Labor Day
6 September 2027
Labor Day is a federal holiday on the first Monday in September. In 2027 that is 6 September, and it is the last long weekend of the American summer.
The first observance was a parade and a picnic in New York City on Tuesday 5 September 1882, organised by the Central Labor Union. According to the Department of Labor’s account, it nearly failed. The grand marshal, William G. McCabe, had almost no marchers and no music when the parade was due to start at ten o’clock. Then Matthew Maguire of the Central Labor Union ran across the park to tell him that two hundred members of the Jewelers Union of Newark had just come off the ferry, with a band. They marched up Broadway playing a tune from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. Spectators fell in behind them, and the afternoon picnic at Elm Park drew about 25,000 union members and their families. Nobody was paid for the day.
Who proposed the holiday has been argued for over a century. The older answer is Peter J. McGuire, a founder of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. The Department of Labor notes that recent research and the New Jersey Historical Society support the claim of Matthew Maguire, a machinist who was secretary of the Central Labor Union — a near-identical surname belonging to a man with more radical politics.
In 1884 the Central Labor Union fixed the first Monday in September. Oregon became the first state to pass a Labor Day law, on 21 February 1887, and 23 more states had done so by 1894, when Congress passed the act of 28 June 1894 and President Grover Cleveland signed it, while the Pullman strike was under way.
Sources
- U.S. Department of Labor, “History of Labor Day”
- Richard P. Hunt, “The First Labor Day”, American Heritage, vol. 33, no. 5 (August/September 1982)
- U.S. Statutes at Large 28, 96, Act of 28 June 1894
- Timeanddate.com, “Holidays and Observances in the United States in 2027”
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