Labor Day: more than a holiday Published Sept. 2, 2008 By Senior Airman Amber Wescott 3rd Wing Public Affairs ELMENDORF AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska -- Picnics are a great way to start off the Labor Day weekend and end another beautiful summer. Labor Day is now known as the last long weekend in summer before autumn, though originally Labor Day was a celebration of the labor movement and its achievements. It is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of the United States. On September 1882, nearly 10,000 workers marched from city hall to Union Square in New York City, holding the first-ever Labor Day Parade. This was the first known celebrated Labor Day, though Congress would not recognize this as a holiday until 12 years later, laborers used this time and parade to voice concerns and complaints about working 12-hours a day, seven days a week to make ends meet, their working conditions, and their employers. In 1894, strikes and boycotts of the American railway began to occur, which involved 50,000 railroad workers and caused railroad traffic out of Chicago to come to a screeching halt. Soon President Grover sent troops to Chicago and after much rioting and bloodshed the strike and boycott collapsed. This brought the issue to the public eye and June 28, 1894, congress declared the first Monday in September each year would be a holiday for workers, known as Labor Day. Samuel Gompers, the founder and long-time president of the American Federation of Labor, once said, "Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country. All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day... is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation."