Labor Day, a national holiday, occurs each year on the first Monday of September. In 2008, Labor Day falls on September 1.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), exactly who founded the Labor Day holiday is unclear.
Some records show that Peter J. McGuire, General Secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and cofounder of the American Federation of Labor (now the AFL-CIO), was the first to suggest the holiday.
But other records show that it was Machinist Matthew Maguire, Secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York, who founded the holiday.
Regardless, the Central Labor Union established Labor Day. The Central Labor Union was an early trade union organization in New York, Brooklyn and New Jersey. It broke up into local unions that joined what was to become today’s AFL-CIO.
Workers celebrated the first Labor Day in New York City on Tuesday, September 5, 1882. The holiday moved to the first Monday of September in 1884, when the Central Labor Union encouraged unions in other cities to celebrate the “workingmen’s holiday”. In 1885, union workers in many industrial cities across the nation celebrated Labor Day.
By June of 1894, 31 states had enacted legislation to honor workers on the Labor Day holiday. In the same year, Congress passed an act to make the first Monday in September a legal annual holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.
For more about the national holiday, see The History of Labor Day from the DOL or conduct a Web search on the keyphrase Labor Day.
For general information about paid holidays, see Holiday Pay - Paid Holidays.
