Labor Day

The General Motors body plant in Flint, Michigan was usually a thankless place, filled with loud sounds and the feverish, dangerous work of turning metal into auto bodies. But in January 1937, the sounds of whistling and conversation filled the air. Instead of toiling over ...read more

Today many Americans see Labor Day as time off from work, an opportunity to enjoy a barbecue with friends and family and a final moment of summertime relaxation before the busy fall season begins. But the history behind the Labor Day holiday is far more complex and dramatic than ...read more

With his quintessential rags-to-riches story, Andrew Carnegie embodied the American Dream. After poverty drove his family out of Scotland in 1848, Carnegie arrived in the United States as a penniless 12-year-old boy. With little formal education, he worked in a Pittsburgh cotton ...read more

Young women became trapped by tables, bulky equipment and doors that locked or opened the wrong way as flames enveloped the eighth, ninth and 10th floors of the Asch Building in New York City’s Greenwich Village on March 25, 1911. As people struggled to escape, several fell into ...read more

At 10:00 p.m. on December 3, 1973, a 37-year old trucker from Overland Park, Kansas named J.W. Edwards stopped his rig suddenly in the middle of Interstate I-80 near Blakeslee, Pennsylvania and picked up his CB radio microphone. The insurrection he was about to start, using his ...read more

The Industrial Revolution brought not only new job opportunities but new laborers to the workforce: children. By 1900, 18 percent of all American workers were under the age of 16. For employers of the era, children were seen as appealing workers since they could be hired for ...read more

The explosion in Haymarket Square came during a period of nationwide labor upheaval. Chicago—then the fastest growing city in the United States—was the nerve center of the country’s workers’ movement, and the spring of 1886 marked one of its most ambitious protests to date. In ...read more

The power looms that thundered inside the cotton weaving room of the Everett Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, suddenly fell silent on January 11, 1912. When a mill official demanded to know why workers were standing motionless next to their machines, the explanation was simple: ...read more

Labor Day 2021 will occur on Monday, September 6. Labor Day pays tribute to the contributions and achievements of American workers and is traditionally observed on the first Monday in September. It was created by the labor movement in the late 19th century and became a federal ...read more

The labor movement in the United States grew out of the need to protect the common interest of workers. For those in the industrial sector, organized labor unions fought for better wages, reasonable hours and safer working conditions. The labor movement led efforts to stop child ...read more

The Homestead strike, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, pitted one of the most powerful new corporations, Carnegie Steel Company, against the nation’s strongest trade union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. An 1889 strike had won the steelworkers a favorable ...read more

Child labor, or the use of children as servants and apprentices, has been practiced throughout most of human history, but reached a zenith during the Industrial Revolution. Miserable working conditions including crowded and unclean factories, a lack of safety codes or ...read more