FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
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NATION FORMALLY HONORS LABOR MOVEMENT; APPROXIMATELY 4 MILLION AMERICANS TO WORK THE HOLIDAY WEEKEND IN ITS HONOR
A joint statement from the American Coalition of Employers, the Retail & Hospitality Gratitude Council, and eleven logistics firms that have asked not to be identified by name
CHICAGO — Today, on the occasion of Labor Day, the undersigned organizations wish to express our deepest and most sincere gratitude to the American labor movement, whose historic sacrifices secured the eight-hour day, the five-day week, and the very concept of the holiday weekend. In recognition of that legacy, roughly four million associates, team members, partners, crew members, and independent contractor-adjacent individuals will be working Labor Day weekend at full capacity, in shifts we are proud to call, internally, “peak coverage.”
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We do not take this lightly. We take it operationally.
A Legacy We Honor By Not Observing It
The labor movement gave this country the weekend. We believe the most meaningful way to thank a gift is to use it, aggressively, at scale, with a 22% year-over-year volume increase. To that end, our member organizations will remain open Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, including the hours historically referred to as “nobody should have to be here.”
“We honor the eight-hour day by observing it twice,” said Denise Fothergill, Senior Vice President of People & Culture at a Fortune 200 grocery chain and current chair of the Gratitude Council. “Back to back. Same person. There’s a real reverence to it.”
Recognition Package
Effective 12:01 a.m. Saturday, all eligible hourly associates will receive a Holiday Appreciation Differential of an additional forty cents per hour — one cent for every hour of the workweek they will not be getting. Eligibility requires 90 days of continuous service, a shift of at least six hours, and not having asked about this last year.
Salaried employees will be honored differently. They are exempt from overtime and, in a gesture of trust, from the holiday.
Members operating app-based platforms will activate a Surge Honor Multiplier of 1.1x, effective in select ZIP codes, capped at $4.00 per trip, expiring at 6 p.m. Saturday, which is when the honoring is scheduled to conclude.
Provision of Food
Fourteen pizzas will be delivered to each participating distribution center. Average headcount per center is 900. This is intentional. Scarcity was a defining condition of the early labor struggle, and we felt it would be dishonest to sanitize that.
One additional cheese pizza will be held in the general manager’s office as a symbol.
Wellness Component
In partnership with a mindfulness platform that recently completed a Series C, all associates working Labor Day weekend will receive complimentary access to a seven-minute guided breathing session titled “Ground Yourself In What Is.” The session is accessible via QR code posted in the break room. The break room is now a seasonal storage annex, but the code remains visible if you turn sideways behind the pallet jack.
Associates are reminded that burnout is a personal chemistry issue and that the platform offers a journaling feature.
Personalized Gratitude
Each of the four million individuals working this weekend will receive an individualized thank-you message generated by our AI recognition engine, trained on nine decades of internal memos and one anonymized copy of The Grapes of Wrath. Messages will arrive by text at 3:14 a.m. Sunday, which is when the engine’s compute is cheapest.
Due to a field-mapping issue, an estimated 380,000 messages will address the recipient as FIRST_NAME. We have chosen not to correct this. The labor movement was never about individuals. It was about the collective, and FIRST_NAME is arguably the most collective name there is.
On the Subject of Organizing
We are aware that some associates have expressed interest in what has been described to us as “a conversation.” We fully support our associates’ right to have a conversation about whether to have that conversation, and we have retained a firm to facilitate it. The firm bills at $1,100 an hour and specializes in listening.
To be clear: nothing in this statement should be interpreted as opposition to organized labor. We love organized labor. We named the day after it. We put it on a mattress sale. We sent a tweet with a wrench emoji.
Ceremonial Observances at Participating Sites
At 4:52 a.m. Monday, immediately prior to inbound truck unloading, all sites will observe a Moment of Reflection lasting sixty seconds. Because reflection is not a task, the minute is unpaid.
Site leadership will read a brief passage about the men and women who fought and in some cases died so that the modern worker might rest. Leadership will then say the word “anyway,” and the doors will roll up.
The honorific “hero,” retired in 2021 due to overuse, will be temporarily reissued at no cost to the member organization.
Statement of Values
“There’s a beautiful symmetry here,” said Craig Duffield, chief operating officer of a third-party fulfillment company that would prefer not to be identified by name and whose logo appears on approximately one in nine American packages. “A hundred and forty years ago, people marched in the street demanding the right to a day off. Today, because of that courage, we have a three-day window of extraordinary consumer demand. Their fight created our opportunity. If they could see the numbers, I think they’d weep.”
Duffield added that he personally would be observing the holiday from a lake house in northern Michigan, on a boat, with his phone off, “honoring it the old way.”
About the Coalition
The American Coalition of Employers represents 41,000 member organizations across retail, hospitality, logistics, gig platforms, urgent care, and one regional chain of self-storage facilities. We are united by a shared conviction that gratitude is a low-cost benefit with an unusually high perceived value, and that the American worker deserves to be thanked in a way that does not appear on a balance sheet.
Media Contact: Our communications team is off for the long weekend, as is customary. Inquiries will be returned Tuesday afternoon, or Wednesday, depending on traffic coming back from the lake.
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Correction, 6:12 p.m.: An earlier version of this release stated that the fourteen pizzas would be hot. They will not be.