There – you did it. One week of classes down. Now you can go home and relax for a three-day weekend to celebrate Labor Day.

Celebrate? That word and “Labor Day” don’t typically flow together, since the holiday’s origins are generally not spoken about.

Emily Crane, junior in animal ecology, had a loose grasp on what the Labor Day weekend is for.

“It’s just for hard workers to get a break,” she said. Crane said she plans to use her three-day weekend to catch up on some sleep.

Rather than sleeping, Jennifer Crandell, senior in architecture, said she plans to watch her parents race on the dirt track of the Iowa State Fairgrounds. She said understood the day off to be “a day to give the blue-collar workers a break.”

The actual meaning of the holiday is derived from more than just a workers’ day off, however.

“Today, most people associate Labor Day with the end of summer,” said Cynthia Anderson, associate agriculture professor of sociology.

Anderson said most generalizations of Labor Day are unfortunate, as its origins are rooted in labor strife.

“Its origins trace back to the early 1890s, a time of nationwide economic depression,” Anderson said. Today, some still face the same problems, she said.

Though the labor movement has calmed since the Industrial Revolution and the only strike people are talking about is in baseball, Anderson believes that what Labor Day originally was protesting is still a major issue.

“We continue to face some of the problems that the workers in the 1890s did – corporations lay off thousands of workers while the CEOs continue to bring in phenomenal paychecks,” she said. “The need for workers to be politically active remains as the gap between the elites in our country and the working-class women and men continues to grow.”

The gap is sometimes created by jobs lost to foreign markets.

“Corporations move production to low-wage countries, often leaving behind communities of lifelong employees,” Anderson said.

The new jobs created in the United States usually don’t close the gap either, she said.

“The new jobs in America tend to be low-wage, low-skilled service work that typically pays poverty level wages.”

The situation 100 years ago had its own complications that led to the Labor Day holiday.

“Employers were laying off hundreds of dedicated workers and slashing wages for those who remained,” she said.

“Workers who had helped create the rise of American industrialism were suddenly unable to support themselves and their families.”

Anderson said strikes, boycotts, walkouts and the resistance of unions in the labor movement led up to the very first national Labor Day holiday.

“Union workers in New York took an unpaid day off and marched around Union Square in support of the holiday,” she said.

The holiday was planned by the Central Labor Union in New York.

“With encouragement from the Central Labor Union, other labor organizations across the nation began to celebrate a `workers’ holiday,'” Anderson said.

During the following years, many state legislatures adopted a Labor Day holiday, she said.

Labor Day became a national holiday in the United States in 1892, when Congress passed an act declaring the first Monday in September to be Labor Day.