Europe’s Labor Day observance was announced in 1889 by the first Paris Congress of the Second Socialist International. “Disruption was to be part of the holiday,” Ms. Vitullo-Martin notes, “and there was no notion that anyone but workers would participate -- certainly not owners or capitalists.”

In contrast -- while no one should suggest the American struggle to gain recognition for the right of workers to organize was a mere walk in the park -- in America things proceeded in a far more conciliatory vein.

Matthew Maguire, a machinist from Paterson, N.J., and Peter J. McGuire, a New York City carpenter who helped found the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, were instrumental in staging the first Labor Day parade in New York City in September 1882. No heads were broken. By 1894, President Grover Cleveland had signed a bill making Labor Day a national holiday.

It may be this notion -- that a celebration of labor is an appropriate undertaking for Americans of all classes and political persuasions -- which allowed America’s holiday to be marked with “picnics, parades, baseball games ... and a few mild speeches,” rather than “clashes between cops and workers,” Ms. Vitullo-Martin theorizes.

In today’s America, “The working class and the employing class now have a great deal in common -- a joint drive for prosperity. ...” Ms. Vitullo-Martin explains. “We also recognize that the labor movement’s great days may be behind it. Less than 10 percent of the American private-sector work force is unionized, down from 35 percent 30 years ago.”

Does this shrinking of union membership mean American workers are being reduced to a new level of serfdom? Just the opposite. “Labor’s problems can be traced, in part, to its own success in reducing unsafe working conditions and giving workers a voice,” editorialized the Journal of Commerce recently.

Europe’s socialist labor movement assumed a Manichaean duality: Workers were good, employers evil. The goal was to equalize distribution of the fixed pile of available wealth by getting as much as possible, while providing as little benefit as possible to their “ruthless exploiters.”

In America, on the other hand, union pioneer George Meany advised his brethren to avoid divisive, partisan politics. The average American worker, far from seeking to sabotage his work product when no one was looking, clung to a pride in his craftsmanship, realizing early on that his energy and creativity could increase the value of his employer’s product, often making the difference between whether a company succeeded or failed. Wealth could only be shared after it was created, and a job well done was something to be proud of.

And this difference -- far more than the distribution of natural resources -- explains America’s economic dominance in the world. The bureaucratized Marxism which seized much of the world in the early 20th century celebrated jealousy over achievement, institutionalizing a grinding poverty of seizure and destruction which stands in stark contrast to the material health and well-being of the lowliest worker in a free, capitalist society.

(Fans of the welfare state annually announce another million or so Americans have “fallen into poverty” -- as they did again last week, like clockwork -- while failing to note this is achieved through the simple expedient of constantly raising the arbitrary “poverty level,” while blithely ignoring massive government welfare handouts and other subsidies, so that America now stands alone in the world in claiming a vast population of people “living in poverty” who are often overweight, and almost universally possess central heating, telephones, televisions, flush toilets, refrigerators, and automobiles.)

Labor’s underlying problem -- if it really is a problem -- is that the percentage of our employment and our sustenance based on a line of interchangeable strong backs has been shrinking for generations. Fredric Hamber of the Ayn Rand Institute argues that what is needed today is nothing less than a new definition of “work,” in better keeping with our modern understanding of the source from which wealth and prosperity actually flow.

“Most of today’s intellectuals, influenced by several generations of Marxist political philosophy, still believe that wealth is created by sheer physical toil,” Mr. Hamber argues. “But the high standard of living we enjoy today is not due to our musculature and physical stamina -- many animals have been much stronger. We owe our relative affluence not to muscle power, but to brain power. ... ”

Contrary to the Marxist premise that wealth is created by laborers and “exploited” by those at the top of the pyramid of ability, “It is those at the top, the best and the brightest, who increase the value of the labor of those at the bottom,” Mr. Hamber insists.

And so on Labor Day, he urges, “Let us honor the true root of production and wealth: the human mind.”