Labor Day gets treated as a Monday when the bank is closed. The unofficial end of summer. A mattress sale. The last decent weekend to get the boat out.
I think of it as the working person’s Memorial Day.
Today is a day to remember the dead. The injured. The people beaten, blacklisted, evicted, starved, shot, burned and sometimes hanged for demanding some portion of the fruits of their own labor.
It’s also a day to look at the ordinary furniture of our lives and recognize how much of it used to be extraordinary. An evening at home. A weekend. A child in a classroom instead of standing beside you at the machine. A fire exit. A guard on a moving part. Overtime. A wage floor. The notion that if you lose an arm making somebody else rich, your employer owes you something. The expectation that you can go to work in the morning with a reasonable chance of coming home at night.
That feels like civilization now. It was a list of demands once, and people paid for it.
Before Labor Day There Was May Day
To understand this holiday you have to go back further than American unions. Further than Haymarket. Further than factories.
May Day is old. Across much of Europe, the start of May opened the summer — the Gaelic festival of Beltane sits at that hinge in the year. By medieval England, the beginning of May meant feasting, dancing, gathering flowers and greenery, “bringing in the May,” raising maypoles. English records of those observances run back at least to the thirteenth century.
Here’s the part worth sitting with. May Day was about the fruits of labor long before the phrase got used politically.
In farming communities the year’s survival depended on the earth producing again. English May customs celebrated vegetation, fertility and the promise of a crop — people carried blossoms in from the countryside, raised decorated poles, and marked the opening of the productive season. English Heritage traces many of those customs through arable communities preoccupied with planting, growing and harvesting grain.
The fruit was literal. Food, pasture, wood, animals, fuel — the ability of the land, worked by human hands, to carry a community another year. And the celebration belonged outside. To the village. To commoners. To the green.
The Commons
That word carries weight.
Before capitalism finished separating working people from the means of feeding themselves, rural England ran on a tangle of private, customary and common rights. A village might sit inside open fields worked in strips, with local people holding customary rights to pasture animals, gather fuel, cut turf, or otherwise draw on common land.
This was no egalitarian paradise. There were landlords, hierarchies, hunger and exploitation. There were also material things ordinary people had a claim on because they belonged to the community. A cow could graze. A goose could feed. Fuel could be gathered. A household with almost no money still held some working access to the landscape around it.
The village green wasn’t decorative grass either. It was where people gathered, where games happened, where the maypole stood. Historic England still documents medieval greens with maypoles tied to May Day.
So look at what the old May Day celebrated. The earth is productive again. We survived winter. The animals can feed. The fields will grow. The community gathers on land it understands, in part, as ours, and together we celebrate the coming fruits of our labor.
That’s a very old human idea.
Then the Fences Went Up
Over centuries that landscape changed. Open fields were consolidated. Commons were enclosed. Rights that had lived in custom were extinguished, compensated, transferred, or made unusable.
Between 1604 and 1914, more than 5,200 parliamentary enclosure bills covered roughly 6.8 million acres of England. Enclosure also raised agricultural productivity, and historians still argue about how directly it pushed rural workers into towns. History rarely hands us one villain and one lever.
But people at the time could see what was going out the door. In nineteenth-century debates, members of Parliament discussed poor families losing customary rights to graze cows, pigs and geese, and complained that enclosure had compensated the property owners while forgetting the people who exercised the common rights.
Pull the camera back and the transition is remarkable. A person who once held some working claim on the surrounding landscape becomes a person who has to buy the necessities of life with wages. The commoner becomes the laborer. The productive commons become productive property. And enormous numbers of people arrive at the factory gate holding one commodity worth selling: their time.
The old argument doesn’t disappear. It changes clothes. If we no longer hold the field together, what portion of what we produce together belongs to us?
May Day Comes Back in Work Clothes
Nineteenth-century industrial workers were putting in hours under conditions we’d find intolerable. The demand that rose to the top was elegantly simple.
Eight hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what we will.
American labor organizations settled on May 1, 1886 as the deadline for a national campaign for the eight-hour day. The Department of Labor describes eight-hour leagues spreading city to city as workers organized toward that date.
May Day had come back around — and watch what happened to the meaning of it. The old May Day gathered the community at the opening of the productive season. The new one gathered the people doing the producing. Same question on the table: who gets the fruits of the labor?
In Chicago, violence followed. Police fired on workers outside the McCormick Reaper Works on May 3. The next evening, workers gathered at Haymarket Square. Police moved to break up the meeting. Someone threw a bomb. Gunfire erupted. Police and civilians died. Eight anarchists were prosecuted and four executed; Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld later pardoned the survivors.
By 1890, May 1 was International Workers’ Day. The workers’ holiday observed across much of the planet grew out of an American fight for the eight-hour day. We gave the world May Day, then largely stopped keeping it ourselves.
The Other Labor Day
We built a second tradition instead.
