The Origins of May Day

Although celebrated in more than one hundred countries, May Day has never been an official holiday in the United States, the country of its origin. The explanation lies in a complex history encompassing the vast differences between what workers want and what capitalists are willing to part with. Jacobin has published many articles over the years on that history, so I’ll just briefly summarize here. (For more details, I’ll point you toward my documentary video We Mean to Make Things Over: A History of May Day.)

In 1884, the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), decrying the inhumanity of workers’ lives crushed by too many hours of work and too little time for rest and play, passed a resolution stating that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.” Another resolution encouraged all labor organizations to vote for a general strike on that date in support of the eight-hour day. After determined organizing, a third of a million workers downed tools on the big day, with decidedly mixed results.

Chicago saw the greatest manifestation of worker power. But following police violence that resulted in fatalities, a protest demonstration was held in Haymarket Square on May 4. Here an unknown perpetrator threw a bomb, precipitating a police riot in which several more people were killed. The city’s employers and government unleashed the nation’s first Red Scare, targeting the most effective immigrant worker organizers. The affair ended in the kangaroo court conviction and hanging of four leaders, the murder or suicide of one more in his cell, and the continued imprisonment of three others. Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, after examining the matter, pardoned and freed the prisoners, declaring their trial a miscarriage of justice.

The cause of the Haymarket martyrs was embraced by the newly formed Socialist or Second International. In 1889, the International met in Paris and designated May 1 of the coming year as a day of remembrance, calling for a worldwide demonstration for the eight-hour day. Initially there was no mention of establishing a workers’ holiday. Yet for decades thereafter, workers’ movements in countries around the world pushed employers and governments to recognize May Day as a paid holiday and to establish the eight-hour day as the workplace standard. At times, the May 1 movement was met with bloody repression. In some places, it took a general strike to win the holiday and the eight-hour workday.

The first May Day demonstrations in 1890 fell on a Thursday, stimulating a conversation that’s recurring now: should workers leave work (i.e., strike) to support the cause? The Socialist International left that decision up to its affiliated parties in each country, depending on their assessment of the conditions under which they operated. The results varied. In Vienna, a general strike shuttered the city on May 1, and some sixty rallies combined to form a march of one hundred thousand. In London, a non-striking “May Day” was moved to May 4, a Sunday, unleashing an unprecedented demonstration of three hundred thousand.

In the United States, the AFL decided against a repeat of the 1886 events. Instead only the most prepared union, the Carpenters and Joiners, led the way and struck for the eight-hour day. Other unions and allies provided as much support as they could, with the plan that each May Day, another union would take its turn and go on strike. Tens of thousands of carpenters earned an eight-hour day through these actions in 1890 (although the victory was rolled back by the economic depression later in the decade).

The next few years of American labor activity were intense. The Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 saw workers clash violently with company-hired Pinkerton agents, and 1894 saw the Pullman Railroad Strike and the murder of workers by police, national guardsmen, and armed thugs employed by the railroads. After these events, President Grover Cleveland thought it prudent to let some steam out of the class-struggle pressure cooker. He signed a bill proclaiming the first Monday in September a holiday celebrating the contributions of workers to America. This bill made no mention of the eight-hour day or the repression of the workers’ movement. Under these circumstances, Labor Day was, in effect, an employer-friendly substitute for May Day.

The Socialist Labor Party, left-led unions, and later the Socialist Party and Industrial Workers of the World continued on May Day to promote the eight-hour day and workers’ holiday. But by the turn of the century, the AFL had fully accepted the non-radical substitute. With the Russian Revolution, Labor Day became a foil in propaganda wars against Communism. After World War II, it further devolved into a Cold War workers’ holiday. “Labor Day Sales!” advertisements bolstered consumer capitalism’s claim to better serve the working class than Communism did.

A nadir of sorts was reached with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1957 redesignation of May 1 as “Law Day” (although internationally that dubious honor would go to Adolf Hitler’s co-optation of the holiday). But a funny thing happened on the way to the death of May Day.

The Resuscitation of May Day

After Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign and the explosive growth of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the decades-long freeze on public collaboration between organized labor and the Left began to thaw. The Cold War was long over, and DSA chapters and unions found they could work together. A rekindled interest in May Day led to collaboration on a growing number of small but feisty demonstrations.

In early 2018, my former employer, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT), asked me to testify before the State Assembly Education Committee on behalf of a CFT-sponsored bill that proposed making May Day a state holiday. The CFT legislative director told me beforehand that he had asked thirty-nine legislators to carry the bill before one agreed. The bill got through committee but died on the Assembly floor.

