi-skilled and unskilled unions to form larger organizations such as The Knights of Labor or the Industrial Workers of the World.  More often, however, they stuck to representing only skilled workers who had more bargaining leverage because they were more difficult to replace.  The American Federation of Labor would become the premier example of that model during the turn of the 20th century.

Labor agitation occurred all over the country as workers struggled to adjust to the new economy, and one of the union movement’s most active centers was New York City.  It was there in 1882 that a machinist named Matthew Maguire, who was serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union, first proposed an American holiday named Labor Day.

Even then, anti-communism was strong in the U.S., so the union proposed holding celebrations in early September instead of May 1, or May Day, which was a leftist-inspired workers’ holiday in parts of Europe.  The Central Labor Union organized a parade to celebrate the first Labor Day in New York City on Tuesday, September 5, 1882.  It was a phenomenal success as thousands of people skipped work, took to the streets, and celebrated their status as workers.  In 1884, New York City officially ordained the first Monday in September an official holiday.  By the next year, parades were being held in industrial cities throughout America.  Oregon became the first state to sanction it in 1887.  Four more states, including New York, followed suit later that year.

Despite resistance by business interests and their political allies, 27 of the nation’s states had gotten on board by 1893.  That year Congress made it a national holiday in the District and the  territories, and the rest of the states soon followed.

So yesterday, whether you decided to put your feet up and tip a cold one or elected to do a little work on your own behalf, such tackling the the yard or getting dirty with your car, rest easy knowing that Labor Day was yours, mine, and for everyone else who works hard on behalf of others most of the year.

I hope you enjoyed your day off.  We all earned it.