The First Monday in September might have been called “Labor Day” and might have been associated with a celebration of the cultural and social events involving the labor movement in the United States, but for me, personally, it was merely to mark the end of summer and the beginning of a new year. Labor Day was designated as a federal holiday, dating back to its declaration as such in 1894. However, it was never, in my life, celebrated as one. There were neither fireworks nor parades as there were for July Fourth. Thanksgiving had turkeys and large family reunions. Presidents’ Day, when I was growing up, actually consisted of two days for celebration, one for Lincoln on February 12 and another for Washington on February 22. Memorial Day on May 30 had military parades, decorations for the graves of those who had died in battle, and red poppies, made from a heavy material having the properties of both silk and felt. However, Labor Day had nothing remarkable about it, other than to bring summer to a close and for the school year to begin.
Labor Day was the last chance for a picnic in the park. For some reason, people were willing to pack food into hampers and drive to an outdoor place to eat it. If your family arrived early enough, they might find a table and benches near a grill, where hamburgers and hot dogs could be burned over hot charcoal, adding its own flavor to the meat to be consumed. If you had to arrive later, you needed to pack the makings for ham sandwiches, along with the last slices of watermelon for dessert.
As Memorial Day marked the beginning of the potential weeks for vacations, Labor Day signaled their conclusion. If you lived in a small town in New England, you prepared for the last days of tourists. Shops would be closed with the possibility for a week of reopening in late December, if Christmas visitors were to be accommodated. Back then, public school classes would begin the next day; they never started before Labor Day.
My personal year began in September, not January. The academic year initiated my annual life cycle. This commencement was reinforced when I joined the federal government with its own fiscal year from September 1 through August 31. Some people maintained you had to stop wearing white clothing after Labor Day. I, on the other hand, had to stop using any of last year’s funds, unless they had been designated for carryover. It was only with retirement that I could change, mentally, from September to January as the time for new beginnings.
In its early years, Labor Day was meant to honor the cultural and social needs of manual laborers, those who produced iron and steel or assembled vehicles made from these sources, as well as those of workers in the ever-expanding railroad industry. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was common for laborers to perform their tasks twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Children as young as twelve years of age would work in textile mills for similar periods. Most laborers were recent immigrants who were willing to accept low wages in order to provide for their expanding families.
This labor movement was part of my own family history. My father worked in one of the steel mills that stretched from northern Indiana through Ohio and into Pennsylvania, the area which, later, was to become known as the “rust belt” of the nation. However, from back in the mid ‘forties, I vividly recall the red glow on the horizon above Youngstown on those evenings when steel was being poured. I also was aware of the Donora smog of 1948 that resulted in some two dozen deaths in that Pennsylvanian mill-town. My own town was not without its share of soot during the winter months, when it poxed the snow around our house and hastened the formation of grey slush in the streets. These conditions were an acceptable part of life, occurring well before anyone knew the consequences of environmental pollution.
Our family’s heated arguments about labor and factory work did not include such concerns; instead, they focused on the merits and demerits of labor unions, with my father vociferously in support and my favorite uncle taking management’s views, since he was a supervisor in one of the local steel mills. I, myself, did not understand the concept of my father being “on strike” every few years. He saw these weeks as opportunities to work with his brother and their father in the wallpaper-house-painting jobs that brought in money to supplement the meager funds provided by the AFL and CIO during such strikes.
In those days, Labor Day was officially in praise of those who performed manual labor to earn their wages. It seldom included farmers who continued to work twelve-hours a day for seven days a week. Office workers, being white-collar rather than blue-, did not seem to be involved in the holiday – or, perhaps, this appeared to be the case, since none of our male relatives or family-friends held such positions. Only three women in my extended family were gainfully employed. Aunt Mary worked in the local General Electric factory making light bulbs. Aunt Betty was a nurse. My mother was the cashier for a Five-And-Dime store at a local mall.
This federal holiday has become less of one over the postwar years. When steel mills moved offshore and were joined by the auto-industry which used their product, the labor movement began to lose its appeal. It is only recently that service workers such as those engaged by Amazon or by the hospitality industry have begun to renew a potential interest in the movement. The current unemployment rate is at a record low of 3.7 percent. Companies are finding it difficult to entice new employees. Many who are employed are part of a new movement called “quiet quitting,” in which workers perform the minimum requirement for their jobs and have little interest in remaining with them.
There was once a time when a person desired and expected to remain in the same job for life, with only minor changes in what they did for eight hours a day, five days a week. This generation of my beginning days of employment did shift to a generation in which it was expected that one would hold a series of jobs with different companies, not always in the same field. Now there is a desire and expectation that you can work at home, some distance from any central office. Some postulate that truck drivers will be replaced by robotic controlled vehicles!
Originally, tradesmen and artists were self-employed. They lived above their shops or were journeymen while developing their skills. The industrial revolution took textile workers from their homes and into factories. Blacksmiths now poured larger vessels of molten metal and rolled out sheets of steel in factories. Labor moved from individuals to groups of workers performing similar tasks. Labor Day was set aside to honor this movement, this ingathering of workers as a community.
Although the future, as always, is unknown, is there a possibility that this holiday, the first of the “Monday Holidays,” will melt into merely another long weekend for shopping, for marking the end of the time for summer vacations and for the beginning of a period for buying new stuff for Halloween and Christmas? Is Labor Day to become another holiday that wasn’t?