On September 5, 1882, New York’s Central Labor Union organized the first Labor Day celebration — workers marching in public to show the strength of their organizations, followed by recreation for their families. The idea spread through the states, and in 1894 Congress made the first Monday in September a legal holiday.
There’s a wrinkle worth handling honestly. It’s tempting to say September was invented to bury May Day. That doesn’t hold up; the first September celebration came four years ahead of Haymarket, and workers created it too.
By 1894, though, the context had shifted hard. May 1 was welded internationally to militant labor politics. And the federal holiday arrived in the middle of the Pullman Strike — President Cleveland’s administration sent troops into that dispute, violence followed, and Congress approved the September holiday amid the wreckage.
So we ended up with two labor traditions. One became an international workers’ day tied to struggle. The other became an American federal holiday, and it got comfortable. Parades became picnics. Picnics became cookouts. Cookouts became car sales. The history receded into the wallpaper.
The Things We Won
Consider how young some of our supposedly normal expectations are.
The Fair Labor Standards Act didn’t arrive until 1938. It set a minimum wage, went after oppressive child labor, and started limiting the workweek; the 40-hour standard phased in afterward.
Getting there was no policy seminar.
At Ludlow, Colorado, striking coal miners and their families were driven out of company housing and lived in a tent colony. On April 20, 1914, an attack on that colony left 21 people dead, 11 of them children. Enforcement of an eight-hour workday was among the miners’ demands.
Eleven children. Over material we now file in employee handbooks.
So when I call this the working person’s Memorial Day, I mean it. There are ghosts behind the weekend. Graves behind the eight-hour day. Children behind the child-labor laws. Burned and broken workers behind the fire codes and the machine guards. Hungry families behind the wage laws. People who spent their lives demanding things they didn’t live long enough to use.
And a Lot of Them Are at Work Today
A great many working people are on the clock right now.
The federal numbers need care — “access to paid holidays” doesn’t guarantee a worker has this holiday off. But the class pattern is hard to miss.
In private industry in 2025, 91 percent of management, professional and related workers had access to paid holidays. Service workers: 56 percent. Part-time workers: 50 percent. The lowest-paid quarter of the workforce: 61 percent. The lowest-paid tenth: 49 percent. Union workers: 94 percent. Nonunion: 80 percent. At businesses with fewer than 50 employees, 73 percent; at businesses with 500 or more, 93 percent.
The people least likely to have comfortable working conditions are frequently the same people least likely to have a paid holiday. And a lot of us enjoying today depend on somebody else working today. Somebody cooks the food. Somebody stocks the store. Somebody cares for the sick. Somebody drives, cleans, keeps the machinery running. Somebody stands behind a counter while the rest of us celebrate the worker.
The Same Question, New Clothes
Which tells you the fight didn’t end in 1938.
The eight-hour question is still on the table; it just wears different clothes. Schedules handed down by an app the night before. Workers classified as contractors so the wage floor and the overtime rule can’t reach them. Production rates set by software that doesn’t get tired. Wage theft that costs more to chase than it returns. Warehouses and kitchens working through heat with no federal standard covering them.
Strip the technology off and it’s the argument from the Chicago streets, and before that the argument over the common field: how much of your life belongs to you, and how much belongs to whoever owns the place you work?
The people who won the weekend didn’t inherit it. They named what they wanted, said it out loud together, and held the line long enough to make it law.
The Fruits of Labor
So today I’d ask something small. Remember.
The weekend is a fruit of labor. The evening at home is a fruit of labor. The paycheck, the safety rail, the overtime check. The classroom your child sits in instead of the mill where your great-grandfather worked as a boy. The holiday itself.
Long before anybody marched through Chicago under an eight-hour banner, people gathered in spring to celebrate the return of the earth’s abundance. They brought greenery in from the fields. They raised the maypole. They met on the green. They celebrated the prospect that their work and their land would produce enough to carry the community another year.
Those were the fruits of labor.
Then the commons went behind fences, the factory rose, and millions found themselves selling their hours for the right to live. So they built new commons. The union hall. The picket line. The mutual-aid society. The strike fund. The march. The ballot. The collective agreement. Places where one worker stopped being one worker and became workers.
And out of those commons came another harvest. Eight hours. Weekends. Safer workplaces. Better wages. Limits on child labor. A little time with our families. A little dignity. A slightly larger share of the lives our work makes possible.
Don’t treat any of it as something that simply happened. Don’t assume it’s permanent. And don’t imagine it was handed down because powerful people had a change of heart.
People stood together. That’s the part I want remembered today.
Not the sale. Not the barbecue. Not the end of summer. The price.
Take a minute and appreciate what you earned with your own work. Then account for what you hold because men, women and children you’ll never meet endured things you shouldn’t have to. The ones who went home injured. The ones who lost their houses. The ones who got blacklisted. The ones whose kids went hungry during a strike. The ones who were beaten. The ones who were shot. The ones who didn’t live to enjoy what they helped win.
Then remember how they won it.
They stood together.
That may be the best fruit of labor we inherited.
