Reply #2: On the first Labor Day in 1882 parade, 10,000 people protested 12-hour days, seven days a week.

[Elmore Furth]

My dad was a union steward and I believe in the union. But these Yuppies have made it unfashionable, like civility.

"Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America."
John L. Lewis


"What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright."
Samuel Gompers

People stood up on the first Labor Day, in 1882, to walk in a parade in New York City. About 10,000 marchers took an unpaid day to demonstrate against what was then the workplace norm: 12-hour days, seven days a week.

The idea of a “workingmen's holiday” spread, and by the end of the decade, eight states had passed laws recognizing it. In 1891, San Diego had its first Labor Day parade.

Three years later, Congress established a federal holiday.

By the mid-1950s, about 35 percent of America's workers belonged to unions. That number has dwindled since — it was 12.4 percent in 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and with it went the protest part of Labor Day.


Labor Day reverence is lost, say historians