By Audrey Elwood, Chief Columnist of “Unhedged Women”

There is nothing more American than Labor Day, hotdogs, a lake and forgetting the meaning of the holiday in favor of a three-day weekend. Labor Day was established specifically to celebrate the labor that built this country, and the strides in working conditions. Almost half of American workers describe their financial situation as “struggling,” and when the American worker is struggling, we all struggle. We cannot just turn a blind eye.

If you passed US History in high school, you do not need an explanation of how bad American working conditions were in the mid 1880s. Seven days a week, 12-hour shifts, oftentimes with children working, it was truly abysmal. Eventually there were widespread protests and strikes that led to the creation of the weekend, and a standard eight-day workday.

The first Labor Day parade in 1882, organized by the Central Labor Union, consisted of 10,000 workers who took unpaid leave to march. The holiday was not officially recognized by the Federal Government until 1894. The intention of the holiday has always been to “celebrate the contributions of laborers of the economy,” but that has not materialized.

If we are talking about the labor that built this country, we cannot exclude the forced labor. The people who built the agricultural economy did not get a choice to build it, it was work or die. While there have been recent strides for more acknowledgement of the economic contributions of forced labor, the current administration has also buried much of the history of slavery and its impact on the United States as a whole.

Wage theft is the act of companies shorting employees through shorter breaks, held wages, unpaid overtime and just in general stealing money and benefits from employees.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, “workers lose more than $50 billion a year to wage theft — that’s more than the value of robberies, burglaries and car theft combined.”

So, why is it that when we talk about property crime, we are never talking about wage theft; wage theft largely happens to vulnerable groups. Minimum wage workers and undocumented immigrants are most likely to experience wage theft. This spring a video of a woman calling ICE on her landscapers, so she could avoid paying them, went viral. Unfortunately, wage theft has skyrocketed, due to the threat of deportation.

The number one way to prevent being taken advantage of by your employer is unions. Unsurprisingly, many companies have been implementing a soft-union-busting technique. Amazon, in their training videos, discourages unionization by emphasizing that unions might not be the best answer for employees. The Federal Government has shown no real desire to protect workers from these manipulations.

Alongside this, an egregious alleged union buster is Starbucks. Starbucks consistently has a track record of closing stores that are in the process of unionization and has hundreds of labor violations. Walmart has been sued countless times for mistreatment of workers and anti-unionization efforts.

Our consumption outweighs desires to uplift fellow workers. The new going out top or your morning joe could be contributing to someone’s unsafe working conditions. Next time you consume, think about the ramifications of your purchase at home. Obviously, there are times you can nitpick where it is not possible to survive without crossing the picket line, however that is not an excuse for a lack of effort. This Labor Day, let’s celebrate and advocate for our laborers, and have a beer on a lake, like true Americans.