Labour Day in USA.

Labour Day. 6th September 2010.
Labour Day in USA.

Labour Day holiday is devoted to recognition of working people's contribution to society. Labour Day is observed on the first Monday in September in the United States and on May 1 or other dates in other countries.

The idea for such a holiday in the United States is attributed to Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and labour union leader who later cofounded the precursor of the AFL-CIO.
In 1882 he suggested to the Central Labour Union of New York that a celebration be held to honour the American worker.

Acting on this idea, about 10,000 workers paraded in New York City on Sept. 5, 1882, under the sponsorship of the Knights of Labour. The date of the celebration was chosen simply because it filled up the long gap between Independence Day and Thanksgiving.

In 1884 the Knights of Labour adopted a resolution that the first Monday in September should be considered Labour Day. The idea spread rapidly, and by 1885 Labour Day events were taking place in many states.

Oregon in 1887 was the first state to grant legal status to Labour Day. That same year Colorado, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts established the holiday on the first Monday in September, and other states soon followed.

In 1894 Congress passed a bill making Labour Day a national holiday. Labour Day's associations with trade unions have gradually declined. The holiday marks the end of summer vacation for many American schoolchildren and is often celebrated at family picnics and sporting events. In most other countries, including former communist ones, May Day (May 1) is the day generally chosen by labour unions and left-wing political parties to honour workers.

Like monetary and international economics, labour economics is an old economic speciality. It gets its raison d'être from the peculiarities of labour as a commodity. Labour itself is not bought and sold; rather, its services are hired and rented out. But since people cannot be disassociated from their services, various nonmonetary considerations play a role in the sale of labour services as contrasted with the sale of machine time or the rental of land. Yet, the bulk of the literature in labour economics was until recently concerned solely with the demand side of the labour market. Wages, the textbooks all said, were determined by the "marginal productivity of labour," that is, by the relationships of production and by consumer demand. If the supply of labour came into the picture at all, it was merely to allow for the presence of trade unions; unions could only raise wages by limiting the supply of labour.

After a long period of neglect, the supply side of the labour market began, in the 20th century, to attract the attention of economists. First, attention shifted from the individual worker to the household as a supplier of labour services; the increasing tendency of married women to enter the labour force and the wide disparities and fluctuations observed in the rate that females participate in a labour force drew attention to the fact that an individual's decision to supply labour is not independent of the size, age structure, and asset holdings of the household to which he or she belongs.

Second, the new concept of "human capital"--that people make capital investments in their children and in themselves by incurring the costs of education and training, the costs of searching for better job opportunities, and the costs of migration to other labour markets--has served as a unifying explanation of the diverse activities of households in labour markets. In this way, capital theory has become the dominant analytical tool of the labour economists, replacing or supplementing the traditional theory of consumer behaviour.

The economics of training and education, the economics of information, the economics of migration, the economics of health, and the economics of poverty are some of the by-products of this new perspective. A field that was at one time regarded as rather cut-and-dried has taken on new vitality.

Labour economics, old or new, has always regarded the explanation of wages as its principal task, including the factors determining the general level of wages in an economy and the reasons for wage differentials between industries and occupations. Wages are influenced by trade unions; the impact of their activities is of increased importance at a time when most governments manage the economy with one eye on the unemployment statistics.

The pre-war fears of chronic unemployment gave way to the postwar fears of chronic inflation at or near levels of full employment. In response to this a vast literature sprang up after 1945 analyzing the inflationary pressures stemming from both the supply side and the demand side of labour markets. Whether prices were being pushed up by the labour unions ("cost push") or pulled up by excess purchasing power ("demand pull") became the issues in this long debate on inflation, a controversy that is, of course, intimately related to the quarrels in monetary economics mentioned earlier.

It s a United States federal holiday observed on the first Monday in September (September 6 in 2010).
The first Labor Day in the United States was celebrated on September 5, 1882 in New York City. In the aftermath of the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the 1894 Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland put reconciliation with Labour as top political priority. Fearing further conflict, legislation making Labour day a national holiday was rushed through Congress unanimously and signed into law a mere six days after the end of the strike. Cleveland was also concerned that aligning an American labor holiday with existing international May Day celebrations would stir up negative emotions linked to the Haymarket Affair.
By the 20th century, all 50 U.S. states have made Labor Day a state holiday.
The form for the celebration of Labor Day was outlined in the first proposal of the holiday: A street parade to exhibit to the public "the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations," followed by a festival for the workers and their families. This became the pattern for Labor Day celebrations. Speeches by prominent men and women were introduced later, as more emphasis was placed upon the economic and civil significance of the holiday. Still later, by a resolution of the American Federation of Labour convention of 1909, the Sunday preceding. Labour Day was adopted as Labour Sunday and dedicated to the spiritual and educational aspects of the labor movement.
Traditionally, Labour Day is celebrated by most Americans as the symbolic end of the summer. The holiday is often regarded as a day of rest and parades. Speeches or political demonstrations are more low-key than May 1 Labour Day celebrations in most countries, although events held by labor organizations often feature political themes and appearances by candidates for office, especially in election years. Forms of celebration include picnics, barbecues, fireworks displays, water sports, and public art events. Families with school-age children take it as the last chance to travel before the end of summer recess. Similarly, some teenagers and young adults view it as the last weekend for parties before returning to school, although school starting times now vary.
In U.S. sports, Labour Day marks the beginning of the NFL and college football seasons. NCAA teams usually play their first games the week before Labour Day, with the NFL traditionally playing their first game the Thursday following Labour Day.
The Southern 500 NASCAR auto race was held that day from 1950 to 2004.
The expansion of industry was accompanied by increased tensions between employers and workers and by the appearance, for the first time in the United States, of national labour unions. The first effective labour organization that was more than regional in membership and influence was the Knights of Labour, organized in 1869. The Knights believed in the unity of the interests of all producing groups and sought to enlist in their ranks not only all labourers but everyone who could be truly classified as a producer. They championed a variety of causes, many of them more political than industrial, and they hoped to gain their ends through politics and education rather than through economic coercion.

The hardships suffered by many workers during the depression of 1873-78 and the failure of a nationwide railroad strike, which was broken when President Hayes sent federal troops to suppress disorders in Pittsburgh and St. Louis, caused much discontent in the ranks of the Knights. In 1879 Terence V. Powderly, a railroad worker and mayor of Scranton, Pa., was elected grand master workman of the national organization.

He favoured cooperation over a program of aggressive action, but the effective control of the Knights shifted to regional leaders who were willing to initiate strikes or other forms of economic pressure to gain their objectives. The Knights reached the peak of their influence in 1884-85, when much-publicized strikes against the Union Pacific, Southwest System, and Wabash railroads attracted substantial public sympathy and succeeded in preventing a reduction in wages. At that time they claimed a national membership of nearly 700,000. In 1885 Congress, taking note of the apparently increasing power of labour, acceded to union demands to prohibit the entry into the United States of immigrants who had signed contracts to work for specific employers.

The year 1886 was a troubled one in labour relations. There were nearly 1,600 strikes, involving about 600,000 workers, with the eight-hour day the most prominent item in the demands of labour. About half of these strikes were called for May Day; some of them were successful, but the failure of others and internal conflicts between skilled and unskilled members led to a decline in the Knights' popularity and influence.