Donnell Wilson
Enc1101
P. Monck
09/04/08
To tell you the truth, Labor Day was just a relaxing day off from everything to me. Now I realized what the real meaning of Labor Day stands for. Labor Day was started on September 5, 1882, so every Labor Day we get a day off to relax. It took the Congress twelve years to legalize the holiday. The average American worked 12-hour days, seven days a week in terrible working conditions to make a basic living which included food and a home to live in.
The children were taken advantage of so they worked more and made less. They called the warehouses they worked at “Sweat Shops” because that’s all they did was sweat. Many people were killed while working in these shops from something going wrong or something that wasn’t done correctly. This behavior is probably the closest infatuation to slavery that you can think of.
On June 26, the American railroad union called a boycott of all Pullman railway cars. Within days over 50,000 rail workers made there work come to a cease. All through the country workers were going on strike as they got word that others were doing the same. The boycott brought worker’s rights to the public eye and Congress declared in 1894. That now the first Monday of September would be the holiday for workers, known as Labor Day.
The labor that went on then produced the most materialistic possessions the world has ever known, thus this shows that the American worker is remarkable and should be glorified and granted that day of rest for all of the hard work they put out everyday. The founder of the holiday is not clear, but the credit should go to either Peter McGuire, who was a cofounder of the American Federation of labor, or Matthew McGuire, who appointed a committee to plan a demonstration and a picnic to uphold the holiday.
