Countries all over the world celebrate May 1st as the workers’ holiday – except the United States, even though the roots of May Day are deep in American history.
In 1886, the new, young American Federation of Labor (AFL) was seeking the spark that would ignite the labor movement. Sensing that it was
the demand for an eight-hour day, they called a general strike to begin on May Day, which had long been celebrated as a day of the people.
In New York in the 1870s, AFL leaders Sam Gompers and P.J. McGuire – both from immigrant families – had watched construction workers win the eight-hour day in a long strike, then lose it in a long depression. And they knew that the struggle for the 10-hour day, won city by city, had energized workers before the Civil War.
Since then, the railroads had created a national market, just the way cheap transportation has created a global market today. To Gompers and McGuire, it made sense to call a national strike for the eight-hour day.
Wages then were paid by the day, not the hour, so an eight-hour day would reduce working hours while maintaining a full day’s pay. That would create more jobs and would give people more time for their families, for bettering themselves, and for taking an active part in politics.
The AFL’s call unleashed a popular movement all across the United States. And because it was the first general strike for the eight-hour day anywhere in the world, all the world was watching when the strike brought much of the U.S. to a halt on May 1st.
The world also watched as the Chicago police (operating for the capitalist employers) killed a number of strikers on May 3rd and May 4th and then rounded up leftist labor leaders and execute four – the Haymarket Martyrs.
In 1889, the world labor movement adopted May Day as its international holiday, a day of commemoration and dedication to the struggle for dignity and justice.
