Garbage workers will toil Labor Day

Labor Day was made a national holiday to celebrate the contributions of blue-collar workers to America's economy. On Monday, September 2, the Orange County Courthouse and city halls will be closed for the holiday along with state and national offices.

However, the men and women who pickup garbage will not be getting a day off. The cities of Bridge City, Orange, Pinehurst, Vidor, and West Orange will have their regular garbage schedules during the week. Pinehurst has collections on Tuesdays while the day for West Orange is Friday, but the Monday holiday will not interrupt schedules.

However, thanks to federal labor laws, they will get extra pay or time off for their holiday work. And those laws are another reason Labor Day became a holiday.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, cities like New York were the first to pay tribute to the labor movement and labor leaders encouraged states and Congress to make a holiday. States started creating a holiday and when Congress adopted the first Monday in September as Labor Day national holiday, 31 of the 44 states at the time had already made the day a holiday.

Labor unions were created to have workers join together to negotiate pay, working hours, and job safety with employers. Though a few unions existed, the main movement in the U.S. didn't start until 1866, the year after the Civil War ended.

Fans of the Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey) HBO show "The Gilded Age," set in the 1880s, got to see the beginnings of a labor union in the second season. Steel workers in mills of the new mega-rich capitalists want 8-8-8, eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, and eight hours of what you want.

The American labor movement has led to an eight-hour work day, weekends off, new safety regulations for workers, and in the 1930s, an end to child labor. The Nineteenth Century into the early 20th Century saw children as young as five years of age working in mills and industries.

The Orange-Beaumont-Port Arthur area once had thriving union memberships in the shipyards, oil refineries, chemical plants, and mills, but changes beginning in the 1980s led to a drop of power and membership in unions.

Today, the most well-known employer-employee negotiations in the area are likely from public entities with police and sheriff's deputies who organized in the 1980s for contracts. Also, most of the full-time city fire departments have a union for contract negotiations.