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Today we celebrate May Day as a time to organise around issues vital to workers

May 01, 2009 Letters

Dear Editor,
While May 1st is celebrated in many countries in the world as International Workers’ Day dedicated to the historical struggles of labour, few know that the holding began in fight for the eight-hour day that peaked in the United States in the 1880s.
In 1884, the US Federation of Organised Trades and Labour Unions passed a resolution stating that eight hours should constitute a legal day’s work, and called for a general strike to achieve this goal.
Rank-and-file support for the eight-hour movement grew rapidly, particularly in Chicago where over 65,000 went on strike, alarming local business leaders and politicians. Police and Illinois National Guard were reinforced, and on May 3, 1886, they fired into a crowd of strikers supporting locked-out workers at the Mc Cormack Reaper Works Factory, killing four and wounding many more.
A mass meeting the next day in Haymarket Square to protest the brutality proceeded without incident, but just as it was breaking up – one was killed and 70 injured (it was never determined by whom).
Police responded by firing into the crowd, killing one worker and injuring others. This incident was followed by an all-out attack on dissenters and trade unions. Homes and offices were raided and hundreds were arrested without charge. Eight prominent anarchists were charged and found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder in the bombing, despite a lack of evidence connecting any of them of the bomb-thrower (only one was present at the meeting, and he was on the speaker’s platform). For ‘Haymarket one martyrs’, Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolf Fischer, and George Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887. Another, Louis Lingg, committed suicide in prison. Six years later, John Atgeld freed the last three, Neebe, Fielden and Schwacb posthumous pardoned the five executed men, but by then, the US movement for the eight-hour day at the centre of the world workers’ movement. So, when the AFL Convention in 1888 announced that May 1, 1890 would be a day for labour to enforce the eight-hour day with strikes and demonstrations, the world was listening.
Today, we continue to commemorate May Day as a time to organise around issues of vital importance to working people. Our songs and marches bring to life the words chiseled in stone on the monument of the Haymarket martyrs. “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than voices you are throttling today.”
Sherwood Clarke

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