May 1 is International Workers’ Day, a day workers around the world mark as Labor Day with marches, demonstrations, and renewed calls for workers’ rights. “May Day” got its start in 1886, when U.S. workers rallied in support of ongoing campaigns for an eight-hour day, setting May 1 as a deadline to begin mass strikes if employers failed to adopt shorter hours.
In 1886 Chicago, where tens of thousands joined May Day actions and thousands went on strike, subsequent police shootings of striking workers escalated into the well-known Haymarket Tragedy. Months of state-sanctioned, anti-immigrant repression of labor organizing followed. Police raids of union halls and arrests of organizers culminated in a sham trial, eight guilty verdicts and public hanging of four prominent immigrant, working-class movement leaders (a fifth died by suicide prior to the execution date).
The trial and executions were followed closely by workers across the country and around the world. In memory of the Haymarket Martyrs, labor and socialist organizations declared May Day International Workers’ Day, now an official public holiday in many countries.
Over 136 years later, our May Day 2022 economy has much in common with that of May Day 1886—rising inequality, economic upheavals affecting those with the least financial security, xenophobia, market concentration, and an upsurge in workers taking matters into their own hands while facing intense employer resistance.
U.S. factory workers and railroad workers are still campaigning for shorter hours, in some cases striking (or threatening strikes) to challenge inhumane 12-to-14-hour shifts and unpredictable forced overtime. New generations of workers, including many immigrants, are breaking through barriers of employer union-busting to organize unions in warehouses, hospitals, nursing homes, coffee shops, retail stores, media outlets, and universities and beyond.
Though now much has changed, several core dysfunctions of that older economic system persist: vast inequality, precarious low-wage labor, corporate concentration and soaring profits, wages barely keeping up with prices, widespread employer hostility to worker organizing, and pernicious forms of xenophobia and racism deployed to divide workers against each other.
This May Day 2022 is also marked by emerging upticks in worker organizing and growing interest in labor unions, after decades of declining union density driven by anti-worker economic policies and increasingly weak labor laws.
Worker struggles underway this May Day remind us that even this past progress remains under constant threat. While today many laws, institutions, and much of public sentiment have changed for the better, income inequality has returned to historic highs, while racial and gender wage gaps, occupational segregation, and disparities in employment remain structural features of U.S. labor markets.
This May Day, policymakers should heed workers’ calls for justice, take action to end long-standing constraints on worker power, and ensure that all can share in the gains they create.
