Dear All,

We grew up hearing about May Day being International Labour Day and being told that May the 1st was a sort of celebration of workers’ rights. Being the pampered, presumptuous brats that we were, we never bothered to find out more -- we were just happy in the knowledge that it was (in most places) a public holiday.

But then when I went to the US as a young student, I was baffled by the fact that there the ‘Labor Day’ was celebrated in September: in fact the first Monday in September (conveniently creating a long weekend for all of us wages slaves). Okay, I thought, it’s because the Americans have just to be different from the rest of the world, spelling English words differently, using different systems for everything…. But it turns out there is probably more here than meets the eye: the official US Labour Day is a creation that almost deliberately glosses over the events of 1886 that led to the May commemoration of worker rights movements.

May Day, as this commemoration came to be known, was an acknowledgement of a turning point in the Labour movement. Interestingly, this was a socialist movement that was strong and well-galvanised in several American cities, most notably Chicago. This was a time when organised labour was agitating to change harsh and exploitative working practices and to force employers to improve working conditions for their employees. A key demand was the eight-hour working day.

The eight-hour working day is something we in the modern world tend to take for granted. Yet, to get this to stage of regulation and legislation was a struggle, and one for which many people laid down their lives. May 1^st, 1886 was the date that the 1884 convention of Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (later to become the American Federation of Labor) proclaimed as the date by which the eight-hour day should become ‘a legal day’s labor’. The convention was held in Chicago "the epicentre of the socialists" and anarchists’ struggle.

On May 1^st, 1886 "more than 300,000 workers in 13,000 businesses across the United States walked off their jobs in the first May Day celebration in history". But just two days later, violence broke out between police and strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago and at least two strikers were reported to have died in police gunfire. At a protest public meeting the next day, there was more bloodshed: as police dispersed the crowds, a bomb was thrown in their direction, several officers and (an estimated) seven civilians died. This protest meeting was held in Haymarket area of Chicago. Eight of the organisers (anarchists) were arrested and convicted of murder, four of them were hanged, one killed himself the night before the execution and three were eventually (after six years) pardoned by the Governor.

That is the story of the activists known in the history of the workers movement as the ‘Haymarket martyrs’. All of this happened in the US and even though May Day has an American history, it is not acknowledged there -- Labor Day is now an excuse for a long weekend in September. And it’s fascinating to note that the website of the US Department of Labor is careful to make no mention of the May events anywhere in its section on "a History of Labor Day".

Ironic really that Labour Day is celebrated in dozens of countries all over the world but not in the US where it originated.

And what of the distress signal ‘Mayday’? Was this too linked to the events of 1886, signalling perhaps the distress of US authorities? Well it turns out there is no connection. This distress signal was introduced in 1923 by a British radio officer at Croydon airport, Frederick Mockford, who was asked to choose a one-word signal. And it’s not Mayday -- it comes from the French ‘m’aidez’ or ‘help me’.

The things we take for granted…

Best wishes,