× Expand Strike (1910) by Stanisław Lentz

President Donald Trump’s decision to nix pay raises for civilian federal employees just a few days shy of Labor Day is striking in many ways. But perhaps most of all, his action should remind us of the continuing battle to acknowledge the dignity of labor. Providing workers of all stripes with a living wage continues to define the struggle for economic justice in America. It is the key to remedying income inequality.

Labor Day today is currently celebrated as the official end of summer, the last respite before the end of vacation, a return to school, and the inevitable coming of fall. This was not always the case. Labor Day celebrations once represented a critical touchstone for the labor movement, an occasion to celebrate the dignity of working people and promote worker solidarity as a key to building a better America.

In September of 1882, the Central Labor Union of New York, taking its cues from the Knights of Labor, organized a parade in celebration of workers. The organization repeated the parade the following year, on the first Monday of September, as an act of recognition of the dignity of labor and in the spirit of solidarity. In 1884, the Knights of Labor adopted a resolution that all future parades be held on that day. The Knights then began a campaign to have state legislatures declare the commemoration a legal holiday.

Oregon was the first state to officially recognized Labor Day, passing a law in February 1887. New York followed suit in May of that same year. By 1893, many other states adopted it. On June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed into law a bill to make Labor Day a national holiday.

From the 1880s through the 1950s, Labor Day exercises were large-scale events where organizers not only celebrated the contributions of labor but also pressed for such reforms as the eight-hour day, the abolition of child labor, and the unionization of labor.

American labor has undergone great transformations since those days, but not without significant struggle. Concomitant with Labor Day exercises were protests, deadly strikes, and tragic accidents that alerted Americans to often horrific and inhumane working conditions.

The speeches and parades that once accompanied Labor Day celebrations have largely faded from memory—lost in the haze of smoky backyard barbeques and furniture sales.

Such amnesia is dangerous. Along with Trump’s recent decision on wages for civilian federal employees, his administration seems intent on rolling back labor’s hard-fought gains, including a proposal in July to relax rules regulating the amount of time that sixteen and seventeen-year-old apprentices may work in hazardous occupations such as logging and roofing. If adopted, the proposal would increase teen worker’s exposure to dangerous machinery and working conditions.

Trump pushes for corporate tax cuts, expensive military parades, and border walls, meanwhile cutting wages to federal workers.

Trump’s desire to deny a pay increase to civilian government workers reveals his clear hostility toward organized labor. He pushes for corporate tax breaks but ignores calls for more equitable treatment of service industry workers, embodied in the Fight for $15 Movement.

Like the original Labor Day, the Fight for $15 began in New York City. In 2012, two hundred fast-food workers staged a walkout to demand $15 hour and the right to unionize. This battle embodies the contemporary struggles of organized labor in this country. It not only involves a living wage but related concerns, including access to health care, affordable child care, and public transportation.

Whatever one’s position on the rights of federal workers—who like many teachers, firefighters, and other civil servants perform essential functions and are woefully underpaid—this Labor Day should be a time to remember the progress made and the vigilance necessary to ensure the protection of workers’ rights.

In the second half of the twentieth century, these rights remained at the center of social movements. Civil rights and labor organizer A. Philip Randolph conceptualized the August 1963 march as “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Martin Luther King was assassinated while demonstrating on behalf of striking sanitation workers in Memphis. Equal pay for equal work was one of the rallying cries of the Women’s Movement. And Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta built a movement by organizing agricultural workers.

On this Labor Day—when continued talk of building walls and breaking the power of unions remain powerful reminders of the hostility toward organized labor—Huerta’s inspiring words in the Proclamation of the Delano Grape Workers still echo loudly for all of those who work:

“Mexicans, Filipinos, Africans, and others, our ancestors were among those who founded this land and tamed its natural wilderness. But we are still pilgrims on this land, and we are pioneers who blaze a trail out of the wilderness of hunger and deprivation that we have suffered even as our ancestors did. We are conscious today of the significance of our present quest. If this road we chart leads to the rights and reforms we demand, if it leads to just wages, humane working conditions, protection from the misuse of pesticides, and to the fundamental right of collective bargaining, if it changes the social order that relegates us to the bottom reaches of society, then in our wake will follow thousands of American farmworkers. Our example will make them free.”