Usually, we celebrate labor on this day – the honorable wielding of the hammer, the wrench, the calculator, but even more commonly these days, the computer keyboard.

And it’s right that we should. This century-old holiday marks the ending of the Pullman Strike, a bloody conflict between labor unions and the railroads. President Grover Cleveland and Congress were anxious to heal the wounds left by the strike and the ensuing violence (13 strikers were killed), and quickly adopted legislation authorizing Labor Day in 1894.

But it’s also fitting to recognize another sort of labor on this day the labor of those who risk everything to start and grow a business of their own.

Entrepreneurs have found themselves thrust into the political conversation of the day. It began when President Barack Obama seems to have assailed small businesses in the line, “you didn’t build that.” There’s still some question about context, with the president’s supporters saying that refers to the roads and bridges someone else invested in. Even if we accept the mangled grammar, such context doesn’t soften the blow to entrepreneurs; they pay taxes just like everyone else (and often at a higher rate than most) to build those roads and bridges.

We needn’t argue whether Obama supports entrepreneurs; he said himself in 2010, “Entrepreneurs embody the promise that lies at the heart of America that if you have a good idea and work hard enough, the American dream is within your reach.”

He’s right – particularly about the hard work. That’s what’s worth recognizing today.

Business writer Erika Andersen explained in a recent Forbes magazine article that tenacity is crucial to any entrepreneurial endeavor.

“Getting a business from a glimmer in your mind to actually making money takes a kind of relentlessness; you have to get up every day and make effort to move the thing forward,” she wrote. “Not because someone else is encouraging you, or because you re afraid of what will happen or who will think badly of you if you don’t. You have to want to see progress every day, and make the necessary effort.”

You have to look risk squarely in the eye, day in and day out.

“If you’re daunted by the idea that every day you’re basically starting from scratch (especially in the early years) and that it’s all on you to move toward the vision, you will not be happy being an entrepreneur,” she wrote.

Something else we should note is that entrepreneurship will very likely be our way out of the economic wilderness. Let’s face it, many of the wage-earning jobs that went away after the financial collapse aren’t coming back. And many of the ones that are seem to be coming back as part-time positions.

So the jobs that will help rebuild the economy will likely be new jobs, not returning jobs. And those will be created when individuals take the enormous step of risking their own finances and futures, and committing to years of hard work.

That, too, is labor worth celebrating.