The heart of the labor movement

Labor Day was once the nation’s most blatantly political national holiday — created by the trade-union movement to celebrate the right of working people to bargain collectively and to stage strikes to press their demands.

The Post was an early and vigorous supporter of the movement. As early as 1836, editor William Cullen Bryant wrote: “Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well at once bind him to a master.”

Even before Congress created the federal holiday in 1894, New York hosted the nation’s first Labor Day parade when 10,000 workers took off from their jobs to march from City Hall to Union Square. As the movement grew, so did the parades and celebrations.

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