Professor William B. Gould weighs in on how the Labor Day festivities of recent times don’t resemble the early celebrations and movement that created the holiday. 

Labor Day was first celebrated as a holiday on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882, before the American labor movement — still in its infancy following a century of sweatshop conditions — figured out the concept of a three-day weekend.

It took another dozen years for its enshrinement on the federal holiday calendar, consecrated as our national 40 Percent-Off Sale Day because President Grover Cleveland thought it might take some of the stink off his decision to use 10,000 U.S. Army troops to break the Pullman strike — labor’s first nationwide challenge to the robber barons and industrialists who routinely brutalized workers.

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As a young labor lawyer, William B. Gould IV stood in Detroit’s Cadillac Square on Labor Day in 1960, listening to United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther and then-Sen. John F. Kennedy speak about organized labor.

“There was a full-scale parade down the main street in support of the rights of organized labor, minimum wages, limitations on overtime — you know, dignity,” recalls Gould, who went on to become chairman of the National Labor Relations Board and a law professor at Stanford University. “It was in such contrast to the kind of holiday picnic atmosphere that in most instances has very little to do with the objectives of the movement and the means of protest that were necessary to achieve those objectives.”