Labor Day: The Fight for a Fair Workplace Then and Now
For many Americans, Labor Day means one last long weekend before summer officially ends! Labor day equals barbecues, a trip to the beach, and a Monday off. But the holiday began with the belief that working people deserved recognition and a say in shaping the conditions of their labor.
The first Labor Day celebration took place in New York City on September 5, 1882, organized by the Central Labor Union. Thousands of workers marched through the city in a public demonstration that showed the unity in organized labor. The exact person who first proposed the holiday remains disputed between labor leaders Peter J. McGuire and Matthew Maguire, but its purpose was to celebrate the contributions workers made to the country and to demonstrate what could be accomplished through solidarity. By 1894, Labor Day had become a federal holiday, officially observed on the first Monday of September.
The labor movement fought for many things that are now so embedded in American life that it can be easy to forget they weren’t always here: shorter working hours, safer workplaces, better wages, and the ability of workers to organize and collectively bargain.
The 1993 television movie For Their Own Good displays a disturbing example of what can happen when an employer is given extraordinary power over its workers.
Inspired by real events, the film stars Elizabeth Perkins as factory worker Sally Wheeler. Sally and other women working at a factory that exposes employees to hazardous materials are faced with an almost impossible ultimatum. Rather than spend the money necessary to make the workplace safer, the company adopts a so-called “fetal protection” policy. Women of childbearing age can either undergo sterilization or lose their jobs.
The film follows Sally and her coworkers as they comply with the policy only to discover that their sacrifice does not protect them from further mistreatment. When the company later begins demoting and firing workers, Sally decides to fight back.
The story was inspired by cases in which companies restricted women from certain industrial jobs because of potential pregnancy risks. Those policies eventually became the subject of a major legal battle. In 1991, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United Auto Workers v. Johnson Controls that employers could not exclude fertile women from jobs involving lead exposure simply because of potential risks to a fetus. The issue, at its core, was whether a corporation could make reproductive decisions on behalf of its employees. Contemporary coverage of For Their Own Good emphasized the same point: supposedly protecting women could become a convenient justification for taking away their jobs, choices, and economic independence.
Who gets to decide how a workplace operates? What happens when new policies increase profits while placing the risks on employees? And how much power should workers have when technology fundamentally changes their jobs?
Today, one of the biggest versions of that conversation surrounds artificial intelligence.
AI is already being incorporated into workplaces for hiring, scheduling, productivity monitoring, surveillance, performance evaluations, and automation. Labor organizations have increasingly argued that workers should have a voice in deciding how those systems are introduced.
In 2025, the AFL-CIO released a set of principles calling for a worker-centered approach to artificial intelligence. Among its recommendations are stronger collective bargaining rights around new technology, protections against invasive workplace surveillance, transparency about how automated systems make employment decisions, human review of AI-driven decisions, protections for workers whose jobs are displaced, and training programs that allow employees to benefit from technological change rather than simply absorb its consequences.
The concern is not necessarily that technology itself is the enemy. New technology has been reshaping work for centuries. The question is who receives the benefits.
AI could remove repetitive tasks, improve workplace safety, help employees work more efficiently, and create entirely new industries. But it could also be used to intensify workloads, monitor employees more aggressively, eliminate jobs without adequate transition support, or allow algorithms to quietly make decisions about hiring, discipline, scheduling, and firing.
That debate has now reached Congress. Earlier this year, more than 40 labor, civil rights, economic justice, and public-interest organizations urged lawmakers to make worker protections a central part of federal AI legislation. The coalition warned that without safeguards, workplace AI could threaten privacy, increase discrimination, undermine labor rights, and destabilize working families.
A factory owner deciding that sterilizing workers is cheaper than improving workplace safety may seem like an extreme relic of another era. But For Their Own Good works because it asks: what happens when employers are allowed to make life-changing decisions for workers who have very little ability to say no?
Labor Day is a reminder that many workplace protections were not gifts handed down by employers. They were won through organizing, legislation, lawsuits, strikes, collective bargaining, and workers insisting that economic progress should not come at the expense of human dignity.
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