By Pedro Eusse, General Secretary of the CUTV

May 10, 2025  Tribuna Popular

 

Traditionally, trade union historiography presents May Day as the result of the battles for the reduction of the working day of the Chicago workers and its tragic end, with the assassinations of demonstrators and the unjust criminal convictions against the main leaders of these protests.

But in reality, the establishment of May Day as Labor Day or International Workers’ Day of Struggle was determined by a broader process that is not only circumscribed to the events experienced by the working class in the United States in 1886, but to the historical accumulation and the rise of the organized action of workers in the heat of the class struggle at the international level.

The trade union tradition has forgotten that the most dramatic moments of those heroic days of Chicago, in reality did not take place on the first day of the month ─when the general strike broke out for the establishment of the eight-hour workday─ but it was on May 4, during a massive rally in Haymarket Square, when the well-known bloody events took place, provoked by agents of the bourgeoisie to justify the ferocious police repression.

In no way do we downplay the importance of these unforgettable episodes led by U.S. workers, since they are part of the heritage of the world labor movement and effectively contributed to the conquest of the eight-hour workday. But we do consider it necessary to identify the strategic and internationalist dimension of May Day, which transcends the anecdotal and the circumstantial-national.

The struggle for the reduction of the working day has been a fundamental demand of workers throughout the world since the dawn of the capitalist mode of production, when working hours of up to 18 continuous hours were imposed, in correspondence with the demands of high levels of productivity of capital and the excessive greed of the bosses; condemning workers (including women and children) to a miserable life and the impossibility of regaining strength.

Of course, this led to the first collective actions of the working class for the reduction of the working day without reducing wages. In England, strikes broke out in the first decades of the 19th Century for the reduction to 10 or eight hours of work.

The English working class, already with the activism of the trade unions, set a date for the implementation of the eight-hour working day: March 1, 1834, which would be the start of a general strike. The plan did not materialize, but for the first time in the history of the workers’ movement, a date was set and a strike plan for the reduction of the working day was drawn up. Finally, after numerous mobilizations, an insufficient but important law for the partial and progressive reduction of the working day (up to 10 hours) was passed in that country, which came into force precisely on May 1, 1848.

In France, for its part, workers’ strikes and mobilizations for the reduction of the working day were not long in coming, and laws and decrees were also passed in this respect, with the logical resistance of the employers, who finally succeeded in repealing it, without there being a proletarian force capable of imposing it.

But it was the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International), born in 1864 ─with Karl Marx as a fundamental theoretical leader─ that raised the question of the reduction of the working day to an international demand of the working class and in its First Congress (Geneva, 1866) adopted the resolution of the struggle for the eight-hour working day as “the first step” towards workers’ emancipation. The Third Congress of the International (Brussels, 1868) reaffirmed that position, directing its national sections to take action for its conquest.

In the United States, from the first years of capitalist industrial activity, the agitation for the reduction of the working day became evident and strikes with that objective were recorded from 1827. At the first congress of industrial unions, held in New York in October 1845, the question of the legal reduction of the working day to 10 hours was raised, after which strikes broke out. Likewise, in August 1866, a national labor congress held in Baltimore proclaimed its objective of achieving a law establishing the eight-hour workday “for all the states of the American union”.

As a result of all the efforts made up to that time by American workers and their organizations, a federal law instituting the eight-hour workday in U.S. government establishments was won in 1868; however, workers in the private sector continued to work 12 hours a day or more.

Consequently, the struggle for the reduction of the workday continued and grew stronger as the U.S. labor and union movement organized and grew, particularly with the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). At the same time, labor militants discarded the illusions of achieving a federal law, which would be a dead letter, so that the eight-hour workday could only be achieved by the direct action of the organized labor movement. This position became a reality at the IV Congress of the AFL (Chicago, 1884), approving that as of May 1, 1886, the normal workday would be eight hours and in workplaces where this decision was not respected, workers’ strikes would take place, a plan that demanded an intense process of preparation and the unity of action of the main labor organizations.

May 1, 1886 arrived and nearly 5,000 strikes took place all over the country. As a result, it is estimated that 125,000 workers won the eight hours of work on the fixed day, by the end of May they reached 200,000 and a little later up to a million workers were favored by the reduction of the working day.

But in the heat of this massive class offensive, bloody clashes of the proletariat with the repressive forces of the State took place in different states, beginning in Milwaukee and escalating, with sickening criminal fury, in the city of Chicago on May 3 and 4. Chicago was then an important center of revolutionary agitation, which concentrated the largest and best organized militancy of the anarchist proletariat of the time.

In various enterprises the bosses tried to counteract the strike by hiring scabs and using the services of a private mercenary agency to terrorize the workers, as did the McCormick agricultural machinery factory, with a toll of six workers dead and dozens wounded.

After these events, the AFL continued the struggle for the reduction of the working day and at its 1888 congress, agreed on a plan of action to establish the eight-hour working day as of May 1, 1890, a decision that a year later would have an effect of international historical significance.

At the same time as those events, in different European countries there were days of struggle for the legal conquest of the eight hours of work or its establishment by means of direct action of the organized workers. The emergence of Marxist-oriented workers’ parties gave great impetus to this struggle.

In France, in June 1889, two international socialist congresses were held that pronounced themselves in favor of the eight-hour day, but it was the International Congress of Paris ─ more identified with Marxist ideas─ that adopted the historic resolution to assume May 1 as the International Day of struggle of the working class, with the following proclamation:

«A great international demonstration will be organized with a fixed date, so that, in all countries and cities at the same time, on the same agreed day, the workers will intimidate the public authorities to legally reduce to eight hours the working day and to apply the other resolutions of the International Congress of Paris. Seeing that such a demonstration has already been decided upon by the American Federation of Labor for May 1, 1890, at its Saint Louis Congress, this date is adopted for the international demonstration».

In this way an old aspiration of Marx and the class militants of the First International was fulfilled, to adopt a day for workers around the world, in unity, to take to the streets to demonstrate against the capitalist system and to demand decent working conditions; gathering their forces to advance towards the revolutionary triumph of the global proletariat.

 

-Pedro Eusse is the general secretary of the Unitary Confederation of Workers of Venezuela (CUTV).