By Arthur J. Magida

What we won't hear from any of the pols this season is that Labor Day was actually the brainstorm of a union leader who got so disillusioned with reforming American capitalism that he ran as a socialist for vice president.

In 1882, Matthew Maguire came up with the idea for Labor Day while secretary of the Central Labor Union of New York. Fourteen years later, convinced that reform was just another word for patching up society (never changing it), he joined another guy lost to history, Charles Horatio Matchett.

They attracted 36,359 votes - about 90,000 fewer than the Prohibition Party and 7 million fewer than the victor, Republican William McKinley, who turned into the most popular president since Lincoln.

McKinley was assassinated in 1901; Labor Day lives on, signed into law in 1894 by McKinley's predecessor, Grover Cleveland, who - eager to appear conciliatory when troops killed 13 workers during the particularly violent Pullman strike - put his initials on the Labor Day bill six days after the strike ended.

The first Labor Day parades were really protest rallies, usually for an eight-hour day. After the first two Labor Days (held in 1882 and 1883), the idea for a "workingman's holiday" spread, and by 1885 several industrial centers in the United States were giving workers a one-day holiday. In 1887, five states made Labor Day a legal holiday; within seven years, another 27 states had followed suit. By then, there was considerable grass-roots pressure for Labor Day to be a national holiday.

Soon, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, was calling the first Monday in September the day "that the workers ... may not only lay down the tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel stronger for it." The strength may have been contagious, but Gompers' AFL was seeking better working conditions, wages and hours - not political or social reforms like their more left-wing counterparts in Europe.

In 1889, unions on the continent established their own holiday - May Day - in Paris. They weren't willing to wait for the government to grant them a holiday; they seized it. Which could well be why, in the mid-1930s, the Labor Party in the United States denounced Labor Day as "a gift, a bonbon, which the workers received from their masters, through their servant politicians." And why they saluted May Day - not Labor Day - as "the one day in the year the workers of all countries ... unite to demonstrate ... that, as members of the same class ... they stand united for the overthrow of world capitalism."

The overthrow never came, as you may have noticed. Which is why every four years, our political parties nominate yet another candidate for the Most Difficult Job in the World. And why our nation and, yes, our labor unions, settled for reform over systemic change. For bonbons, if you will.

In the U.S., 50- and 60-hour workweeks are common; in Europe, 35-hour workweeks are virtually standard. In the U.S., vacations are not legally mandated; in Europe, vacations are prescribed by law for everyone. In France and Sweden, for instance, employees must have five weeks' vacation each year. This is done at no loss to production: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, French and Swedish workers match or surpass Americans' annual increase in output per hour while working vastly fewer hours.

So here in the U.S., we get one crummy day a year - the first Monday of September - as a sop to our workers, while millions of Europeans get five weeks of vacation. Maybe Matthew Maguire knew what he was doing when he joined the Labor Party's ticket for the White House. If he had won, we might have five weeks' worth of Labor Days. But apparently, we're content with our one day of hamburgers and hot dogs.