By Denise Louise Gregorka
We often look forward to Labor Day as the “end of summer” marker. Having the long, three-day weekend is a welcome break, as it is observed as a government holiday. But why was it created?
Labor Day began in the late 19th century during the Industrial Revolution when workers demanded better pay and shorter hours. It was a way to honor American workers and their contributions to the country.
Early Hardships of the Industrial Revolution
Informal hiring practices existed alongside indentured servitude and slavery in the late 1700s, providing flexible labor for construction, shipping, and clearing land.
Before workers organized and formed unions, there were no regulations surrounding employment, and employers often took advantage of this freedom.
Immigrant Workforces
By the 19th century, waves of immigrants—including Irish, Italian, and Eastern European workers—relied heavily on day labor and “shape-up” docks to find jobs in expanding urban centers.
Long Hours
During the Industrial Revolution, the majority of people lived to work. There was no leisure time. In the early 1800s, workers labored 16 hours daily, six days a week. They took the Sabbath off. Children also worked because wages were low and children needed to work for families to make ends meet. Often the work was very dangerous, and if a worker was hurt, that usually meant the “poor house.”
There were no workers’ rights, no worker protections, no worker compensation for injuries or death. Poverty was pervasive, and most workers lived in tenement slums. Because working and living conditions were so hard and people were crammed together, disease spread quickly; the average life expectancy of working Americans in the mid-1800s was 35-40 years old.
Lack of Protection
Day laborers historically faced extreme volatility, wage withholding, hazardous physical work, and zero long-term security or benefits. Factories lacked proper ventilation, breaks, or sanitation.
A nine-year-old boy receives twenty cents for a hamper of beans he picked on a farm in Homestead, Florida.
Child Labor
It is hard to imagine, but young children worked in dangerous mills and mines with no rights and no protections.
Child labor was especially common in coal mines, chimney sweeping, prostitution, rat catching, and newspaper and street barking. Coal mining and street sweeping favored children because they were small and could fit into tight places and required far less pay.
Dickensian horrors were commonplace in factories and mines. Children were used as “hurriers” to push along coal carts on their hands and knees in cramped and completely dark horizontal coal shafts. They often developed permanent medical conditions like congested lungs or lung cancer, spinal deformation, damaged eyesight, and broken bones. Also, rats, explosions, and cave-ins were ever-present risks.
Crowds of people stand in the street, waiting to identify bodies of immigrant workers following the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York City.
Fighting Back
In the early 1880s, many workers turned to unions to better their circumstances and contest the growing power of capitalists as the nation rapidly industrialized. Skilled artisans played a leading role in the labor movement, but to a greater extent than before, unskilled workers joined them in organizing. New labor organizations sprang up, and old ones expanded in a wave of militancy and activism that peaked in 1886 in the “great uprising of labor,” when union membership reached a new high, huge strikes shook the nation, and independent labor political parties surfaced in community after community.
Trade unionists proposed that a day be set aside to celebrate labor. “Labor Day” was promoted by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor, which organized the first parade in New York City. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed the law declaring Labor Day as a federal holiday; Widely considered a conciliatory gesture to workers amid the nationwide labor protests, Congress and Cleveland chose to establish the September holiday.
The first Labor Day proved a huge success. Some 10,000 men and a few women marched in the parade, which began on lower Broadway, went past reviewing stands set up in Union Square, and then continued uptown to 42nd Street.
Estimates of the size of the crowd watching the march were as high as a quarter million people.
Labor Day parade in Union Square, 1887 (NYPL)
In the years since, labor unions have served as a united voice for workers of all professions by bargaining collectively with employers to advocate for better wages, working conditions, and to establish parameters of work life that have become commonplace and law, such as the eight-hour workday, five-day workweek, protection for children in the workplace, and the federal minimum wage.
To this day, we can thank the hard workers who bravely fought back to gain rights and protections for us all!
Denise Gregorka is a longtime Little Falls resident who loves the city’s people & history.
She is married to Craig, who is a Little Falls native, retired photographer & former business owner.
Denise has collaborated on costumes for Broadway and off-Broadway theatre for 18+ years and has also been an antique/collectibles dealer for over 25 years.
She is not a professional writer but is compelled to hear and share the “background story” from engaging Little Falls residents.
If you’d like to contact Denise about a story idea, you can email her at gork4444@gmail.com.
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