Labor Day is supposed to mean cookouts, road trips, sales, and one last long weekend before summer slips away. But behind the holiday is a stranger, sharper story: workers who risked their wages to take over the streets of New York, a fight over who gets to own your time, and a dream of industrial progress that slowly revealed something much darker underneath.

In Part One of this two-part My Latest Fixation story, Joshua follows Labor Day back to its uneasy beginnings—from the first workers’ parade to a near-perfect company town outside Chicago. It is a story of long hours, big promises, labor unrest, railroads, and the dangerous question at the heart of it all: what happens when the people who own your job also begin to own the rest of your life?

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