04 Sep 4 Reasons to Thank LABOR on Labor Day
Labor Day is a welcome, and well-deserved, day off for millions of American workers and their families. But it’s worth remembering that Labor day is more than just a three-day weekend. Labor Day “is a creation of the labor movement” and is “dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.”
Here are four important accomplishments of the labor movement that benefit all Americans:
1) Unions Helped End Child Labor.
Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined in U.S. history, with organizations like the “National Consumers’ League” and the “National Child Labor Committee” working together in the early 20th century to ban child labor. The very first American Federation of Labor (AFL) national convention passed “a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment” in 1881, and soon after states across the country adopted similar recommendations, leading to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated child labor on the federal level for the first time.
2) Unions Spearheaded The Fight For The Family And Medical Leave Act.
Labor led the fight for the 1993 law, which “requires state agencies and private employers with more than 50 employees to provide up to 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave annually for workers to care for a newborn, newly adopted child, seriously ill family member or for the worker’s own illness.”
3) Unions Gave Us The Weekend.
During the relatively labor-free 1870s, the average workweek for most Americans was 61 hours — almost double what most Americans work now. Yet in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, labor unions engaged in massive strikes in order to demand shorter workweeks so that Americans could be home with their loved ones instead of constantly toiling for their employers with no leisure time. By 1937, these labor actions created enough political momentum to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped create a federal framework for a shorter workweek that included room for leisure time.
4) Unions Won Widespread Employer-Based Health Coverage.
The rise of unions in the 1930’s and 1940’s led to the first great expansion of health care for all Americans, as labor unions banded workers together to negotiate for health coverage plans from employers. In 1942, the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering ‘fringe benefits’ – notably, health insurance. By 1950, half of all companies with fewer than 250 workers and two-thirds of all companies with more than 250 workers offered health insurance of one kind or another.