Each year on May 1st, working people all over the world celebrate May Day, or International Workers’ Day.
While Labor Day is celebrated in September in the United States and Canada, International Workers’ Day is an official public holiday in countries ranging from Denmark and France to Nepal. But despite its international character, the modern origins of May Day are very American, dating back to the 19th-century fight for an eight-hour workday.
The fight for workers’ rights
Workers across North America know one simple fact to be true: There are eight hours in the workday. Of course, SMART members often work far more than eight hours in a day — from TD members working long shifts on the rails to sheet metal workers pulling six twelves to get a job over the line. But eight hours still makes a difference: It’s the foundation for the 40-hour workweek and, as a result, the principle that governs when most North American workers get overtime pay.
That principle — eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for whatever we want to do in our free time — was won in blood.
In the 1800s, as the industrial revolution changed the entire world, workers were crammed into factories, working long days (10 to 16 hours or more) in dangerous conditions for low pay. Unions organized in response. In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada — which preceded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) — passed a resolution stating that by May 1, 1886, a single day’s labor would only be eight hours. As the deadline approached, workers organized work stoppages in 1886 with the slogan “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!”
In Chicago, these demonstrations helped trigger a domino effect with global impact. In May 1886, police killed at least two people after opening fire on striking workers at a McCormick Harvesting Machine Company Plant. The next day, workers rallied at Haymarket Square in protest. When police stormed the crowd, the peaceful protest quickly became violent: A bomb was thrown and a shootout erupted, killing multiple police officers and workers. The events would become known as the Haymarket Affair.
Eight protesters were arrested afterwards. According to UCLA, “The ensuing trial was considered by many to be unfair and resulted in the execution of seven of the eight men.” And the international outrage that followed helped lead to the modern iteration of May Day/International Workers’ Day.
The forgotten history of the eight-hour workday
The eight-hour workday was not officially law in the United States until 1938, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act into law.
But despite the 50 years in between the Haymarket Affair and this major victory for workers, the two events are in no way unrelated: The fight that started in the 1880s led directly to a win in the 1930s.
Worker victories are very rarely won overnight. SMART members know this well — we learned it from the long journey to a federal two-person crew regulation, the ongoing push for labor law that truly supports American workers, the fight against so-called “right to work” in states like Michigan, and other battles. These fights took decades to win; many are still being fought. But the fact that we have legally required overtime pay is proof that these battles are worth waging, and that our solidarity will win out in the end.
Today, most Americans are unaware of the history of May Day. In fact, most Americans likely don’t know the reason they have an eight-hour workday or two days off every week — just like they are probably unaware that unions lift pay and living standards nationwide to this day.
That’s why, on May 1 and throughout the year, it’s more important than ever that we reclaim our history.