On Labor Day we commemorate both the contributions of American workers, past and present, and the achievements of the Labor Movement in securing more protections for workers and advancing workers' welfare. The New York Public Library's Digital Collections holds hundreds of photographs of Americans at work, a small selection of which are shown below.

The majority of the images here are from the first half of the 20th century and represent a wide variety of jobs, some of which no longer exist. These images were primarily taken by documentary photographers like Lewis Wickes Hine, Alice Austen, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee whose work helped expose harmful labor practices and furthered labor reforms. Several of these photographers were part of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography project during the 1930s and 40s which documented rural poverty in Depression-era America. NYPL holds approximately 40,000 FSA images in its collection, over 23,000 of which can be viewed digitally.