Listen Money Matters - Free Your Inner Financial Badass. All The Stuff You Should Know About Personal Finance.

It’s Labor Day and most of us are not working.  We’ll tell you the reason you have the day off and the story of those who sacrificed so you could sleep in. Labor Day celebrates the American Labor movement.  It became an official holiday in 1887.  If you think you’re job is oppressive now, imagine what it was like before the concept of organized labor.  At least we get paid in money.  At some points, workers were paid with “company chit” that could only be spent at places that were conveniently owned by their employer. Once upon a time, workers labored as apprentices under master workers.  You then became a journeyman and eventually, a master yourself.  By 1815, journeymen began to outnumber masters due to migration patterns.  As a result, investors began building labor intensive businesses on a big scale. When the workers began to collude to raise wages, the practice was made illegal by the government.  Commonwealth vs Hunt made collusion to raise wages a legal activity.  That was the beginning of the mode