Labor Day Reflections

Date Published: 09/09/2009

For years I have listened to the jokes about not working on Labor Day. The church’s office is closed for the holiday, so I am not at work today, but the rest of this week will take extra effort to make up for the relaxation I’m enjoying today. I did a little work around the house (fixing a condensate drain in a window AC and taking care of family finances) and hope to have some time for relaxed reading.

Though I had never checked out the details, I have long been certain that Labor Day was not about celebrating the value of work per se by taking a day off from work, but that Labor Day was a celebration of the contributions of organized labor – labor unions – to the history and culture of the United States. As the picnic I was part of on the Sunday before Labor Day, one conversation turned to speculating about the origins of Labor Day. We guessed that it might have been instituted in the time of Franklin Roosevelt when unions rose to prominence.

I did a little sleuthing on the internet today and found that Labor Day truly was founded to celebrate labor unions, but quite a bit earlier than Franklin Roosevelt. Apparently a number of unions, cities and states had some form of Labor Day celebration before it was formally adopted by Congress. Unions paraded through the streets of cities as a demonstration of their size and importance. Grover Cleveland was president in 1894 when Congress officially made Labor Day a federal holiday. Though the historical impetus is not completely clear, what is evident is that there had been several violent clashes with labor unions, perhaps culminating with the Pullman Palace Railway Car strike, and establishing the holiday may have been a political maneuver to pacify the unions.

Like most of our holidays, the reason for their existence quickly is lost in the push to enjoy leisure time and recreation. Though my father belonged to the Teamsters in the heyday of Jimmy Hoffa (he was an embalmer and they were organized with the chauffers local along with the taxi drivers, since they all drove cars as part of the job), I don’t remember making any special acknowledgement of that on Labor Day. Though labor unions seem to be in the decline at the beginning of the 21st century, I don’t imagine anyone suggesting that we drop Labor Day as a holiday. The owners and managers of union and non-union shops alike enjoy the day off.

I’m not going to stretch or do some mental gymnastics to make a spiritual or religious connection with these observations. That we don’t think of unions much on Labor Day is just another reminder of how hard it is to sustain a passionate focus for a long period of time, especially from one generation to the next. Even something as powerful and precious as faith must be renewed daily if it is to remain fresh.