Remember reforms that raised up those who toil on this Labor Day

Our country has occasionally fallen short of certain ideals. When it has fallen short, the words our leaders say about those ideals are merely platitudes. And one topic on which the United States in its earliest days risked spouting platitudes rather than committing to principles is the value of hard work.

Today is Labor Day, a holiday to recognize the importance of the American workforce. American workers have built an economy that lifted 13 disparate colonies into a world superpower, capable of providing our military with the means for liberating Europe from the Nazis and capable of giving millions the means to sustain their families so that generations could pursue the liberties to which our country is dedicated.

But Labor Day is about more than honoring America’s workers. It’s about reflecting on reforms and initiatives throughout our country’s history, reforms that changed platitudes about the value of hard work into a respect for the principle that hard work has value.

Because in its beginning, hard work didn’t have value. Workers were subjected to unreasonably long hours in unsafe conditions for low pay — to say nothing of the significant percentage of our workforce that until 1863 were treated as literal property by the entrepreneurs who operated the South’s plantations.

It was decades of organizing, striking and negotiating that led to the reforms that turned platitudes about hard work into principles. And the men and women who pursued those reforms made tremendous sacrifices — including in some cases their lives, such as Manhattan in August of 1850, Baltimore in July of 1877, Homestead in July of 1892, St. Louis in June of 1900 and Ludlow, Colorado in April of 1914, among many others.

They made these sacrifices because they understood an underlying truth — that a society built on liberty and equality could only survive if the men and women who worked, who created the goods and services the marketplace deemed necessary had the means to do more than survive. America would only survive if the American worker could thrive — could have a standard of living adequate to pursue liberty, could pursue opportunities on merit rather than hereditary station, could be confident that the law deemed the worker as equally deserving of its protections as the entrepreneur or aristocrat.

And while we have made significant strides in assuring the American worker of all this, we continue to occasionally fall short. So while Labor Day is a day to honor the American worker and to reflect on our history of labor reforms, it is also a day to re-commit the United States to liberty, equal opportunity and equal protection before the law for all working Americans.