Here's the NYT article, perhaps editorial, about Labor Day 1887, after the fact. It calls for the next Legislature to repeal Labor Day.
Labor Day
Yesterday was not observed as a general holiday in this city. It was a special holiday, and carried out very fairly the purpose of its institution, if that purpose was to enable Labor "to show its power." That is to say, there was a very large and entirely orderly procession of various trades, in which the representation of the building trades was most numerous and most conspicuous. It is said that this procession was augmented by dint of the discipline of the unions, insomuch that men who were anxious not to lose a day's work were informed that they would be fined a day's pay if they remained at work; so that employers in the trades so represented, if their work was sufficiently urgent, paid for the day's work twice over, once as compensation for the work and once as indemnity for the fine. This may be called tyrannical, but it is at all events a demonstration of the power and the discipline of the unions. The only serious drawback to the success of the procession was that it was compelled to march to "scab" music. The musicians, as yesterday's TIMES related, have been disciplined for not recognizing the "solidarity" of Labor by providing for strikes of sympathy whenever any shoemakers or longshoremen or waiters quarrel with their employers, and have undergone a partial excommunication from the Central Labor Union. They took a mild by effectual revenge by charging Labor $2 a musician more than they are accustomed to charge Capital when it organizes street parades or relaxes itself with picnics in Jones's Wood.
In fact, the observance of the day, so far as the day was observed at all, sustained the objections that were made to the creation of a special holiday to be known as Labor Day. Labor, in so far as it organizes street parades and political parties, means the association of men who work with their hands for daily wages, and who have, or suppose themselves to have, interests peculiar to themselves, and separate from, if not hostile to, the interests of the rest of the community. The fact that they can afford to take a day off, in addition to Sundays and holidays, for the sake of exhibiting themselves as a special class is a gratifying proof of their prosperity, no doubt, and one that could scarcely be afforded in any other country. But why should the rest of the community be compelled by law to suspend its usual business, or to conduct it in spite of legal obstructions, in order to show its sympathy with the antipathy of Labor to it? There is no reason, and the establishment of Labor Day as a legal holiday is a piece of class legislation of the most objectionable kind.
This familiar argument, which was ignored by Gov. Hill and the Legislature, was justified by the demonstration of yesterday. It was a demonstration of Labor, in this restricted sense, and of nothing and nobody else. The suspension of business was not complete enough to make the day a general holiday which people could enjoy in their own way without reference to the occasion of its institution. Such business as depended directly upon the banks was necessarily suspended. Other business was carried on under difficulties that prevented those engaged in it from fully profiting by the day as a working day or as a holiday. Apart altogether from the objections to this particular holiday, the first Monday in September is a very unfit time for a general holiday. Men who can afford to take a day now and then from their work have already taken the time they can well spare, and those who can afford a more extensive vacation, or in whose business it is customary to grant a more extensive vacation, have recently returned from it. Unless they are confirmed shirks they are anxious to be at their work again, and can celebrate any holiday only in a spiritless and perfunctory fashion. The new holiday occurs, too, when the Fall trade is just opening after the dullness of the Summer, and, being a legal holiday, interferes more or less with that trade, and consequently with the general prosperity, no matter how extensively it may be disregarded. From every public point of view "Labor Day" is objectionable, and one of the first acts of the next Legislature should be the repeal of the ill advised statute under which it was instituted.
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