83| A Brief History of Labor Day (And Why We Gave All Our Freedom Back)
Download MP3Hey friends, welcome to Intentional Motherhood. I'm your host, Kelsey Redd, and I hope you guys all have a lovely Labor Day weekend. It's officially the mark of the end of the summer, but it's just that perfect weekend to go on a camping trip or do some boating or I don't know, whatever it is people do on Labor Day. And I was actually thinking about Labor Day because it's like one of those holidays where nobody really even knows why we have it or what started Labor Day but we don't really care because it's a day off and we just get to have that extra weekend long weekend in September to get us through the hump of the back to school time and all of that. But it did make me a little curious as I was thinking about this and I remembered vaguely you know like oh it has something to do with labor and like working people but I got a little interested in what is actually the origin story of Labor Day.
Kelsey Redd:And it actually just made me laugh because I was like, that is so just like our government and they're still doing the exact same thing. So let's actually dive into the origins of Labor Day and you'll see exactly what I mean and why I actually feel like there's some relevance to us today and the lives we're living. Okay, so let's dive into it. Back up, it's 1894 and the country is in the middle of an economic depression and there's one industry that kind of leads the whole country. It's the railroad industry and George Pullman is a big part of this story.
Kelsey Redd:See the problem was that he owned basically the whole city of Pullman, Illinois along with his railroad company that employed basically all the citizens of the town. Well because of this economic depression that was hitting the whole country he decided that he would save some money by cutting his workers wages by 25% But because he owned the whole town he was also the landlord and he owned the grocery stores and he owned the water rights. So he didn't lower any other prices for anything. He just lowered his workers wages while still expecting them to pay the same for their groceries and their rent and their water and all of that. And it was a little bit of a problem because suddenly the railroad union decided that they were gonna go on strike.
Kelsey Redd:A 125,000 railroad workers across the whole country decided to stop working on any train that Pullman had a car attached to. And in that time the railroad is what ran the country so the entire country and economy essentially ground to a complete halt because the railroads weren't running. Well the president at the time, President Cleveland, saw this issue and he was facing some of his own pressures by his wealthy railroad business donors. And since it was an election year he needed to solve this really quick and look really good in the public eye so that we could get on with elections and everyone would be happy. So he used a little loophole that actually punished the workers because of their obstruction of US mail.
Kelsey Redd:That was the legal loophole he found in how to actually blame all this problem on the union workers who were protesting. So then he decided to send in the army essentially, the military, and riots broke out and troops came in with rifles and bayonets and actually many people died and it was really sad you know because people actually died in this essentially a war zone brought to their town and of course the strike ended because the military broke it up and the corporations won but again now he's facing even more problems because now he appeased his wealthy donors but now the masses of working class voters were super furious that a president just used the military to kill a citizen, to kill many citizens, in order to protect railroad profits. So now the panic in Washington was the first priority or the next priority that needed to be solved. So Congress said, oh what do we do? What should we do?
Kelsey Redd:How do we make everyone feel better? I know. Let's just make a bill, pass a bill that designates a holiday celebrating all the hard workers in our country. Literally within days of this like riot that killed a lot of people, this law was passed. It passed in 06/28/1894, just days after his troops left the railroad track riot zone.
Kelsey Redd:Unfortunately, this is how the political figures think that they can solve their problems is, yeah we just aren't going to keep everything running exactly the way we want to but here's a day so you know you guys should be pretty happy. We're cool right? Like because we gave you this day. Unfortunately this did absolutely nothing to change the conditions of the work week, you know, and the actual issues that the union was protesting in the first place. So yeah we got a random Monday off in September but every other day of the week, every other day of the year, we were still dealing with the same horrific workplace risks and issues including long shifts, unfair wages, child labor, all these issues were still facing the country.
Kelsey Redd:It actually was years and years later that Henry Ford decided to do something about this. Not necessarily out of the goodness of his heart but because he's a very smart capitalist and he really understands business and he actually had a little bit of a revelation which was when my workers have been working for twenty hours straight and they're exhausted they're not doing their best work. And also nobody in my town has time or money to even buy and use my cars. So he decided to actually do something pretty crazy. He was the one who actually specified eight hour shifts and he actually doubled his factory workers pay at this time.
Kelsey Redd:And again he's quite a genius because he ended up creating his own customer base out of literally his own employees and the productivity in the factory skyrocketed. Fast forward a little bit farther and finally in 1938 is when we actually see Franklin D. Roosevelt passing the Fair Labor Standards Act which is what actually created the forty hour work week and banned oppressive child labor and requires companies to pay overtime. So it took about forty four years from the political participation trophy of the Labor Day here. Like let's solve this problem.
Kelsey Redd:We'll make you feel better by giving you this day so now you can go back to work the rest of the year in the our crazy environment and just don't complain because we gave you that day off, remember? It took forty four years before we actually see some real legal protection of the workforce and of our time. Now I don't know if you guys picked up on it but it sounds just eerily familiar with what has recently transpired where can we just say that our government wasat least had foreknowledge, if not participation allegedly in the assassination of Charlie Kirk? And when the mass panic ensued, not just panic around the death of an innocent man and the horrific way in which it was done, but also in the distrust of the government and the backlash of how we as American people can feel so betrayed by our government especially when someone who was supposedly a friend to all of our government elected officials because he was the one who got them in office or at least was credited with a lot of that victory. I think when the government saw oh, that was supposed to go a lot smoother and people were just supposed to move on and accept it the way they've accepted all the other political assassinations but they're not.
