Labor Day - More than a great weekend
For most of us, Labor Day is our last chance to enjoy a long summer weekend with our friends and family before the Fall school or work grind begins in earnest. It’s a great holiday, with a history nearly as long as the country itself.
Slater’s Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a US National Historic Landmark.
Labor Day represents centuries of struggle, all the way back to 1793 when the first factory was established. Samuel Slater, a 21-year-old English immigrant trained in mechanical production, established Slater’s Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. This mill was built to use waterpower to drive the latest British mechanical technology – with the help of human labor to streamline the yarn spinning process. The approach was successful, producing yarn at rates that home spinning could never match. Soon, factories up and down the east coast were pumping out yarn that was ready to be made into textiles. Slater was dubbed “Slater the Traitor” by the British for sharing this technological innovation with the United States.
Not just technology
Slater didn’t just use British technology, he instituted British labor management principles – including child labor. He created the “Rhode Island System” that replicated the close-knit family life patterns of the rural English countryside in New England.
Slater recruited whole families to work at his mills, developing entire tenant farms and villages. He provided company-owned housing nearby, along with company stores; he sponsored a Sunday School where college students taught the children reading and writing. The children weren’t just going to school – they were also the first employees of the mill, aged seven to 12.
The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, two years before it became a national holiday
After the introduction of the cotton gin in 1794, production really took off, By 1810, the U.S. had 50 cotton-yarn mills, many of them started in response to the Embargo of 1807, which cut off imports and trade with Britain before the War of 1812. That war accelerated the process of industrialization in New England. By war's end in 1815, there were 140 cotton manufacturers within 30 miles of Providence, employing 26,000 hands and operating 130,000 spindles. The Industrial Revolution was well underway in the United States[1]. Vestiges of this system remained in place until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 which established federal standards for non-agricultural child labor.
The labor of individuals is of vast importance
Our country was built by the labor of individual workers – from the first surveyors who plated the wilderness in the 1600s to the children who helped spin yarn in 1794, to the workers who laid the railroad tracks for westward expansion to the laborers who helped build the Hoover Dam to the potholers who dig down to reveal buried infrastructure. In 1882, Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, suggested setting aside a day for a "general holiday for the laboring classes" to honor those "who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold."[2]
The country took this to heart and in 1894, President Cleveland signed the law creating a national Labor Day on the first Monday in September.
Berntsen honors all those whose labor goes unseen and uncredited – those who layed out the highways, bridges, dams and buildings, those that do the hard work that raise structures that make our way of life possible.