Why Labor Day Still Matters: A Family Story About Work, Immigration, and the American Promise

This Labor Day, my children asked me a deceptively simple question: What is so important about Labor Day? To a child, it is understandable. There is no Thanksgiving turkey, no Christmas tree, no fireworks like the Fourth of July, and no single heroic figure whose story explains the holiday. For many Americans, Labor Day has become little more than the unofficial end of summer—a three-day weekend, a barbecue, perhaps one last trip to the beach before fall begins. But when my children asked me that question, I realized that explaining Labor Day meant explaining something much larger: how modern America came to recognize the dignity of work, how immigrant families helped force that recognition, and why that history is also part of my own family’s story.

The uncomfortable place to begin is with the conditions under which millions of Americans once worked. Industrial capitalism created tremendous wealth and transformed the United States into an economic power, but the system that emerged during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could also be extraordinarily brutal. Adults regularly worked ten, twelve, or even fourteen-hour days, often six days a week, with few meaningful protections against injury, dismissal, or exploitation. Children worked alongside adults in factories, mines, textile mills, workshops, farms, and other industries, sometimes because a family’s survival depended upon every member contributing wages. The weekend, the eight-hour workday, overtime protections, workplace safety standards, and meaningful restrictions on child labor were not natural features of early capitalism; they were victories that had to be fought for.

That struggle cannot be understood without understanding immigration. The explosive industrial growth of American cities depended heavily upon successive waves of immigrants who arrived desperate for opportunity but frequently possessed very little bargaining power. Employers knew that newly arrived families needed work immediately, often did not speak English fluently, lacked political connections, and could be replaced by another recently arrived worker waiting outside the factory gate. That imbalance made immigrant communities especially vulnerable to low wages, dangerous working conditions, overcrowded housing, and extraordinary working hours. The great American industrial machine was built in significant measure by people who had escaped poverty and persecution abroad only to discover that economic freedom in America could come with its own forms of exploitation.

For Jewish Americans, this history is particularly important. Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War, roughly two million Jews arrived in the United States, most coming from the Russian Empire and other parts of Eastern Europe. This second great wave of Jewish immigration was driven by poverty, legal discrimination, political instability, and violent antisemitism, including the pogroms that devastated Jewish communities across parts of Eastern Europe. Many arrived in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, and other industrial cities with little money and few possessions. They came looking for freedom, but freedom did not mean that life would immediately become easy.

Jewish immigrants became especially associated with the garment and textile industries. Men and women worked in shirtwaist factories, clothing shops, textile mills, tailoring rooms, and thousands of small manufacturing operations that today would commonly be described as sweatshops. Entire families could participate in garment production, sometimes inside crowded tenement apartments where clothing was cut, sewn, pressed, and finished for contractors who paid by the piece. Workers could spend extraordinarily long days at sewing machines or worktables, producing clothing that they themselves often could barely afford. The irony was difficult to miss: immigrants had reached a country that promised liberty, yet many spent most of their waking lives inside factories and workshops over which they possessed almost no control.

Jewish women were especially important to this story. Young immigrant women entered the garment trades in enormous numbers, becoming some of the most important participants in the emerging labor movement. Their labor helped sustain entire households, yet they often faced a combination of low wages, unsafe factories, sexual harassment, and expectations that after completing exhausting shifts they would return home and continue domestic work. When these women joined strikes and labor organizations, they were not merely asking for higher wages. They were asserting that immigrant women deserved a voice in American economic and political life.

The garment industry consequently became one of the great laboratories of American labor activism. Jewish workers played important roles in organizations such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. The famous “Uprising of the 20,000” beginning in 1909 brought thousands of predominantly young immigrant garment workers into the streets of New York in one of the largest strikes by women in American history to that point. Many of those strikers were Jewish immigrants or the daughters of Jewish immigrants. Their demands—better wages, shorter hours, safer workplaces, and recognition of their ability to organize—were demands for something larger than money: they were claims to dignity.

The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire became one of the most horrifying symbols of what happened when labor protections failed. One hundred forty-six garment workers died, many of them young Jewish and Italian immigrant women. Some were teenagers. Workers were trapped on upper floors as fire spread through the factory, and the disaster exposed dangerous conditions that labor organizers had been warning about for years. The names of the dead make the history painfully concrete because they remind us that industrial reform was not an abstract philosophical argument; real people died before society decided that certain working conditions were unacceptable.

