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Next Monday, September 2, we celebrate the American holiday known as Labor Day. This day is a holiday dedicated to honoring the workers who drive our country and the long history of the working person in the United States. The holiday is one of the special ones that floats around on the calendar as it does not have a finite date in which it is celebrated. Instead, the defining trait of Labor Day is that it is spent being celebrated on the first Monday of September. Aside from the name, the fact that it honors the workers of America, and the idea in which it marks the unofficial end of summer do you know the actual history behind the holiday?

To many, Labor Day is just another three day weekend, but it actually was once much more.

Labor Day in the United States came out of the Industrial Revolution. During the technological movement, the average working American was working 12-hour days, seven days a week. Children worked in factories, mines, and mills as early as at the age of five years old. Essentially, employment was massively unregulated, especially by today’s standards. People began to form these new things, unions, as means of negotiating terms for regulations and requirements for the protection of the workers. Rebellions and riots became more common as workers decided enough was enough. Mixed in with some of the violent riots, was what we now consider the first Labor Day parade in New York City. During this, 10,000 workers walked out of work for the day to march from City Hall to Union Square. After word of this unpaid “holiday” spread, other industries in other parts of the country adapted similar practices.

Eventually, after more riots occurred, President Grover Cleveland signed a Labor Day into law as a federal U.S. holiday.

President Cleveland signed the holiday into American history on June 28, 1894. There had been many violent uprisings at that point and many disruptions to production. The U.S. government was seeking a means of repairing its bonds with the American people and settled on the holiday as a good starting point.

While Cleveland is the man who made Labor Day a formal means to an end, few recognize him as the actual founder of the holiday. No official name has been said, but many theorize the cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, Peter J. McGuire, as the originator of Labor Day.

So, why is it a floating Monday holiday?

In 1968, the U.S. government decided to set up a few holidays on Mondays annually, so that there is always a three day weekend for federal employees, and often most other workers. This bill was the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, and it is why we celebrate days such as Labor Day, Memorial Day, President’s Day, and a few more on a rotating schedule in which it is always a Monday.