Labor Day has been around for a while but its origin story is often forgotten

31 August 2023 , 22:16

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The history of Labor Day in the US is a rich one, dating back to the late 1800s (Image: Getty Images)

Labor Day has been celebrated by Americans for 129 years. It's often symbolic of the transition from summer to autumn and features picnics and family gatherings galore, held annually on the first Monday of September.

But the roots of the federal holiday run much deeper than seasonal celebrations and long three-day weekends. Its origins actually trace back to the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s.

The first official, federally recognised Labor Day occurred in 1894 after a decade-long push from labourers who wanted their efforts to be observed and celebrated by the government, according to the US Department of Labor. Activists had pushed for a holiday, claiming that workers formed the baseline for the US's strength, prosperity and well-being.

The movement to make Labor Day a federal holiday began in the late 1800s (Getty Images)

For nine years before that, activists had been celebrating the holiday in individual states, with the first municipal ordinances recognising the day passed around 1885 and 1886. Then, New York became the first state to introduce a bill seeking to have the holiday observed on the statewide level — though Oregon was the first to actually pass such a bill in 1887.

Other states quickly followed, and by the end of the 1880s, 31 of the 42 states admitted into the Union at the time had ratified a bill recognising it as an official holiday. Four years later, in 1894, Congress passed a law federally recognising it and officially designating the first Monday of September as the day to celebrate it.

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Picnics, parades and parties have become staples of Labor Day (Getty Images)

The first recorded instances of the holiday were from 1882, though its debated who actually conceptualised it — it may have been Peter McGuire, the general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, who co-founded the American Federation of Labor; or it could have been Matthew Maguire, who served as the secretary of the local chapter of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, New Jersey.

New York City saw the first Labor Day celebration in 1882 on September 5 of that year, and the second was held there the next year on the same date. Parades accompanied the events, and that was cemented as a tradition of the holiday when it became federally recognised in 1894 by former President Grover Cleveland.

Labor Day was made into a federal holiday in 1894 (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

The parades were designed to showcase "the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labour organisations" of America, the DOL stated, and later, speeches by some of the country's most prominent historical figures became a staple of the holiday as well.

"American labor has raised the nation’s standard of living and contributed to the greatest production the world has ever known and the labor movement has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy," the DOL wrote. "It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation's strength, freedom, and leadership – the American worker."

Jeremiah Hassel