Italian immigrants experienced many of the same forces, although their labor was often concentrated in somewhat different industries. Millions of Italians arrived in the United States during the great migration from southern and eastern Europe between the 1880s and the 1920s. Italian immigrants became construction workers, miners, railroad laborers, factory workers, dockworkers, stonecutters, agricultural laborers, and craftsmen. Much like Jewish immigrants, they encountered ethnic prejudice, dangerous jobs, crowded neighborhoods, low wages, and employers who often regarded immigrant labor as interchangeable. Their physical labor literally built portions of the American landscape—roads, bridges, tunnels, railroads, factories, neighborhoods, and cities.

Nor were Jews and Italians alone. Irish immigrants had already transformed American labor in an earlier generation, while Poles, Greeks, Slavs, Hungarians, Germans, Scandinavians, Chinese immigrants, and many other groups entered different sectors of the industrial economy. Black Americans migrating from the South during the Great Migration would later become indispensable to factories, transportation systems, steel mills, automobile plants, meatpacking facilities, and other industries in northern cities. The American labor story is therefore inseparable from the American immigration story and from the history of racial and ethnic minorities attempting to claim a place within the American economy. Much of what we call American prosperity was produced by people who initially possessed very little power within the society whose prosperity they were creating.

This history also explains why labor unions became so deeply embedded in immigrant communities. A union was not merely an organization that negotiated wages. For immigrants who had little political influence individually, collective organization provided one of the first mechanisms through which they could confront institutions far larger than themselves. Union halls became places where people debated politics, learned about American government, organized neighborhoods, created mutual-aid networks, and formed relationships that could eventually translate into political influence. Labor organizing was therefore frequently a pathway into American civic life.

That connection between labor, immigration, and political participation is where the story becomes especially personal for me.

I come from a long line of labor activism and civic participation rooted in Philadelphia’s Jewish community. My great-grandfather, Emanuel Weinberg, came out of precisely the world that immigrant labor helped create. In our family’s history, he became a leader within Philadelphia’s police union and later an important figure in Democratic politics. He eventually served on Philadelphia City Council and became an influential ward leader in South Philadelphia. Even today, a Philadelphia park carries the name Emanuel Weinberg Park, a small but enduring reminder that the political struggles of one generation can become part of the landscape inherited by another.

His story represents an important evolution within American immigrant history. The first generation often arrived with little influence and worked wherever work could be found. The next generation organized through unions, neighborhood associations, religious communities, political clubs, and civic organizations. Eventually, families who had once been outsiders began participating directly in the institutions governing their cities. Labor organization became political organization, and political organization became representation.

Our family remembers Emanuel Weinberg as someone who helped Jewish candidates and other emerging political figures gain support in Philadelphia, including Arlen Specter, who was elected Philadelphia district attorney in 1965 and would later serve for decades in the United States Senate. That history matters to me because political representation for Jewish Americans was never automatic. Earlier generations lived in a country where universities, corporations, law firms, neighborhoods, clubs, and other institutions could openly restrict Jewish participation. Jewish political organization therefore became one way of insisting that citizenship had to mean more than simply being legally permitted to live in America.

Labor Day is consequently personal to me in two different ways. The first is historical: Jewish immigrants were among the millions of workers whose labor helped build industrial America, and they were also among those who organized to change the conditions under which that labor was performed. The second is familial: within only a few generations, my own family moved through precisely that world of labor organization, immigrant political participation, and civic leadership. When my children ask why Labor Day matters, I can point not only to a history book but also backward through our own family tree.

That does not mean we should romanticize unions or pretend that every labor organization has always acted correctly. Any institution capable of acquiring power can misuse power, and unions are no exception. Nor does acknowledging exploitation during the rise of industrial capitalism require rejecting capitalism itself. The more useful lesson is almost the opposite: systems survive and improve because people are willing to recognize where those systems are failing.

Capitalism has generated extraordinary prosperity. It has rewarded innovation, produced new industries, helped lift enormous numbers of people out of poverty, and created technological and medical advances that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. But capitalism is an economic mechanism, not a moral philosophy. A market does not independently decide that children belong in classrooms instead of factories, that workers should be protected from preventable deaths, or that human beings need enough time away from work to raise families and participate in their communities. Those are moral and political decisions that societies impose upon markets.

