For most of us, Labor Day means the unofficial end of summer. A three-day weekend, maybe a barbecue, one last trip to the beach.
But Labor Day began as something quite different. It was a celebration of working people, born out of the growing labor movement of the late 19th century. And it turns out that music, and Newark, were there from the very beginning.
The first Labor Day was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5th, 1882, in New York City.
It was organized by the Central Labor Union, at a time when workers across the country were organizing for better wages, shorter hours and safer working conditions.
The idea was to bring workers from different trades together for a parade through Manhattan, followed by speeches, a picnic, and, apparently, quite a lot of beer.
But on the morning of the parade, there was a problem. They didn’t have a band. As so often happens, the music was overlooked.
The marchers were gathering, the police were ready, spectators were lining Broadway.
But the organizers weren’t sure how you could have a parade without music.
And then, shortly after ten o’clock, help arrived from New Jersey. About two hundred members of the Jewelers Union of Newark Two had crossed the ferry. And they brought a band.
The Newark jewelers turned onto lower Broadway playing “When I First Put This Uniform On,” a song from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience.
A police escort fell in behind them. Then came the parade organizers. Spectators started joining in. And just like that, the first Labor Day parade was underway.
By the end, somewhere between ten and twenty thousand workers had participated. Later, as many as 25,000 union members and their families gathered for a massive celebration at a park on the Upper West Side.
There were speeches, food, cigars and, according to one account, lager beer kegs “mounted in every conceivable place.”
The idea caught on. Other cities began holding their own Labor Day celebrations. States started recognizing it as an official holiday. Oregon was the first, in 1887. And in 1894, Congress passed legislation making the first Monday in September a federal holiday honoring American workers.
Of course, musicians know something about work too. Musicians were part of that same wave of organizing.
In fact, more than twenty years before the first Labor Day parade, New York musicians had formed the Musical Mutual Protective Union, generally considered the first true musicians’ labor union in the United States.
They organized around many of the same things other workers did: wages, working conditions, and the idea that individuals negotiating alone have less power than people acting collectively.
But as the labor movement grew in the 1880s, musicians confronted an interesting question.
Were musicians really workers? Some resisted joining the broader labor movement because they considered themselves artists who were separate from ordinary laborers.
Others argued that being an artist didn’t change the basic economics of making a living.
Eventually that idea helped lead to the formation of the American Federation of Musicians in 1896, and here in New York, after a complicated series of mergers, disputes and even a strike, to the creation of AFM Local 802 in 1921.
That tension between artist and worker never really went away. Musicians make art. But they also make a living.
They negotiate. They compete for jobs. They worry about wages, health care, pensions, and increasingly, about technologies that might replace the work they do.
And sometimes they organize. Which seems worth remembering on Labor Day.
Along with the fact that the very first Labor Day parade couldn’t even get started...until a bunch of workers from Newark showed up with a band.
