Labor history of the United States losing money anyway. They were successful in times of prosperity when the company was losing profits and wanted to settle quickly. The Federation made some efforts to obtain favorable legislation, but had little success in organizing or chartering new unions. It came out in support of the proposal, traditionally attributed to Peter J. McGuire of the Carpenters Union, for a national Labor Day holiday on the first Monday in September, and threw itself behind the eight hour movement, which sought to limit the workday by either legislation or union organizing. In 1886, as the relations between the trade union movement
Labor Day By the time it became an official federal holiday in 1894, thirty U.S. states officially celebrated Labor Day. All U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and the United States territories have subsequently made Labor Day a statutory holiday. The date of May 1 (an ancient European folk holiday known as May Day) emerged in 1886 as an alternative holiday for the celebration of labor, later becoming known as International Workers' Day. The date had its origins at the 1885 convention of the American Federation of Labor, which passed a resolution calling for adoption of the eight-hour day effective May 1,