The labor movement was one of the forces that compelled America to make those decisions. The eight-hour day, child-labor restrictions, workplace safety rules, collective bargaining, workers’ compensation, and other reforms emerged because Americans repeatedly confronted the gap between what an efficient market might permit and what a humane society should tolerate. These reforms did not destroy American capitalism. In many cases, they helped preserve it by correcting conditions that had become socially and morally indefensible.

That distinction is particularly important as the twenty-first century begins moving toward its midpoint. Once again, capitalism is being subjected to intense criticism, and much of that criticism deserves to be taken seriously. Younger Americans are looking at extraordinary concentrations of wealth, rapidly increasing housing costs, medical expenses, educational debt, precarious employment, and wages that can feel increasingly disconnected from the cost of participating in ordinary middle-class life. At the same time, corporations and financial institutions have acquired levels of economic influence that demand the same kind of serious scrutiny Americans once directed toward industrial monopolies and factory owners.

Artificial intelligence and automation may make these questions considerably more urgent. We may be approaching another transformation of labor comparable in significance to industrialization itself. Machines will increasingly perform tasks once reserved for human beings, while relatively small numbers of companies may own technologies capable of generating enormous economic value. That raises fundamental questions about who benefits from productivity, what happens to people whose occupations disappear, and whether technological advancement will broaden prosperity or concentrate it.

Those questions should not frighten us, and asking them should not automatically be dismissed as socialism or hostility toward business. Previous generations asked equally uncomfortable questions about child labor, industrial accidents, wages, working hours, monopolies, and unionization. What now appear to us as obvious reforms once appeared radical to many people who believed that interfering with unrestricted markets would damage economic growth. History ultimately demonstrated that capitalism could absorb those reforms and often become stronger because of them.

The great lesson of Labor Day may therefore be that capitalism requires reflection precisely because capitalism is powerful. Anything capable of transforming society so dramatically deserves continual examination. The choice is not between blindly defending capitalism and abandoning it. The better tradition—the tradition represented by much of the American labor movement—is to preserve what creates opportunity while reforming what produces unnecessary suffering.

That is the lesson I want my children to understand when they ask what Labor Day means. It is about workers, but it is also about immigrants. It is about Jewish seamstresses sitting at sewing machines, Italian laborers digging tunnels and laying stone, miners descending underground, children entering factories when they should have been sitting in classrooms, and families who discovered that the American promise sometimes had to be demanded before it was actually delivered. It is also about their own great-great-grandfather and the long process by which immigrant families moved from the factory floor and union hall into the political institutions of the country they had adopted as their home.

Most importantly, Labor Day should remind us that no economic or political system is ever finished. Every generation inherits institutions created by people who came before it, but inheritance does not relieve us of the responsibility to examine them. We should neither destroy institutions simply because they are imperfect nor worship them simply because they have succeeded. We must preserve the capacity for criticism that allowed earlier generations to look at an enormously productive industrial economy and nevertheless say: this can be better.

As the twenty-first century approaches its midpoint, capitalism is again being criticized, and rightly so. That does not mean capitalism has failed; it means reflection is necessary whenever economic conditions change faster than the institutions created to govern them. The workers and immigrant families of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries understood that prosperity and justice were not automatically the same thing, and they forced America to confront the difference. Our generation must be willing to do the same.

So when my children ask me what is so important about Labor Day, my answer is ultimately about memory.

It is the memory of people who worked before there were meaningful protections for workers.

It is the memory of immigrant families—Jewish, Italian, Irish, Polish, Greek, and countless others—whose labor helped build American cities while they fought for acceptance within them.

It is the memory of a young Jewish woman sewing clothing for twelve hours a day, an Italian laborer building the infrastructure of a city, a child working when that child should have been learning, and generations of ordinary people who collectively decided that economic progress had to include human dignity.

And, for my family, it is the memory of Emanuel Weinberg and the generations who transformed labor activism into civic participation and political representation.

Labor Day is not simply a celebration of work.

It is a reminder that work must always remain in the service of human beings, rather than human beings existing solely in the service of work.

That was worth fighting for more than a century ago.

As we approach the middle of the twenty-first century, it is worth remembering—and, when necessary, fighting for again.