Before Congress created he three-day holiday weekend for many of our national holidays, today, September 5, was Labor Day. The men and women who marched in New York City that day in 1882 were still working 12 to 14 hour days and their children were working in textile mills, canneries, and mines. Even though progressive states like Connecticut and Massachusetts enacted laws on child labor before the Civil War, most states did not.
It wasn’t that long ago in our nation’s history that when Oregon passed a law limiting the number of hours women could work to 10 hours a day and industry opposed it. Louis Brandeis, who later became a Supreme Court Justice, put together a 113-page brief on the economic, medical, and sociological consequences of a longer working day.
And it wasn’t that long ago that Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act that protects all of us. As we spend this three-day weekend in any of our holiday activities, we should remember the sacrifice our predecessors made.to get us to where we are because, just like the Independence we celebrated not that long ago, it took a great deal of struggle to get us here.
Prayer for the Day
How to be thankful for people in the past we never knew,
But whose sacrifices gave us our way of life, O God;
How to live today in the midst of our own struggles,
We are often unsure, O Lord.
Move us into a future where we care how people work,
And that they are fairly recompensed for their value.
In the name of the One who was a carpenter’s son,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
As we celebrate Labor Day, it is important to recognize the contribution of labor unions’ critical role in building and safeguarding the rights of all American workers, including their wages, benefits, and working conditions.
US, Rep Al Green (D-TX)
The American standard of living depends not only a high minimum wage, but also a high minimum of leisure because we must also meet other needs than material ones.
Louis Brandeis, Justice (1856-1941)
You shall not oppress a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether he is one of your brothers or one of the sojourners who are in your land within your towns. You shall give him his wages on the same day, before the sun sets (for he is poor and counts on it), lest he cry against you to the Lord, and you be guilty of sin.
Deuteronomy 24: 14-15