May 1 is a holiday in Spain and in most countries around the world. International Workers’ Day or Labor Day is celebrated, a day marked by demonstrations and labor and social demands. But what is its origin?
To locate the origin of Workers’ Day, we have to go back to the end of the 19th century, when union movements began to gain strength in the United States. They called for an end to the 12 and up to 18 hour shifts to which factory workers were subjected. “Eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure and eight hours of rest”, proclaimed the mobilized workers. Back then, if a company forced an employee to work more than 18 hours a day, the penalty he could receive was as little as $25.
In this context, the largest union in the country, the American Federation of Labor, decided that as of May 1, 1886, the maximum working day would be eight hours and raised a series of strikes and protests in case the employers did not comply with the Ingersoll Act, enacted 16 years earlier by President Andrew Johnson and which many states had managed to circumvent.
The union threat made many companies agree to implement the eight-hour day, but many others kept their schedules intact. May 1, 1886 arrived and the strikes began wherever the law was not complied with.
In Chicago, then the second most populous city in the United States, protests pitted strikers and police for three days. Already on May 4 and already with a balance of half a dozen workers dead, a concentration in the Haymarket square ended with the detonation of an explosive device that killed six police officers and injured dozens of agents. The police responded by opening fire on the demonstrators, causing 38 casualties.
Anarchist union leaders and dozens of affiliates were arrested as a result of the Haymarket Square event, although only eight of them ultimately ended up being tried. They are known as The Chicago Martyrs or the Haymarket Martyrs. Under a campaign of harassment and demolition by the conservative press and after a controversial trial held in 1887, five trade unionists were sentenced to death, two to life imprisonment and another to 15 years of hard labor. Years later it was possible to demonstrate the falsity of the judicial process.
Two years after the executions, in 1889, the Socialist Workers’ Congress of the Second International declared May 1 International Workers’ Day in memory of the Haymarket martyrs and with the idea of ??promoting the implementation of the eight-week day. hours in other countries. Once this demand was achieved, starting in the second decade of the 20th century, new labor and social demands emerged every May Day.
It is curious that in the United States Workers’ Day is not celebrated on May 1, taking into account that the event that originated that international day of protest took place in that country. The explanation is that, when establishing a national holiday for workers, President Grover Cleveland ruled out the first day of May, fearing that the date, linked to the Chicago attacks, would strengthen the socialist movement in his country and provoke public disorder. Instead, in 1894 the first Monday of September was set to celebrate Labor Day. The date commemorates the first parade organized by the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor (Knights of Labor), held in New York on September 5, 1882. Canada also celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday in September.
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