NEW YORK — The Labor Day holiday originated in New York City, but exactly who created it is the subject of mild controversy.
New developments by a DNA research company may have laid some of that controversy to rest, while a far bigger new development for everyone -- the global pandemic -- may have helped to put labor issues at the forefront of policy.
First, the controversy: two men, who were not related to each other, despite the fact that they had very similar last names, have both been credited with creating Labor Day.
Peter McGuire, a union carpenter from South Jersey, was given the credit for Labor Day's creation when it was first declared a national holiday in 1894. However, the first Labor Day observance, as Queens College historian Joshua Freeman pointed out in an interview, was more than a decade before.
"It started in 1882," Freeman said, "by a relatively new group, that just was founded, called the Central Labor Union," or CLU.
The CLU's president was an organizer named Matt Maguire. He never seemed overly interested in claiming credit for creating the labor-focused holiday, but his family and others had insisted that he'd come up with the idea.
New research by the DNA and family history analysis firm MyHistory concluded that Maguire, not McGuire, birthed the Labor Day idea. Rafi Mendelsohn is a director at the company, as well as its spokesperson.
"A lot of records, a lot of information," Mendelsohn said in a Zoom interview from the company's headquarters city of Tel Aviv, Israel, "seems to suggest that actually Matthew Maguire may have had more of a hand in the founding of Labor Day."
More specifically, MyHeritage historians found Maguire's funeral interment card from 1917, on which someone had handwritten a note at the time saying, "This man founded Labor Day."
The researchers also found historical newspaper coverage that supports that narrative.
Nonetheless, said Freeman, the Queens College historian, "None of us were in the room when the Central Labor Union decided to do this. So, we don't really know who suggested it, but it clearly was a collective project."
"Everyone named Maguire or anything like that," Freeman continued, "should deserve the credit."
On Labor Day 2020, the labor movement is holding its own, especially in the midst of the global pandemic and economic crisis. Both Freeman and Bob Hennelly, a correspondent for the labor issues publication The Chief-Leader, said that unions are representing well now, at a time when they're badly needed.
An example that Hennelly cited, was in transportation.
"It was TWU members working in the subway who decided to wear masks" at the the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, Hennelly said.
"They were aware of what was going on, perhaps more than some of the political leadership in our country. Immediately, the MTA supervisors wrote them up because the masks didn't conform with the uniform, and they were afraid that it would scare the public."
"The union stood behind the workers in making that choice," Hennelly continued, "and then convinced the MTA, ahead of the CDC, to change that policy guidance."
He and Freeman both pointed out that union membership nationwide has dropped significantly -- from more than 30 percent of workers in the 1970s, to 10 percent of workers now.
However, they said, the current crisis may point the way to a stronger future for organized labor.
Hennelly said that the case of unionized nurses and other organized workers in health care demonstrates his point. The unionized health care workers had warned management in the industry well before COVID numbers had spiked in New York that PPE was in short supply.
"Unions that were right and had hands-on knowledge weren't listened to" at first, Hennelly told PIX11 News. "So my hope is that, as this goes forward, that no matter who wins in November, that working people will have more of a place at the table when it comes to assessing the long term consequences of this virus."
Freeman supported that perspective, despite the fact that "unions themselves have not grown," he said.
"Yet they've helped put labor issues more to the forefront. I think that may continue," said Freeman. "It's hard to predict, and of course if there's a Democratic administration in Washington, you may see some changes in labor law that will make unionization easy to do."
Meanwhile, one of the very few unions that are growing are police unions. The president of New York's biggest police union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, has publicly endorsed the Republican administration of Pres. Donald Trump.
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September 08, 2020 at 06:03AM
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New research about the creation of Labor Day may help workers in this time of pandemic - WPIX 11 New York
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