Americans just finished celebrating Labor Day, a much-needed day off for some, and a holiday grounded in the supposed achievements of the American labor movement. To many, it’s simply a day of appreciation for American workers. 

But who do we have to thank for the eight-hour workday? The five-day work week? The constantly improving working conditions, rising wages, and long-term decline in the price of consumer goods? It isn’t your local labor union, no matter how much Bernie Sanders would have you believe otherwise.

"Over the last 200 years, trade unionists have been jailed & even killed fighting for economic justice," Sen. Sanders wrote on X over the weekend.  "But because of them, we have decent wages for millions, the 8-hour workday and the end of child labor. This Labor Day, let's continue the fight for an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%."

Most of what progressives hail as union victories are ideas that originated with free-market entrepreneurs. 

The eight-hour workday and the five-day work week owe much to the likes of Henry Ford, who discovered that one of the best ways to boost productivity was to treat workers with dignity and respect, not like objects to be worked into the ground. That’s also why Ford’s workers were paid $5 a day, roughly double the $2.30 many factory workers earned under other employers at the time. And despite what progressive economic logic would predict, that investment in his workforce allowed Ford to slash the price of the Model T from $850 in 1908 to about $300 just a decade later, all while posting record profits. 

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Plenty of business leaders weren’t so forward-thinking, but it was the incentives and competition of free-market economics, not union strategy, that pioneered these reforms. 

That is also shown dutifully in the data: explosions in economic growth closely track improvements in worker conditions and treatment. Unions simply came in to steal the show after markets had already done all of the hard work.

What have unions achieved? The monopolization of labor markets. In the public sector, they’ve ensured that their benefits are backed by taxpayers. They’ve made it more difficult for teaching to be about the education of children, and for business to be about producing the best goods and services at the lowest cost. They’ve made it harder for people to enter industries, reduced competition, and turned themselves into some of the most powerful political lobbying groups in the country. But because they claim virtuous intent, their faults are largely ignored.

Like nearly all economic progress, we have free markets to thank for the gains in wages, hours, and working conditions that Labor Day celebrates, and the systems built in opposition to those markets to thank for the regression and roadblocks that followed. Unions didn’t pioneer the eight-hour day or the five-day week; they arrived after entrepreneurs had already proven that treating workers better paid off in productivity and profits. What they did pioneer was the art of turning those gains into protected privileges: higher barriers to entry, reduced competition, and political power that often puts union interests ahead of the very workers and taxpayers they claim to serve. 

That is a lesson worth remembering on Labor Day.