Today is May 1st or May Day. While there are a number of different holidays and celebrations associated with May Day, among these includes International Worker's Day. Unfortunately, May Day in this context has became synonymous with septagenerian Soviet General Secretaries politely waving to rows of deadly Red Army divisions poised to strike Western Europe. Fortunately, the U.S. embarked on the path advocated by the John McCain's of the era and U.S. forces currently are enjoying their fifty-third year of peaceful occupation and borscht eating.
As for the origins of May Day, they actually lie right here in the good ol' US of A! May Day grew out of the struggle for a shorter working day, one which can be traced in the U.S. at least as far back as the (appropriately enough) named "Ten Hour Movement" of antebellum times. May Day itself traces back to October 7, 1884 when the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), the immediate predecessor to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), passed a resolution demanding the legislative approval of an eight hour day by May 1, 1886.
Sadly, the eight-hour day was not implemented in 1886, leading unions across the nation to commence a major strike wave, including in Chicago. Those protests ended in a sordid tale called the "Haymarket Affair" in which seven police officers were killed by a bomb (culprit unknown), leading to the trials and executions of five anarchists in a trial most scholars describe as embodying all the impartiality and thoroughness one could expect in say, the North Korean justice system. Among other repercussions of the Haymarket affair was that May Day became an international day of remembrance for the "martyrs" of Haymarket and thus became the international celebration of today.
In honor of May Day, I thought it'd be good to post a video reminding us of why we have needed, still need, and will need in the future a thriving labor movement:
No comments:
Post a Comment