Labor Day isn’t the most exciting of holidays. It doesn’t quite have the verve or internationalism of May Day and its meaning is overshadowed by important things like superb discounts on flat screen TVs.

But Labor Day was a real victory for the workers’ movement. As Tim Goulet writes in Jacobin, the holiday finds its roots in the most radical struggles of the nineteenth century. More than a decade before Grover Cleveland sanctioned a federal observance in 1894, Labor Day was marked by socialists and radical trade unionists.

We might still prefer May Day, but hey, workers deserve at the very least two days to celebrate their contributions to society.

Hopefully, we’re not mimicking the TV retailers too much, but we want to use the opportunity to share Jacobin with as many people as possible. We’re offering our print subscription for $20 and our digital edition for $10 with the link below. Internationally shipping is free for the first year.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/subscribe/?code=LABORDAY

Subscribers get complete access to our back archive and all the great material we’ll be putting out over the next year.

This is below costs for us, especially for international subs, so it only applies to new and gift subscriptions. Our hope is that many of those reading the magazine for free online will get a subscription for the first time and then renew into a second year.

For everyone else, it’s worth remembering that everything Jacobin does — from our network of over sixty reading groups to our exhaustive coverage of politics all over the world — relies on your generous support to continue. Please consider buying a lifetime subscription or making a reoccurring donation to the publication.