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The History of Labor Day

14 points by zoowar 14y ago

tokenadult 14y ago
This official history of Labor Day by the United States Department of Labor is described as a "sanitized" history of Labor Day in the United States by another webpage http://www.cs.uni.edu/~campbell/gened/labour.html http://www.cs.uni.edu/~campbell/gened/labour.html (written by a professor of mathematics who definitely has a point of view on labor history) that I find more informative, even as it expresses a point of view, than the government webpage. Ever since I have lived in Taiwan, a country with a red flag (adopted during the worldwide socialist movement) and Labor Day on May 1st, I have wondered why the United States doesn't have Labor Day on May 1st. See also my submission from yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4468530 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4468530 of another website about this issue.
twelvechairs 14y ago
This is very sanitised. 'labor day' comes from the international unionist struggle/demand for workers rights that stopped sweatshop conditions existing in all western countries, usually through 'illegal' strikes. You can also forget conflating it with Stalin and the cold war - that all came much later.
toomuchcoffee 14y ago
Note only does the DOL page not mention the stiff competition faced with the May 1st date, it doesn't even mention what is uncontroversially regarded as the main impetus for the federal labor holiday, namely, as a gesture of appeasement in the wake of the brutal suppression of the Pullman strike just 6 days before the enabling act was signed by Grover Cleveland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike In that sense, the totality of the censorship on the government's page around a simple matter of noncontroversial public history is simply astonishing. The irony is that it seems to exemplify the very ethos of left-wing totalitarianism that it's desperately trying to "protect" us from. Or as Winston Smith said it best himself, "The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth" (Book One, Chapter VII). BTW, here's a good recap of the actual political maneuverings around the time of the federal holiday was enacted: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2004/09/why_do_we_get_labor_day_off.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

14 points by zoowar 14y ago

This official history of Labor Day by the United States Department of Labor is described as a "sanitized" history of Labor Day in the United States by another webpage http://www.cs.uni.edu/~campbell/gened/labour.html http://www.cs.uni.edu/~campbell/gened/labour.html (written by a professor of mathematics who definitely has a point of view on labor history) that I find more informative, even as it expresses a point of view, than the government webpage. Ever since I have lived in Taiwan, a country with a red flag (adopted during the worldwide socialist movement) and Labor Day on May 1st, I have wondered why the United States doesn't have Labor Day on May 1st. See also my submission from yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4468530 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4468530 of another website about this issue.

twelvechairs 14y ago

This is very sanitised. 'labor day' comes from the international unionist struggle/demand for workers rights that stopped sweatshop conditions existing in all western countries, usually through 'illegal' strikes. You can also forget conflating it with Stalin and the cold war - that all came much later.

toomuchcoffee 14y ago

Note only does the DOL page not mention the stiff competition faced with the May 1st date, it doesn't even mention what is uncontroversially regarded as the main impetus for the federal labor holiday, namely, as a gesture of appeasement in the wake of the brutal suppression of the Pullman strike just 6 days before the enabling act was signed by Grover Cleveland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike In that sense, the totality of the censorship on the government's page around a simple matter of noncontroversial public history is simply astonishing. The irony is that it seems to exemplify the very ethos of left-wing totalitarianism that it's desperately trying to "protect" us from. Or as Winston Smith said it best himself, "The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth" (Book One, Chapter VII). BTW, here's a good recap of the actual political maneuverings around the time of the federal holiday was enacted: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2004/09/why_do_we_get_labor_day_off.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...