It's Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2023. I hope you had a productive and enjoyable Labor Day weekend. From its late 19th century origins within the New York labor movement, it's always been holiday with a delightful paradox: a designated day of leisure to honor the dignity of work.
In our post-pandemic environment, the cutting-edge issue when it comes to labor, organized or not, is whether workers have a right to perform their duties at home. Millions of American employees and their union representatives seem to think so. Management is skeptical. This divergence of opinion, explored on this morning's homepage of the Gallup polling organization, is going to take time to sort out.
If you were wondering who should get credit for the nice three-day weekend as summer winds down, you weren't alone. Hoping to answer the question definitively for you this morning, I did some research yesterday. Alas, the results were inconclusive. It seems that there is a historical dispute.
Devotees of Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, give their man the credit. As the U.S. Department of Labor notes, McGuire proposed in 1882 "a general holiday for the laboring classes" to honor those "who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold."
About that time, however, a machinist with same last name (just a different spelling) apparently conjured up a similar idea. He was Matthew Maguire, and he served as both secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, N.J., and secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York. His backers also point to 1882 as the year of his epiphany. Although the Department of Labor notes diplomatically that both Maguire and McGuire attended the first Labor Day parade in 1882, state historians in New Jersey and New York (and the great-grandchildren of the two Irish Americans in question) are still arguing over it.
Cannon is also an Irish name, so I'd be forgiven for inserting here the old joke about the Irishmen with Alzheimer's ("They forget everything but the grudge"). But we don't do ethnic jokes on these pages.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
