Transcript for the Piece Audio version of The Real May Day

It’s May Day, the traditional day to celebrate the coming of Spring. But it’s also a day to commemorate the long, hard struggle for the most important right working people have ever won – the eight-hour workday, the standard in the United States, of course, and in every other industrial nation and the goal everywhere else.

In this country, anyway, people generally take the eight-hour day for granted. But it took many years of hard struggle to win it, beginning in the mid-1800s. By 1867, the federal government, six states and several cities had passed laws limiting their employees’ hours to eight per day.

The laws weren’t very well enforced, and in some areas were overturned by courts. But they did set an important precedent that ultimately led to a powerful popular movement. It was launched on May Day in 1886, when nearly a half-million workers in dozens of cities across the country held rallies, marches, one-day strikes and other union-sponsored demonstrations to demand a reduction in working hours that amounted to as many as 16 a day, six or seven days a week.

More than half the workers eventually won their demand for an eight-hour workday, and most of the others won at least some reduction in hours,

The workers drew strong popular support. But they also drew strong opposition. A newspaper editorial complained, for instance, that the eight-hour day would encourage “loafing and gambling, rioting, debauchery, and drunkedness.”

The greatest opposition came in response to a demonstration that was led by anarchist and socialist groups in Chicago, the heart of the eight-hour day movement.It was held at Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest police action that had been taken against the May Day rally that had been held there two days earlier. Four of the people at the rally had been killed and more than 200 wounded by police who had waded into their ranks.

The opponents of the eight-hour movement seized on the events at the Haymarket Square protest. Someone threw a bomb into the ranks of the police who surrounded the square during the rally, fatally wounding eight policemen.

The general public was outraged, and employers who opposed the eight-hour day movement quickly mounted a campaign claiming that the bomb was thrown by protesting demonstrators. Eventually, eight anarchists were convicted of conspiring to attack the police, although not of actually throwing the bomb, Four of the anarchists were hanged, one committed suicide and three eventually were pardoned by Illinois’ governor.

The public outrage slowed, but did not halt, growth of the eight-hour day movement. It remained an effective organizing tool for the country’s unions. By 1890 the American Federation of Labor was able to organize an “International Labor Day” in favor of the eight-hour workday. Workers in the United States and 13 other countries demonstrated on that May Day of 1890.

The New York World hailed it as “labor’s emancipation day.” It was. For it marked the beginning of an irreversible drive that finally established the eight-hour day as the standard for working people everywhere.

Happy May Day.

This is Dick Meister.