Monday is Labor Day, a federal holiday aimed at celebrating the workforce.

It has become the unofficial end of summer, as students are now back to school.

But how did Labor Day become a federal holiday?

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the holiday is rooted in the late 19th century when labor activists pushed for a federal holiday to recognize the many contributions workers have made to America’s strength, prosperity and well-being.

Oregon was the first state to pass a law recognizing the new holiday in 1887, with four additional states following suit later that year.

Over the next decade, 23 more states followed, adopting the new holiday.

On June 28, 1894, Congress officially passed an act naming the first Monday in September as Labor Day.

We recently asked our readers to talk about their first job that started their careers. Here are some of their stories.

Jeffrey Gilbert

Aside from the small odd jobs that most kids have growing up I recall the first real job I had was a summer job working at Trexler Orchards in Orefield.

I believe I was 15. Work began at 7 a.m. so I had to be up by 6 every day.

I packed a Lebanon bologna sandwich for lunch and carried my box and my thermos of water. I learned the slow rhythm of punching in and out of the clock. We’d head out on flatbed trucks into the endless acres of fruit trees.

The air would still be cool and the tall grass wet, but it never took long before breaking a sweat. Peach fuzz is itchy on the skin!

The old foremen seemed very simple to me. They liked to talk about movies they had been to and knew all the stars of the day.

I was impressed with their seemingly innate sense and understanding of all the different trees and everything that went along with growing fruit.

After the early part of the season ended most guys were laid off until it was harvest time. But a few of us were asked to continue working by pulling weeds around endless rows of young trees.

I continued working right on through to harvest time. I don’t think I missed a day.

Migrants came and helped with the picking. They seemed to work gracefully and without effort, and I admired their skill and stamina. In the time it took me to fill a basket they were often able to strip a tree.

One day I got home and must have been totally exhausted. I laid on my bed while I waited for the tub to fill up. I was awakened by someone down in the kitchen screaming, “water’s coming down!”

My pay was 90 cents an hour and by the end of the summer when I returned to school I had $270 in the bank.

I bought a clock radio for $20 and the rest was still in my account when I got out of the Navy many years later.

My first job taught me many things: I learned that hard work really is HARD, but if you approach it as a challenge you can be rewarded with the satisfaction of meeting that challenge.

I learned that if you are dependable and do a good job that you will be sought after as an employee.

I learned that even when the pay seems small you have an opportunity to save for the future. I saw different qualities in different people I worked with and tried to emulate them.

Lastly, I learned that you should never lie down on your bed while filling the bathtub, especially if you’ve spent a hot summer day laboring in the fields.

Susan Bulanda

All my life I wanted to be a writer and work with animals; I also had a passion for collecting books.

When I graduated high school in June of 1964, I was fortunate enough to get what I thought was the ideal job.

I was hired to work in the filing department of Oxford University Press in our local industrial park. The building was a combination of an office and a warehouse full of books, and they periodically had damaged book sales.

Who could ask for more?

Since my mother also worked at Oxford, I grew up knowing many of the people who worked there which made my first job feel like I was joining a group of friends. In those days there were no computers, so everything was done by hand and hard copy.

My job was to file the hundreds of invoices in a huge section of the office that contained many filing cabinets. I learned how to sort the invoices and properly file them.

While it sounds like a boring job, it was fun to work with the other people in the department. I learned how the entire system worked, from receiving orders to shipping books.

I was promoted to the accounts receivable department where I had to take each stack of invoices and enter the line items in a bookkeeping machine that added them across and down and then enter the total of the invoice in a ten-key adding machine.

If the two totals did not match, I had to find the error(s). Sometimes the tape from the ten-key adder went across my desk, down to the floor where it piled up.

I learned to be very good with numbers and how to interact with the people in other departments.

Christmas was our busiest time, and I learned how to work overtime as part of a team. There were a few people that did not get along with other people and I saw how to resolve conflicts and still work together.

All in all, it was a good job.

Valerie Behlmer

My working career started at the age of 17 after graduating Curtis High School on Staten Island where I grew up. My first job was in Manhattan at Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. on 23rd St. on the 23rd floor.

I learned how to travel first by ferry, then subway and sometimes by bus.

I worked in the Annuity Dept. with a great bunch of girls. In high school I took the commercial course because this was the career I planned on following.

Working at Met Life was an experience. The company had after work programs such as cooking, art classes, jewelry making and sewing and I took advantage of it all.

I worked there for 5½ years.

A co-worker set me up on a blind date to the man I am married to near 56 years. I could not have had a better start to life which I am still enjoying to this day.

R. Thomas Berner

Right out of high school I became the full-time sportswriter for the Evening Courier of Tamaqua.

After writing local sports stories early in the morning I was dispatched to get news from the justice of the peace and the ambulance report.

After two years I realized that I wasn’t going to advance so I joined the Navy.

After the Navy, I went to Penn State and spent my first summer between my freshman and sophomore years working at the Courier.

At Penn State I joined the staff of a brand-new morning newspaper which enabled me to go to class during the day and work at night. After I graduated, I switched to another local newspaper.

Eventually I became a journalism professor at Penn State so it all worked out. At 81 I just retired from a part-time job with a local magazine. I have ink in my veins.

Bruce Markovich

My first job was in 1976 at Edgemont Lodge when I was 14 years old, cutting grass, raking leaves and washing windows, after school, pay was $1.85 an hour and a meal.

At 16 you were allowed to work in the kitchen washing dishes and cleaning up, pay was $2.25 an hour.

At 18, I was promoted to short order cook on the weekends, after attending what was called the Pocono Culinary Institute, I then became one of the lead cooks at the lodge. Working at the lodge was an amazing experience, 20 hour days were normal on the weekends.

Every weekend we had a different live band, the King Brothers, Nicky Thear, The Shoreliners.

I didn’t know it then but I had a chance to experience the waning days of when the valley was still full of energy, people dressed up on a Friday or Saturday night to go out, Sundays the whole family went to church together and then went out to eat.

Weddings were huge events, cars were decorated with flowers and signs and after the wedding the procession would drive around town blowing their horns so everyone could see who got married.

Our kitchen was open until 2 a.m. on the weekends. A typical Sunday was anywhere between 300 and 400 customers, Mother’s Day was always over a thousand diners served. The lodge was owned by Philomena Fauzio, she was a great lady but business always came first.

No one ever knew this, but even though we had excellent food at the lodge, Philomena loved Burger King, every Wednesday afternoon after the lunch crowd left, I would have to drive Philomena and her friends to the Burger King in West Hazleton, we couldn’t go to the Tamaqua Burger King because she was afraid someone would recognize her and it would look bad that she owned a restaurant and was eating at Burger King.

I would have to go in first and look around to make sure no one from the area was in there, then she and her friends would spend the afternoon comparing the different hamburgers.

Today that personal interaction between people that took place in all the clubs and restaurants in the valley has been replaced by cellphones, text messages and emails, much to our loss.