Democratic President Grover Cleveland was concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket Affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe. In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative.
The date was formally adopted as a United States federal holiday in 1894. Thus, Labor Day is effectively the US' celebration of the sentiments embodied in the world's celebration on May 1...not too cool.
Without turning this into a religion/Catholic kinda thingy, May 1 was established as The Feast of St. Joseph the Worker by Pope Pius XII in 1955 in order to counter communist and socialist appropriation of labor as a social good. Perhaps this sentiment is best explained by Ven. Fulton Sheen:
Communism has chosen the Cross in the sense that it has brought back to an egotistic world a sense of discipline, self-abnegation, surrender, hard work, study, and dedication to supra-individual goals. But the Cross without Christ is sacrifice without love. Hence, Communism has produced a society that is authoritarian, cruel, oppressive of human freedom, filled with concentration camps, firing squads, and brain-washings.
Thus, in the midst of burgers and a day off, for me Labor Day is a day to celebrate the value of work within the context of my vocation as husband/father/lprovider, and not some socialist/communist bastardized view of agitation, hatred, and conflict.
Why is it the focus has always been on the date of the Declaration of Independence. Not when we were actually officially recognized as an independent nation An officially created country seven years later I believe.Done at the Paris Accord on a day and month that ironically centuries later was nearly the same as when WWII officially ended on the Battleship Missouri, Yet both dates occurred on September 2bd remain unobserved.