Our Opinion: A day ‘when labor shall be best honored and well rewarded’

In honor of Labor Day, the Times is republishing an editorial from Sept. 4, 1976, that describes the holiday’s history and significance.

Labor Day is one of the most used celebrations, as it is in reality a weekend and the last one for many to enjoy summer vacations and sports on a grand scale. Labor Day weekends have become traditional settings for outings to picnic grounds, water resorts, mountain retreats and all the other favorite vacation haunts.

Labor Day is the launching pad for another fall routine, including a new school term, and it provides a welcome breather before the family buckles down to the serious business of earning a livelihood. It also has fulfilled the dreams of Peter McGuire, who envisioned Labor Day as a celebration “dedicated to peace, civilization and the triumph of industry. It is a demonstration of fraternity and the harbinger of a better age, a more chivalrous time, when labor shall be best honored and well rewarded.”

Labor Day, with all its blessings, has another side that should be emphasized and corrected.

This is a very special Labor Day, as it is being observed on Sept. 6 during the 200th anniversary of the birth of liberty in America. Sad to say, there are some who would curtail liberty by requiring labor union membership as a condition for employment.

North Carolina’s Sam J. Ervin, constitutional lawyer and former United States senator, had this to say on the subject: “Is there anything that is anti-union in a person’s entertaining the belief that it is not an injustice to labor unions to require them to obtain their members in exactly the same way that churches and all other voluntary organizations obtain their members?”

We are glad to state that in 20 of the states of the Union, right-to-work laws protect the liberty of workers, but we sadly admit that in 30 states, American workers do not have any protection from the tyranny of compulsory unionism.

We could go on and on quoting opinions on the right of free choice, to be able to join a union if the worker desires and to be able to keep his job without joining a union.

In the United States, forces bent on the destruction of freedom of the individual are powerful and, we fear, gaining in power. These forces would have long ago won total victory were it not for men and women dedicated to the preservation of the rights that made this country, after 200 years, one of the most successful nations that history records.

Successful, not in power to conquer weaker peoples, but in the power to allow men to live in freedom under law, free from slavery, free from being bullied into belonging to organizations that to some extent may help them, but that do so at a cost that no man in his senses would want to pay.

HISTORY OF LABOR DAY

Labor Day is one of our most recent holidays. This is true because industry had not developed into the industrial force it is today until around the end of the 19th century.

May 1 is the date generally selected by trade unions, socialist parties and labor organizations in general for a public celebration. It is observed on May 1 by a portion of the population in nearly every industrial country except the United States and Canada.

Labor Day is also celebrated on May 1 in Mexico and most of the countries of Central and South America. In the Communist countries, it is also a holiday.

In Great Britain, the Labor Day celebration generally takes place on the first Sunday after May Day; in London, the traditional meeting place is Hyde Park. The first Labor Day celebration was not held in Great Britain until 1892.

Labor Day is celebrated on the first Monday in September in the states and territories of the United States and in the provinces of Canada. Peter McGuire is a name unfamiliar to many Americans, yet he was the man responsible for giving the United States one of its most celebrated holidays.

It was Peter McGuire who, in 1882, suggested a day each year be dedicated to American industry and the men who have contributed toward making it the most powerful and constructive force in the world.

Twelve years after McGuire proposed a day dedicated to industry of man, and after many towns, cities and states already had proclaimed such a legal holiday for their citizens, Congress made it official by establishing Labor Day as a national holiday.

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