We Should Call It ‘Economic Growth Day’

National Review Online

Monday, September 07, 2026

 

Every Labor Day, unions claim responsibility for much of modern America’s cushy living standards. They argue that the eight-hour workday and five-day workweek wouldn’t exist without their valiant efforts against the mighty industrialists. We are supposed to thank unions for minimum wages and workplace safety laws, too, and for banning the scourge of child labor. If not for organized labor, the story goes, we would essentially still be living in the Gilded Age.

 

The comforts of working in today’s U.S. economy are nothing to scoff at. But to attribute these improvements to labor unions — ignoring the underlying force beneath them all — is to engage in historical revisionism. At best, organized labor ratified improvements in living standards that were already enabled by rising productivity.

 

It is crucial to remember that mankind’s economic baseline is universal grinding poverty, with life sustained only by subsistence. All improvements in material welfare, from the First Agricultural Revolution onward, must be forged through investment and ingenuity. The Industrial Revolution, the era that unions decry, was an extraordinary advancement in human welfare. Daily economic life has only gotten better since, as free peoples have developed new ways to arrange capital and labor to yield greater wealth for all involved.

 

Begin with labor hours. Since the 19th century, the number of hours worked per lifetime has more than halved worldwide, while leisure time has increased fivefold. Weekly hours worked by men in the United States have also gradually declined, even as the unionization rate rose and then collapsed. The same is true of American seniors.

 

The now-standard workweek — five eight-hour days with a two-day weekend — was not a union creation. Rather, it was innovated by Henry Ford at his company’s strictly non-union Highland Park Plant. The productivity revelation that was the assembly line first permitted Ford to give workers one day off a week in 1922, then two days off in 1926. With mass production came the free time needed for mass consumption.

 

Wages for production workers were rising steadily for decades before the advent of unions. When the first federal minimum wage took effect in the 1930s, at 25 cents an hour, most unskilled workers were earning nearly twice that amount.

 

As for safety conditions, the rate of workplace fatalities in America has been falling since at least the 1920s, as factories became increasingly automated and more workers shifted into the service sector.  When we look at a graph of deaths over time, it’s impossible to tell when federal workplace safety rules were enacted. Child labor was almost nonexistent by the time Congress prohibited it in 1938, since it had plummeted in the prior decades.

 

Time and again, laws pushed by labor unions were enshrined only after economic growth made them feasible — and after such standards were already being adopted voluntarily. When businesses must compete for employees, they have every incentive to boost productivity and share the proceeds through higher wages and more attractive working conditions.

 

Most champions of organized labor are ungrateful for the very mechanism that enables the common worker to flourish. To the extent they succeed in forcibly pushing wages and benefits above fair market levels, they discourage investment by slashing its return and thereby retard growth at the companies they unionize.

 

This Labor Day, remember that no improvement in living standards is possible without the economic productivity that lets Americans provide ever more goods and services to one another while requiring less work. Don’t let the unions take credit for your weekend.