America, Celebrate All of Your Hard Work

The Labor Day holiday is purely and simply a celebration of work. And we celebrate by not working!

This is a holiday that does not require displays of patriotism, like the Fourth of July or Memorial Day. We have parades on Labor Day, but they're intended to commemorate the fact that people work in this country to build financial security for themselves and their families.

For every generation the concept of Labor Day has a slightly different meaning. The very first "Labor Day" holiday, celebrated on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City, was organized by the Central Labor Union. (Two years later, the date was fixed as the first Monday in September.)

America has come a long way in the past century since the original plan for "a street parade to exhibit to the public the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations of the community," as the U.S Labor Department explains on its Web site. And yet in some ways things haven't changed that much.

A century ago, we relied on immigrant labor to do the essential and often messy or burdensome jobs that more established workers disdained. Thus we had immigrant groups that became the maids and housekeepers in the homes of "robber barons." Immigrants worked in the mines and the mills to dig the energy and make the steel that built America. As each wave of immigrants moved up the ladder of prosperity, more immigrants arrived to take their places on the bottom rung of the ladder.

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