Labor Never Sleeps
Commuters clog local roads every morning heading south or east to jobs in the metropolitan areas of Washington and Baltimore. However, some 150,000 people work right here in Frederick County. And they do an amazing variety of jobs.
We have the engineers of Bechtel and BP Solar, the scientists of Medimune and the National Cancer Institute, and the professors of Hood College and Mount St. Mary’s University. Not to mention farmers raising everything from alfalfa to turkeys. And the guy who brews your morning coffee at the mini mart.
According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, the biggest employers in Frederick County are government, retail or construction, with each claiming about 10 percent of the workforce.
Many in the county work traditional 9 to 5 hours, but plenty of folks do not. This week marks the 125th anniversary of the first Labor Day celebration in New York City. The first Labor Day came just three years after Thomas Edison developed the first practical incandescent light bulb — an invention that enabled people to work 24 hours a day.
To mark this tenuous coincidence, The Frederick News-Post assigned 24 reporters one hour each — from midnight to midnight — and assigned them to spend that hour with someone at work. The fruit of that assignment is this multimedia package, Labor Never Sleeps.
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