[Excerpt]
The original May Day was born of the movement for an eight-hour workday. After the Civil War, unregulated capitalism ran rampant in America. It was the Gilded Age, a time of merger mania, increasing concentration of wealth, and growing political influence by corporate power brokers known as Robber Barons. New technologies made possible new industries, which generated great riches for the fortunate few, but at the expense of workers, many of them immigrants, who worked long hours, under dangerous conditions, for little pay.
As the gap between the
rich and other Americans widened dramatically, workers began to resist
in a variety of ways. The first major wave of labor unions pushed
employers to limit the workday to ten, then eight, hours. The 1877
strike by tens of thousands of railroad, factory and mine workers —
which shut down the nation’s major industries and was brutally
suppressed by the corporations and their friends in government — was the
first of many mass actions to demand living wages and humane working
conditions. By 1884, the campaign had gained enough momentum that the
predecessor to the American Federation of Labor adopted a resolution at
its annual meeting, “that eight hours shall constitute legal day’s labor
from and after May 1, 1886.”
On the appointed date, unions and
radical groups orchestrated strikes and large-scale demonstrations in
cities across the country. More than 500,000 workers went on strike or
marched in solidarity and many more people protested in the streets. In
Chicago, a labor stronghold, at least 30,000 workers struck. Rallies and
parades across the city more than doubled that number, and the May 1
demonstrations continued for several days. The protests were mostly
nonviolent, but they included skirmishes with strikebreakers,
company-hired thugs and police.
Read more at L. A. Progressive.
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