The Holiday US Workers Built Was May 1. The One the State Gave Them Was September.

Welcome to Organized Labor. We tell the story of working people organizing against capital, every week, free to read. We launch on May 1, and only one story belongs at the top of the stack.

The deadline was set in Chicago

In October 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions met in convention in Chicago and passed a resolution: "eight hours shall constitute a legal day's labor from and after May 1, 1886." Two years' notice. Not a lobbying ask. A strike threat with a calendar date attached. FOTLU became the American Federation of Labor in 1886, the same year the deadline came due.

When the day arrived, around 340,000 workers at roughly 13,000 establishments walked off the job across the country. In Chicago, 80,000 marched up Michigan Avenue, led by the anarchist organizer Albert Parsons, who would be dead inside 18 months. Three days later a bomb went off at a rally at Haymarket Square, eight organizers were put on trial, and four were hanged.

The world picked up what America put down

In July 1889, the founding congress of the Second International met in Paris. A French delegate named Raymond Lavigne proposed a resolution calling for "a great international demonstration" on a fixed day, in every city, demanding the eight-hour workday. The date they fixed was May 1, 1890, and the resolution said why: the American Federation of Labor had already scheduled its own demonstration for that day.

Europe did not hand Americans May Day. Americans handed it to the world. The date came from Chicago. The rest of the planet noticed.

The holiday the state could tolerate

The United States already had a different labor holiday in circulation. The first Labor Day parade was organized by the New York Central Labor Union on September 5, 1882. Credit for proposing it goes to either Peter J. McGuire of the carpenters or Matthew Maguire of the machinists. Maguire was a socialist who later ran for vice president on the Socialist Labor Party ticket. The AFL preferred, over time, to credit McGuire. Take that for what it is worth.

For 12 years, September Labor Day remained unofficial at the federal level. Then, in the summer of 1894, the country was on fire. Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company had struck over wage cuts. The American Railway Union had thrown a nationwide boycott behind them. Rail traffic was shutting down across half the country.

On June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed S. 730, introduced by Senator James Henderson Kyle of South Dakota, making the first Monday in September a federal holiday. It passed both houses unanimously. Six days later, on July 3, 1894, Cleveland ordered federal troops into Chicago to break the Pullman Strike.

The labor historian Richard Schneirov notes that unions were a Democratic constituency and a Democratic president putting down a strike "didn't look good." What is not in dispute is the sequence. The holiday was signed. The bayonets followed. September was chosen over May because September carried no socialist memory, and because four months sit between May 1 and the first Monday of September. That distance was the point.

The receipt

More than 80 countries today observe May 1 as a workers' public holiday. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada are the notable exceptions. Every September, US workers get a three-day weekend engineered to be apolitical. Every May 1, the rest of the world marks a holiday American workers built with a two-year countdown and a general strike. The choice between those dates was not an accident. It tells you what kind of memory the ruling class was willing to let working people keep.

The United States did not forget May Day. It chose September instead, on purpose, while the bodies were still warm. Today is May 1. Welcome.

Sources

• The Brief Origins of May Day, Eric Chase (Industrial Workers of the World)
• Labor History: May Day, Fighting for the Eight-Hour Day (American Postal Workers Union)
• Resolution of the International Workers' Congress of Paris, July 14-20, 1889 (Marxist Internet Archive)
• Birth of a Holiday: The First of May, Eric Hobsbawm (Jacobin, 2017)
• Who Founded Labor Day? The Answer Is Complicated (TIME, September 4, 2020)
• How a Deadly Railroad Strike Led to the Labor Day Holiday (History.com)
• International Workers' Day, country-by-country observance (Wikipedia)