Unfortunately, the end of my favorite season is almost upon us—Labor Day weekend is coming up. I don’t know about what you all will be doing, but I’m going up to see David in Boston for the first time since he left me standing at the airport security gate in Chicago a month ago. So don’t expect much (if anything) posted on Monday.

Do any of you even know what Labor Day is all about? It has been a while since I’ve done a “holiday education” blog post—I’m thinking Cinco de Mayo was the last one. Perhaps the key to why none of us have much of a clue about Labor Day lies in its sordid origins in the national labor movements of the 19th century.

Today the mention of organized labor calls up images of the Teamsters for some. For me, growing up in a household where both adults were union members, organized labor was the group that rented a local theater so that we kids could see Lady and the Tramp at Christmas. Yet when Labor Day became law in 1894, Americans identified organized labor with several bloody clashes against corporations and law enforcement to gain rights for workers that we take for granted today—things like the eight-hour workday and essential safety regulations in workplaces.

The movement for a national worker’s holiday started in the early 1890s, when labor unions pushed cities to recognize workers’ contributions to the strength of the American economy. Labor Day’s entry into the national scene, however, came after the violent Pullman Strike, in which federal marshals fired on and killed striking workers of the Pullman Railcar Company near Chicago. Seeking to appease the nation’s workers in an election year, President Grover Cleveland signed Labor Day into law only six days after his troops had broken the strike.

The other day, Interfaith Worker Justice (www.nicwj.org) sent me a card asking me to honor my favorite worker with a donation. When I think of my “favorite worker,” I think of my dad. As I said, he was a union member for over twenty years. Dad was what I’d imagine most workers of the past and present are really like—not necessarily itching to cause trouble for trouble’s sake (something unions often get accused of), but a decent person doing decent work to support himself and his family.

When I think of labor, I think of this—if I’d grown up in my family a hundred years earlier, I probably would have been working in the factories myself by the time I was twelve. Instead, I got health insurance, braces, even my college education based on the living wages my dad earned as a union member. Perhaps I’m biased when it comes to the labor movement. But we all come at these things from our own perspectives.

Yet today, the “working class” aren’t folks like my dad, who work at well-paid manufacturing jobs. The people who struggle today (and who, by the way, probably won’t get Labor Day off), are the low-skilled, low-wage service industries, from retail workers to migrant laborers to the janitors in our workplaces and dorms. On this Labor Day, how are we honoring those people? Particularly when a high number of those people are women like us?

We believe in a God who set the captives free and lifted up the lowly. Look around this Labor Day at the lowly in our community. How are we going to lift them up?

“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” --Luke 1:52-53

Kelsey