🏡💚 All out on May Day
This Thursday is May Day. Also known as International Workers’ Day, May 1st is a national holiday in over 160 countries that celebrates workers and the labor movement. The United States does not officially recognize International Workers’ Day as a holiday, and so if you were like me growing up, you didn’t learn about the existence of May Day until much later in life (or perhaps you are learning about it right now…).
Ironically (but not coincidentally, as we’ll see), the origins of May Day are in the US. In 1886, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (later to become the American Federation of Labor) declared that May 1st of that year would be the day when the eight-hour work day would become standard. As the day approached, they called for a general strike in support of the eight-hour day.
On May 1st, thousands of workers in every major city across the country went on strike. They sang the Eight Hours anthem, with the chorus demanding “Eight Hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what we will.”
In Chicago, these protests carried into the following days. On May 3rd, as protestors confronted strikebreakers, police fired on the crowd, killing at least two people. Outraged, workers called for a mass assembly the following day in Haymarket Square.
The next day’s events, what has become known as the Haymarket affair, began as a peaceful rally in the rain. After a few hours, the police moved in to try to disperse the crowd. All of a sudden, someone (still unknown to this day) throw a homemade bomb at the police, after which the police started firing into the crowd. By the end, there were seven police dead, four workers dead, and at least another 70 wounded.
The backlash was severe. Martial law was declared across the country. Eight of the protest organizers were charged with the bombing (even though only two were actually present at Haymarket at the time), leading to four of them eventually being hanged, and two others were sentenced to life in prison.
In 1889, the International Workers Congress chose May 1st as a international day to demonstrate in celebration of the eight-hour day, chosen in homage to the 1886 general strike. But following the Haymarket affair, the US had a wave of anti-communist, anti-union sentiment — an early “red scare.” The government was unwilling to recognize May Day as a celebration of the labor movement because of its violent origins. In 1894, in response to another uprising of labor activity, President Grover Cleveland (bet you haven’t heard that name in a long time) decided to create Labor Day as the first Monday in September as a concession to the labor movement, but one that would blunt the power of the more radical May Day celebration.
To cap everything off, during the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s, President Eisenhower declared May 1st as Loyalty Day. Meant as a direct counter to May Day, Loyalty Day is a day for “the reaffirmation of loyalty to the United States and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom.”
This little history lesson is interesting, but I bring it up to make the point of how much propaganda has successfully erased the history of May Day from American education. It shows the power of holidays — the ones we recognize, and the ones we don’t. The origin of May Day is a powerful labor movement, one that can organize nationwide general strikes, that can win demands like an eight hour workday that fundamentally alter working conditions for everyone. During what should be an international celebration of working people, most Americans just go to their eight hours of work, completely ignorant of how we came to have that eight hour day to begin with (or asking themselves, “how are we still working eight-hour days with stagnating wages given all of the advances in productivity and technology???”).
May Day has always been a day of action for our movements. But this year, with the extreme rise of authoritarianism, illegal deportations, weaponized fear, and large-scale defunding of public services, we should be all out on May Day. Stand in solidarity with each other, and with millions of people across the world.
MAY DAY ACTIONS
Check out May Day Strong for a list of actions all over the country and find one near you. I’ll be at the Oakland Sin Fronteras march, and hope to see some of you there.
Source: Grassroots Global Justice
WHAT WE’RE READING
California Lawmakers Push Housing Laws to Boost Affordability (KQED) — mentions several of our endorsed bills, including AB 1157 (Lower the Rent Cap) and SB 52 (End AI Rent Hikes)
The ‘badass’ Echo Park renters who defeated their landlord (LA Public Press)
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