Daily Dose of English 155
Labor Day
Daily Dose of English 155
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about Labor Day. It's another one of those holiday episodes because on the day that this is coming out, it is Labor Day in the US where Labor Day is celebrated. There might be other similar holidays in other countries. In fact, I'm looking at there's a Wikipedia article about Labor Day with L-A-B-O-U-R, which is the representation of the holiday in other countries. And it looks like there is some kind of Labor Day in a lot of different countries, only a few that have no Labor Day at all. But we're gonna be talking about the U.S. Labor Day today, which is a little bit unique in the fact that it falls on a different day every year. So I think I talked about this last time, but we have a different date, like a different day of the year for some holidays that fall on a day of the week in a certain time of the year, rather than a specific date, right? So things like Halloween happen on October 31st every year, regardless of what day of the week it is. July 4th is always on the 4th of July, but Labor Day is always the first Monday in September. It cares about being a Monday, not whether like a specific date. And so today is September 2nd, the first Monday. It happens to be very early in September, but it can be all the way up to the 7th, right? If the 1st is a, wait, the 1st is a Tuesday, you have to wait all six days and then the 7th day is the first Monday of Labor Day. That's the name of the holiday that I'm trying to say. And it is always a day off. It's a day that you don't have to go to school. And it's sort of starting the end of the year holiday season. We'll actually talk about this more in a month at the beginning of November. But the end of the year in the U.S. generally has a lot of September, October, November, no, in two months. Was it September? Yeah, two months, sorry. At the end of the year, it ends up having a lot of holidays, but this is sort of marks the beginning of that feeling, at least for me. Maybe that's wrong. Cause now that I think about it, I don't think there's very many actual holidays in September. It kind of just feels like it, I guess. Um, but you know, anyways, so, uh, Labor Day is a public holiday. Like I said, that is celebrated all over the place and it has to do with, with work and with, um, celebrating work and labor is the word right and your job and that sort of thing in a way it's not really like a celebration we don't do anything for labor day besides take the day off of working to have that sort of celebration, and some places I think have like a parade, but that's kind of it. It's sort of a day of rest, if you will, an additional day, because it was started during the American labor movement, which was in like 19th century, like 1800s or something like that, when there was a lot of support for unions and for labor movements and for better working conditions and that sort of thing. And it started as a, almost a way, not necessarily as a protest, but sort of as like a worker's day to be like, we are the ones building this country. This is sort of a thing for us sort of thing. And so here on the Wikipedia page, it's saying that it was proposed in the early 1880s, so what, a hundred years would be 1980, so we're like 150 years after its invention, and it is there to I don't like the word celebrate for this because it doesn't really feel like a celebration, but it's to be like a general holiday for the average worker, for the average person. This is a time when unions and American laborers were gaining a lot more Power, again, power isn't the right word, but it was growing because when the US was founded as a separate country and started to grow and become more industrialized, there was a lot of exploitation of labor and you can actually there's actually really interesting stories from this time of of when things are being invented and like the invention of the the assembly line right that that was from oh what ford henry ford henry ford let's see let's pull him up on on the old Wikipedia yeah, so Henry Ford was Around this time like building up his The Ford company right Ford Motors. That was a little bit later I think a little towards the 19th 1900s, but it was there was a lot of like this growth of industrialization and making more stuff and factories and that sort of thing. And at the beginning, the working conditions were pretty bad. The workers are treated very poorly, the rich and the ruling class would make them work terrible hours, very similar to a lot of poorer countries nowadays, which is messed up because it's not humane. But this is sort of when labor movements and unions started to gain more power. Unions are basically when everybody that working somewhere come together and say that we will not work unless you improve the conditions of work for us. And it's called the union because they're all together, right? You're combining forces, you're unionizing. However, that has now become to refer to this thing of work. And unions actually have a lot of power because if everybody doesn't work, the factory doesn't work, right? The factory doesn't go, you don't make, the factory owner doesn't make any money. And getting new workers is very difficult, it's a big process. And so they actually have a lot of power. And so they're, So a lot of unions were gaining power, it was becoming a bigger thing, and supposedly the American Labor Union, which is sort of like a big union of a lot of workers, wanted to have a day to set aside that sort of thing. That's sort of it. I don't think there's actually that much more to it. Something interesting is that Oregon, where I'm from, was the first state to make it an official public holiday, which is sort of cool. But it is now everywhere. It's a part of the federal government, so it's a federal holiday, which is in all U.S. states, Washington, D.C., and even U.S. territories. It is a required thing. And that actually is saying that that happened in 1894 when there was a certain strike. So a strike is a thing that a lot of unions can do as a way to show power. Striking is when people don't go to work and say, we need this to be better, right? We need to have better working conditions of some kind. And strikes in unions are actually great. They give a lot more power to the regular people, to workers. And they were very strong and they actually built a lot of the the the American middle class and making And that was sort of the idea behind like not the idea But that was one of the driving factors behind making something like the American dream a reality an actual possibility for a lot of people there was strong labor laws and protections and wages were quite good for the time and However, in the past, whatever, 50, 60 years, they've actually successfully been squashed in a lot of ways. There's been sort of decades and decades of anti-union, basically propaganda from rich people and rich company owners and that sort of thing, because they're bad for their businesses. If people have more power, then the companies have less power, which is not what they want. And so they use the power that they do have to influence the public opinion of labor movements and unions. And so in the 2000s and up till fairly recently, most people in the US were against unions, despite them being a very good thing for most people. And now, it's starting to shift again. People are becoming a lot more pro-union, you can say, and a lot more positive on unions. And that's a really good thing. We saw some big strikes a couple years ago in Hollywood and in the actors union. There was also a, I forget exactly what it was, but there was a very successful campaign where they actually didn't have to strike pretty much at all. I believe it was in, the automobile industry and factory workers. I don't remember exactly what it was, but they had a new type of strike where it was random. Instead of having there be like a defined day that everybody goes, the idea was that at any day, an entire factory can just have no workers. It's a random secret, and this is terrifying for business owners because just not being able to plan, not knowing anything like that, suddenly you just don't have this working, you have to keep up with demand and all these things, it's terrifying. And it worked really, really well as a negotiation tactic. I think there was only like one walkout or maybe two, and then the entire industry essentially caved and started talking and giving them their demands, which is fantastic. And so hopefully more things like that happen we get much stronger unions in the US and really all over the world would be fantastic But we'll see so yeah, that's a little bit about Labor Day again I know I sort of didn't have a ton of substance to say especially at the beginning because it's Not really a very interesting holiday in terms of like stuff that happens. It's really just a day off. So but hopefully you enjoyed and Yeah, we'll be talking about more holidays coming up especially going into the end end of the year, so I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a great rest of your day, and I'll see you then. Buh-bye!
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.