One moment from that experience remains vivid in my memory. After finishing my brief historical presentation to the legislators, an unusual silence fell over the room and persisted for nearly half a minute. Anyone familiar with elected officials knows silence before an audience is not their default. I believe they were mentally revisiting images from May Day news broadcasts in decades prior — goose-stepping Soviet soldiers marching ahead of tanks and missile carriers across Moscow’s Red Square. I suspected these legislators were making a mental connection between those Cold War images and their chances for reelection, prompting quiet contemplation on their political futures.

This experience taught me that the recovery from “May Day fear” of union activists post–Cold War and post-Bernie did not extend to elected public officials. Soon my brief legislative committee testimony became a longer talk, which I presented to unions, labor councils, DSA chapters (and like May Day demonstrations, often cosponsored) in April for the next couple of years. With COVID’s shutdown, I delivered these talks on Zoom but also worked with a group of talented friends to turn the presentation into a video.

When we returned to public gatherings, the video continued to be screened in the days leading up to May 1 each year. There was clearly rising interest in the topic. May Day demonstrations were becoming an annual labor-supported event. San Francisco demonstrations and marches, for instance, were jointly called by all five Bay Area labor councils.

This year, the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center showed the video on April 3. The event was cosponsored by East Bay DSA, UC Berkeley Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), the Alameda Labor Council, and UAW Local 4811, the academic workers’ union that had waged and won an inspirational statewide UC strike in late 2022. The event included a reception for the art created for the video by Jos Sances, blown up and framed on the Labor Center’s walls, and brief talks by me, Jos, and Tanzil Chowdhury, a PhD candidate and a statewide leader of Local 4811. The Labor Center’s event organizers told me they would be very pleased with forty attendees. Ninety showed up.

Tanzil described the work it had taken to make the 2022 strike a success. A new militant leadership of the union (which was actually composed of three separate units at the time of the strike, later merged into one) carefully prepared members for several years before the strike could succeed. He noted that in the current political climate, many people were hoping that Fain’s proposed date for a general strike on May 1, 2028, could be moved earlier. But his union’s experience demonstrated the importance of thorough preparation. If it required several years to organize a strike of 48,000 workers, then a three-year timeline to build a national general strike involving millions did not seem unreasonable.

The discussion that followed his presentation seesawed between fear that we don’t have three years given the swift installation of American fascism and the recognition of how much distance we have to cover before pulling off a successful general strike. At other screenings since then, the conversations have continued to revolve around the question: “How do we reasonably get from here to where we need to be as quickly as possible?”

Toward the General Strike?

May Day 2025 is a long way from the nadir of May Day 1957. The holiday is no longer anathema to American organized labor — and unions like the UAW have learned to surmount divide-and-conquer tactics utilized by employers, including the red-baiting that led to a reflexive avoidance of May Day.

Fain’s stated goal of a general strike on May Day 2028, and the concrete task of aligning contract expirations to support it, addresses the desire for action so many are feeling right now. It also establishes a credible path for the American working class to reclaim May Day.

May Day also stands for triumph over divisions within the working class, rooted as it is in the history of a largely immigrant-led American labor movement. The state repression of immigrant worker leaders and whipping up of hysterical xenophobia has periodically returned as a “look over there” tactic in times of social crisis, and the current moment is no exception. Historically, some unions have averted their gaze or even cheered anti-immigrant fervor. But today, Sheet Metal workers union president Michael Coleman and National Building Trades Council leader Sean McGarvey — not generally considered radical labor leaders — are standing up against Donald Trump, demanding the return of union apprentice Kilmar Abrego García, whose illegal deportation and imprisonment are an attempt to divide workers and demoralize the immigrant community.

But May Day 2025 is also a long way from May Day 2028, and it remains to be seen whether we will achieve our highest ambitions. This year’s May Day organizing efforts by labor and community groups are laying groundwork that could spark public demonstrations as powerful as those we witnessed on April 5. That’s important. Crucial to the success of the plan for a general strike in 2028 will be building the capacity for mass action along the way, which requires a sharp focus by organized labor on internal and external organizing for that purpose. We shouldn’t expect this to happen overnight. Labor is not a monolith, and different unions are moving at varying speeds toward understanding and responding to the existential threat we face.

Of course, organized labor is not the only factor in resistance to the fascist tide. But the turnout for May Day 2025 will help us gauge whether labor is on track to play the role it can and should in the fight.