Labor Day is a hard-fought tradition that should be observed
RAY CRYER Rusk

"Labor Day is a holiday honoring working people," according to the World Book Encyclopedia. It is celebrated as a legal holiday throughout the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada.

In Australia it commemorates the successful struggle for an eight-hour day.

In Europe, Labor Day is May 1.

In the U.S. it was designated a legal holiday by President Grover Cleveland in 1894. It is a sacred day, a day that was hard won by many thousands for the sake of millions. Sometimes death was the price.

This year, our teachers at Rusk voted to work that day to get time off later. In time, the preferred day they have chosen may be taken from them. It does not have the international currency that Labor Day carries.

It would serve them right.

Why didn't they vote to work Thanksgiving and Christmas to spread that time into longer lunch hours or to get an early jump on a trip to Disney Land?

When people contribute to the nibbling away of sacred days, they hurt us all. I try to never shop on a holiday, so that I make no contribution to employees being pressed to work on that day.

Some years ago teachers at the Houston Community College voted to not observe Veterans' Day. Vets throughout threatened to withdraw. Now that's as it should be. People need to stand for something besides, "Give us more money."

If I am the only one in town, I am ashamed of the teachers' vote. The cavalier way they discarded tradition may yet come back to haunt them and teachers for hundreds of years. It was wrong to engineer the vote and the result was a bad vote. Good traditions are hard to build, harder to legalize and easy to destroy.