Kelsey Redd:So it's okay, we'll just throw you a day. We'll just designate a Charlie Kirk day so we're cool, right? Because now he's got a day and so you know that we really loved him. It doesn't matter that he's dead and that we probably were involved in it allegedly because now he has a day. So everyone can feel better about that.
Kelsey Redd:That to me was just a little too much of a similarity that I couldn't deny just seeing that comparison. But I digress because I hope we seein this case it took forty four yearsI hope we see the turnaround faster to where how the American people feel about the state of our government and how we feel about how we're being treated as essentially just a commodity for sale. We just need to buy the votes and get the votes from wherever we can and just are we still talking about Charlie Kirk? I expect to hear that any day now especially as we're coming up on the one year anniversary. It's just been on my mind and when I read this history of Labor Day and saw the similarities I was like yeah, that's about par for the course and maybe in hopefully less than forty four years we'll actually see some real changes that come from the power of the people rather than the power of the government.
Kelsey Redd:But going back to Labor Day and this theme that I just kind of thought about is it's just interesting because we finally got this freedom, this legal protection around our work time and yet if those workers from back in the eighteen hundred's could see the way we work nonstop now I think they would be so shocked that we seem to have just given it all back. Know, they fought for these eight hour days, forty hour work weeks and yet our work is so much easier but we have a hard time disconnecting and separating for it. And actually part of that came from those Fair Labor Standards Act because it actually exempted professional, administrative and executive employees from receiving overtime pay. So the problem is that if once you're a salaried professional then you actually just are expected to do the work that's necessary and so people started working more and more hours as a way of first of all showing what an ideal employee they were or maybe even because as we actually started getting into cultures where you get unlimited time off but there's a little bit of a problem because if your work is project based then the work doesn't stop just because you leave the office.
Kelsey Redd:And also because of the technology. The technology has become this invisible leash where as the Blackberry and smartphones and laptops and all this has been invented and now we actually just bring the office home with us in our pocket and email changed everything because there's some implicit expectation that you should be on all the time. In fact that's what they call it, the always on culture. And so the problem is that now we still are responding to work emails at nine p. M.
Kelsey Redd:Or taking a work call late in the evening or on a weekend. And part of that is because employees wanted to just appear to be the best employee so that when it came time for promotion they were the ones that would be promoted. So how does this affect our family? How does this affect our lives now? And what's the relevance here?
Kelsey Redd:Part of it is because this always on culture has completely reshaped like family life. Know all of our leisure is half interrupted by the fact that you could at any moment have to respond to something at work or this continuous partial attention is the word that you know is used when we research this kind of thing because there's this constant pull to be attentive to both family but also be checking in at work. This creates all sorts of burnout. You know, the feeling of just like you can never get time off because even when you're on vacation you might still be taking a call. It creates distracted adults because we're constantly checking in on other things even though we might physically be sitting at home with our family at the dinner table.
Kelsey Redd:We might hear the buzz in our pocket and be like oh shoot, I really need to see what's going on with a work notification and now I'm physically at dinner but I'm thinking about what's going on at work. And this is a little bit distracting and children pick up on this. Children know that they're competing with our smartphone for attention unfortunately and that can be due to work or not. But ultimately when it comes down to it I think the real issue is that we as a society struggle to really truly enjoy presence and leisure and play and doing nothing and valuing those things as actual necessities, not just luxuries. And the irony is that you know those original labor movement fought for the physical freedom from the factory, you know?
Kelsey Redd:But today's struggle is for mental freedom. From the constant connectedness that's available because of the digital world that we live in. And interestingly enough other countries have figured this out and they actually have created laws around the right to disconnect after work hours and to not allow that constant communication of employees during the non work hours. But as individuals and even as companies this is a cultural shift that's going to have to be made. But to set up those digital boundaries to protect your own personal time I think is critical and that's where we start.
Kelsey Redd:Like I said, there is work to be done and ironically I feel like we actually have a lot in common with those early workers. So this Labor Day remember the grueling hours that those early industrial workers fought so hard to escape and let's honor their legacy by setting our own boundaries so that we can reclaim and protect and truly actually enjoy our own leisure and leisure time. And remember that play is also important and doing nothing is allowed. And we don't have to constantly be at our most productive in order to prove our worth but we can actually just enjoy leisure and recognize that there is so much to be learned, so much to be gained in our families, in our own mental well-being by just allowing that to be the case. And unfortunately until the laws in our country catch up with those of the other countries like I mentioned, we're just going have to set our own boundaries.
Kelsey Redd:I hope you found this brief history on the origin of Labor Day interesting and I hope you truly do enjoy with no distractions and no work notifications the rest of your Labor Day weekend and I'll see you guys next time on Intentional Motherhood. Motherhood. If you like the show, give it mom a review.
