This Labor Day and beyond, Michigan’s workers demand power, respect

Michigan Advance · Kasey Helton · September 7, 2026

Pro-labor activists at a climate protest before the 2019 Democratic debate in Detroit. | Photo by Andrew Roth/Michigan Advance For most of my early life, Labor Day was an appreciated holiday, but not the most remarkable one. On the scale of holidays — and I think I speak for most average Americans here — Labor Day ranked toward the bottom compared to the Big Three: Christmas, Halloween, and Thanksgiving.

When you have the boundless energy of youth and a full social calendar, Labor Day for me was that last chance to take a dip in the pool with friends before the October chill and enjoy that last barbecue of the season. The “Labor” part of Labor Day? Never really gave it much thought.

But as I got into my 30s, life happened, or rather death happened, to be more precise. When death happens, you start to look at everything that happens in life after that through a different lens. For me that was the death of my mother, Sandy, who passed away just over a decade ago two months after her 65th birthday. The retirement she had spent years dreaming about — a trip to France, buying her first Buick, and hours spent with grandkids — all washed away with memory in its place.

The only thing Sandy did better than working was motherhood. She was such a hard worker that when she passed, the managing editor at the local newspaper, where she devoted untold hours as the office worker equivalent of a multipurpose, multitasking Swiss Army knife, wrote a column about her in tribute. Later she would even work through the cancer treatments before the sarcoma took her after two hard years of chemo and a brief course of radiation.

Today, Labor Day has taken on a whole new meaning for me, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. As the summer of 2026 comes to a close with the midterm elections coming fast, I think Labor Day has become different for a whole lot of working people who are in the struggle, caring for kids and family amidst a broken system that works for the wealthy privileged few, and not for the many.

We are starting to awaken to the power and meaning of the valuable labor we provide — those irreplaceable hours spent in productivity that make this beautiful country run, and all the decades past where we haven’t gotten our fair share of the gains.

This Labor Day, working families are saying enough is enough. We’re fed up with a system that only works for the billionaires, where honest work is not compensated adequately, politicians disrespect their constituents at every vote, and money in politics has made our say in the political process less powerful.

Nothing exemplifies that better than the “Big Beautiful Bill” from last summer. That piece of legislation further broke a health system that helps millions just to reward billionaires with lavish tax cuts. Imagine the world we could live in if Congress prioritized everyday Americans with the same care? What world could we build together if our needs for quality and affordable care were met? If we made enough money to save for retirement, or if prices were manageable and not making most Americans choose rent or groceries just to get by?

Today society is driven by broken incentives and terribly misguided priorities, and I speak to that both as a caregiver and as a healthcare worker at Michigan Medicine.

The week before my mother died, I married the best man on Earth who also happens to have an older brother with Parkinson’s disease. Diagnosed at 30, Parkinson’s took everything from him — the opportunity for a career, to accrue savings, and to live an independent life. We are his caregivers. Because we live in a political system that prioritizes health insurance profit margins and politics over people, cuts to Medicaid and the affordability crisis have meant that he has to live in an adult foster care facility that is nearly an hour away from the rural area where me and my husband live.

Various UA union pins on display at the labor organization’s training facility located in Lansing, Mich. April 6, 2026 | Photo by Ben Solis/Michigan Advance We can’t afford a caregiver for him out of pocket, so we must rely on Medicaid. Those invaluable yet somehow underpaid home health aides that could care for him at home are priced out of the housing market here where we live. Like I said: broken incentives and misguided priorities everywhere you look. We can do better, and we must.

With the Midterms around the corner, working families like mine demand better and we demand it now. We demand the things that will help us not just survive, but thrive, starting with money, power, and respect. Our wallets are empty, especially the sandwich generation, who care for our elders while also supporting kids and other family. We demand change.

We need Ppower at our jobs, which my union contract affords me, but also power to shape our government for workers, not billionaires. This November, working people will exercise the power we have in numbers to fire politicians who coddle the ultra-rich and elect candidates who will work toward a future for all.

Finally, we demand respect. We demand basic human dignity: dignity that is more important than corporate profits, billionaires’ greed, and AI data center techno-feudalism that threatens our health, our jobs, and our property rights.

So to the working people like myself out there: I hope you get that last chance of 2026 to enjoy that barbecue or last day at the pool or a picnic or whatever your plans are: you’ve earned all that and more. But remember that Labor Day is about more than that. Let this Labor Day also be the day where working people say enough is enough and we will show it at the ballot box.

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