Labor Day rules and rituals: Nobody actually knows why we do any of this

There is a certain kind of person, at a certain kind of barbecue, who announces, with the flat authority of Scripture, that white is not to be worn after Labor Day. No one has ever produced this law. It’s enforced like a grudge: the offense long forgotten, the point being the enforcement.

That, it turns out, is the whole personality of the holiday: a house built on a foundation nobody can locate, in honor of a man history can no longer confidently name.

Labor Day has spent a century accumulating quirky social rules no legislature passed but nearly everyone obeys anyway.

The first Labor Day — not yet official, just an idea a union decided to act on — took place on September 5, 1882, in New York City. Someone willed it into being. Who, exactly, that person was is where the record gives out.

Credit for organizing it sits between Peter McGuire, a carpenter and the co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, and Matthew Maguire, a machinist and secretary of the Central Labor Union. While their unions were rivals, their surnames were just one letter apart, as if fate couldn’t be bothered to keep them straight.

A former U.S. Department of Labor historian admitted in 2011 that she still couldn’t say which one deserved the credit.

What is known is that it cost something. Workers reportedly forfeited about $75,000 in lost wages to march that day — the Central Labor Union even fined anyone who skipped it. Roughly 10,000 walked from City Hall to Union Square.

Even while most of the world marks the labor holiday on May 1, the U.S. wanted no part of it. A Haymarket Square rally in Chicago that began on May 1, 1886, ended in a deadly bombing three days later, turning May Day into a symbol of radicalism.

In 1894, President Grover Cleveland specifically pushed September into law instead so the holiday wouldn’t become a memorial to the Haymarket radicals.

From that origin — sacrifice, spectacle, and a little deliberate amnesia — Labor Day has spent a century accumulating quirky social rules no legislature passed but nearly everyone obeys anyway.

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For one, the white clothes were never really a rule so much as a gatekeeping test, likely invented by old-money New Yorkers of the Gilded Age terrified of being confused with the flanks of the industrial nouveau riche nipping at their heels.

Fashion historians trace it to Newport summers, where white linen signaled you had servants to launder it and no hard labor to dirty it.

After Labor Day, pools close with the solemnity of a curfew, though the reason behind that practice — the school calendar — is rather dull. Roughly a third of the country’s 309,000 public pools face shortages each year since so many lifeguards are teenagers who vanish the moment the school bell rings.

Mattresses also tend to go on sale at this time, but mostly because someone once noticed a day off is a day to shop — 30% to 50% across major brands.

And repetition, given enough years, effectively becomes law.

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