4 September - Labor Day

Why May Day?

For many older Americans, "May Day" brings to mind images of phalanxes of Soviet soldiers, goose-stepping through Red Square behind massive tanks, while millions of onlookers obediently cheer. For some, "May Day" is a pagan holiday, Beltane, known more (and loved) for maypoles or other fertility rituals than for political struggles. But May Day, the political version, is an American holiday—one celebrated for the last century everywhere in the world except America, and one whose origins are well worth remembering. Because May Day began as a strike for basic workplace rights we're now in the process of losing. And that strike was largely by immigrant workers, which is exactly what America will see when immigrants and their supporters strike, march and rally across the country on a “National Day of Action for Comprehensive Immigration Reform” on this coming Monday—May Day.

Chicago, in 1886, was a rapidly growing city, a polyglot of immigrant languages and cultures. On the first May Day—May 1, 1886—"International Workers' Day" began as a series of general strikes in Chicago and other Midwestern cities for the eight- hour day. Some 340,000 workers participated; it was a campaign that had already been going on strong for quite some time. But the strike took on particular significance when, two days later, police attacked striking workers at McCormick Reaper, on Chicago's south side. Four workers were killed and over 200 injured. And at a demonstration to protest the police riot on the following day, May 4, a bomb went off at Chicago's Haymarket Square—the infamous "Haymarket Massacre" that killed eight police and wounded 60. The bombing led to death sentences for eight leading anarchists, including several German immigrants, convicted with no evidence at all for conspiracy to commit murder.

Three of the anarchists were pardoned before their deaths, the other five posthumously. But the public and police hostility to organized labor that was whipped up over Haymarket meant that, in turn, May Day became an international labor rallying cry for the right of workers to organize in general, and for the eight-hour day in particular. By the end of the decade, May Day was a holiday celebrated by workers and workers' movements in every industrialized country in the world.

It still is—now, in fact, it's observed globally. Except, ironically, in the land of the holiday's birth. The holiday's burgeoning popularity led Congress, in 1894, to establish "Labor Day" in September to honor American workers—a holiday established, not by ordinary workers themselves as an expression of empowerment, but by big business and their Congressional apologists as a way to try to dictate what workers were and weren't allowed to celebrate. One day belonged to the workers; the other 365 to big business, and we were to work as many hours of those days as business pleased.

>>continua

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