Get up to 50% off the latest styles at Old Navy. Take advantage of 60% off Amazon purchases site-wide. Save 75% on furniture, rugs, and decor this Labor Day weekend at Wayfair. This is what Labor Day has become. A long weekend to take advantage of sales meant to convince us our lives will have meaning if we pile up on stuff we don’t need. Is this really what men, women, and children bled in the streets for? Discounted floor rugs and fast fashion?
Real power for workers never looked like a sale. One of my heroes, Fred Hampton, famously said, “All power to the people.” That was what the American labor movement embodied decades before Hampton ever spoke the words. At the turn of the 20th century, industrialization swept through the United States on the backs of a deregulated workforce. The average workday ran 10 to 14 hours, with no mandatory day of rest, no minimum wage, and no restrictions on child labor.
Gut-wrenching stories that captured the lives of the average worker at the time have been told in works like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, The Bitter Cry of the Children by John Spargo, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. According to the Oxford Dictionary, sterilize means:
deprive of the ability to produce offspring by removing or blocking the sex organs.
Said another way, sterilization is the act of removing the necessary parts that allow for continuation, or multiplication. This is exactly what the institutions of power have done to the average worker. They have removed our radical organs and, in their place, put consumerism.
The Inhumanity of Unregulated Capitalism
By 1900, the fatality rate in American mining alone had reached roughly 300 deaths per 100,000 miners every year, more than thirty times today’s rate. Women fared little better. They often worked in unsafe conditions in textile mills and garment shops, putting in the same hours as men for lower wages and under stricter conditions, including having to ask a supervisor’s permission just to use the bathroom. But employers’ most preferred labor was children, some as young as four years old, who worked 12+ hour days for a dollar a day, and in some cases, no pay at all.
Conditions like these didn't go unanswered. Throughout the 1880s, workers across the country organized local protests and demonstrations against the inhumane conditions they were forced to endure, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become Labor Day. The first labor day parade is generally considered to have taken place in New York City on September 5, 1882, when roughly 10,000 workers marched through Lower Manhattan to advocate for better working conditions.
The Breaking Point
In 1887, Oregon became the first state to make Labor Day an official holiday. By 1894, 22 other states had followed suit. In 1893, a panic caused a severe depression that led the Pullman Palace Car Company, in Pullman, Illinois, to cut workers’ wages by approximately 25%, while refusing to lower rent or prices in the company-owned town. By May 1894, a worker delegation shared their grievances with Pullman, who responded by firing three committee members. As a result, workers walked off the job on May 11, 1894.
Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway Union voted to support the Pullman workers through a nationwide boycott of trains carrying Pullman cars. This effectively halted rail traffic in 27 states from Chicago to California.
On July 3, 1894, in response to the walkouts and the boycott, President Cleveland ordered federal troops to Chicago. What started as a peaceful protest turned violent between strikers and troops. In the end, approximately 30 strikers were dead, dozens of others were wounded, and Debs was arrested. It was this same imprisonment that pushed Debs toward the socialism he’d later become known for. The state’s crackdown didn’t just break a strike, it helped create one of its most enduring radical critics.
Just days before deploying those troops, President Cleveland had signed the Labor Day law on June 28, 1894, making it a federal holiday. A peace offering to the labor movement, timed almost to the week of the violence it was meant to gloss over.
The genesis of Labor Day as a federal holiday is a textbook example of the mechanism used by capitalism and the state to sterilize history. The labor movement started as a grassroots, worker-led initiative that is ultimately viewed as a threat by the government. The state’s response to that threat is violent suppression, as in the Pullman Strike. Inevitably, the state offers a partial concession, presented to the masses as propaganda of American exceptionalism, and the original threat is rebranded to take power away from the people and hand it to the state.
Sterilization in Service to the State
Though President Cleveland’s legislation making Labor Day a federal holiday looked like a win for the labor movement, it was actually part of the movement’s sterilization. Making Labor Day the first Monday of September was a deliberate choice.
You see, there’s already a day dedicated to workers that is observed internationally. Since 1889, May 1st has been International Workers’ Day. The reason the American government decided to observe Labor Day in September was twofold:
It kept the U.S. from aligning with a holiday started through the work of socialist and labor parties.
It kept workers in America from joining in solidarity with workers around the globe.
In the end, Labor Day as a federal holiday was a strategic concession. A single day of observation is far cheaper than structural change. Instead of focusing on issues like a living wage, healthcare for all, and social safety nets our collective surplus could be used for in service of the common good, we turn inward and take advantage of the once-a-year Labor Day sales.
Today, every American who relies on the labor of themselves, or someone else, to meet their basic human needs stands on the forgotten shoulders of those who sacrificed to make our work conditions better than they were. We have all fallen victim to the state’s greatest trick: leveraging power to create ignorance.
The late anthropologist David Graeber explains this phenomenon:
“The relation of power not with knowledge, but with ignorance and stupidity. Violence, particularly structural violence, where all the power is on one side, creates ignorance.” (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, p. 72)
When a society is driven by obedience through fear, do this, or we can hurt you, it is in the average citizen’s best interest to be ignorant. Ignorant people obey without question, don’t think for themselves, don’t consider the good of the community, and willingly submit to authority.
When people forget their radical history, they lose the stories, vocabulary, and lessons needed to continue to bring about radical change.
Reclaiming Radicalism
Those 50%, 60%, or even 70% off sales on Labor Day weekend aren’t incidental. They are a corporate form of pacification. Don’t think about the plight of your life as a working person, numb yourself with a new floor lamp. Don’t worry that 10 Americans own more wealth than the bottom 50% (160 million Americans) of the U.S. population.
You know what will happen if we collectively remain in our consumerist hypnosis? Nothing. If, like me, you are tired of status quo, start by reclaiming the day. Take time to learn our labor history. Do the hard work of understanding the mechanisms at play that sterilize and rebrand our radical history. Re-claim Labor Day, Educate yourself, and see what doors open from there.