09/05/2026
Before Labor Day became a national holiday, printers were already helping shape the American labor movement.
Founded in 1852 as the National Typographical Union and renamed the International Typographical Union (ITU) in 1869, the organization became one of America's pioneering national labor unions. Its members fought for shorter working hours, better wages, and safer workplaces while creating programs to support printers as they aged or became unable to work.
By 1908, the ITU had emerged from an enormous campaign for the eight-hour day. It had established the Union Printers Home in Colorado Springs, was addressing workplace health and sanitation, and had just begun an old-age pension program. At the same time, it was confronting another challenge: rapidly changing technology. Typesetting machines such as the Linotype were transforming the printing trade, and the union encouraged members to learn the new machines rather than be left behind.
This remarkable photograph in the Museum of Printing collection captures members of that community on August 9, 1908, during an outing at Point of Pines in Revere, Massachusetts, one day before the ITU's 54th Annual Convention opened in Boston.
This Labor Day, it reminds us that the history of printing is also the history of working people — and of the organizations they created to improve their lives.
