Labor Day is our holiday

Labor Day is our holiday—won through the American labor movement’s hard-fought battle for dignity, shorter hours, and fair treatment.

In the late 1800s, industrial workers endured 12–16 hour days, child labor, deadly workplaces, and poverty wages. Unions answered with organizing and mass action. On September 5, 1882, the Central Labor Union (linked to the Knights of Labor) staged the first Labor Day parade in New York City. Thousands of workers marched for the eight-hour day and the right to organize.

Leaders like Peter J. McGuire (a founder of the American Federation of Labor) and Matthew Maguire helped spread the idea of a workers’ holiday. Cities and states began adopting it. After the violent 1894 Pullman Strike—when federal troops crushed a nationwide railroad walkout and workers died—Congress and President Grover Cleveland made Labor Day a federal holiday as a concession to organized labor’s growing power.

It was never a gift from employers or politicians. It was taken by unions and rank-and-file workers who struck, organized, and refused to accept exploitation as inevitable.

The first parade came five years before the IUPAT’s founding, yet painters were already part of that same struggle. On March 15, 1887, the Brotherhood of Painters and Decorators of America (IUPAT’s original name) was organized in Baltimore by tradesmen seeking uniform wages, safer conditions, and collective strength amid the Gilded Age conditions that produced Labor Day. Painters had long been active in the Knights of Labor. Within a year the new craft union grew to more than 100 locals and 7,000 members, affiliated with the AFL, and joined the fight for the eight-hour day and workers’ rights.

From the beginning, IUPAT members marched in Labor Day parades and observances. To this day the union’s constitution requires every District Council and Local Union to treat the first Monday in September as Labor’s holiday—members are barred from working—and sets aside the preceding Sunday as Memorial Sunday to honor deceased brothers and sisters.

Labor Day remains what workers made it: a day of remembrance, solidarity, and resolve.