DP Ricardo Diaz on the IATSE Strike That Wasn’t – as “Hot Labor Summer” Becomes “Stormy Labor Fall”

Below the Line: So the informal end to summer, at least in America, now starts to reside in the rearview mirror. We refer of course to Labor Day, that holiday, as noted in earlier columns, offered up as an alternative to the more potentially incendiary May Day, around which, when unions were just starting to form as a reaction to working conditions in the early industrial era, some violent– and often fatal – clashes between workers and police took place, such as Chicago’s Haymarket Riot.