In recent years, the mass mobilizations of immigrant workers for their rights has once again brought May Day to the forefront of many workers’ consciousness. Paradoxically, however, “International Workers’ Day” is not widely celebrated in the country where it was born. In fact, it comes as a surprise to many to learn that May Day was originally “Made in the USA.” Today, with millions being forced to work longer and harder for less pay, despite record levels of unemployment, it’s relevant to take a look at the history of this tradition of struggle and its lessons for 2010.
May Day was born out of the struggle for the 8-hour work day more than 100 years ago. In many countries it is the most important date on the calendar for millions of workers and youth, marked by mass mobilizations of the trade unions, mass workers’ parties and student organizations, and in some, by one day general strikes.
Struggles by workers for a reduction of the working day have existed since the beginnings of the capitalist system itself. For most of the 19th century, when the “Industrial Revolution” was taking off in Western Europe and the United States as part of the development of modern capitalism, workdays of 10, 12, 16 and even 18 hours were common. Overtime pay was practically non-existent, and only came about later as a result of the struggles of the unions. Many men, women, and children worked literally from sunrise to sunset. For example, during the Philadelphia cordwainers strike in 1806, the first industrial strike in U.S. history, one of the workers’ main grievances was the fact that many were forced to work as much as 20 hours a day.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were the first to give a scientific explanation of the exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class through the relations of production created under the capitalist system. As part of this explanation, they pointed out that capitalism, then and now, treats workers’ labor power, or ability to work, as a commodity. From the capitalists’ viewpoint, it is always in their interest to raise the productivity of labor of each worker, to make them work as much as possible and as cheaply as possible. These increases in productivity are not used lighten the labor of other workers, but instead to throw “superfluous” workers out and maintain what Engels referred to as the “reserve army of labor,” the unemployed, which drives down wages and keeps workers competing with each other on the job market for lower wages and longer hours.
Marx and Engels also explained that the extraction of profits from the workers’ labor power could be increased by an extension of the working day. In the 19th century, factory bosses were able to force such long working days on workers due to the flood of people from the countryside streaming into the cities looking for work, and also because the trade unions many workers have today were at that time either non-existent or still in their infancy.
It was during this period that the working class itself was first coming into being in many countries, the vast majority of people who, just like today, have no other means of securing a living other than selling their ability to work to the capitalists. When workers are unorganized, we can be used by the system as raw material for exploitation and will be forced to put up with the conditions imposed by the capitalists. But the history of the working class is full of attempts, some successful some not, to unite together to change our conditions of work, and beyond that, to change society at large.
The first focal point for the working class’s struggles was by necessity for a reduction of the working day. In 1866, Marx and Engels’ First International resolved that “the legal limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation of the working class must prove abortive... The Congress proposes 8 hours as the legal limit of the working day.”
In the United States, the first organized stirrings on this front began not long after the end of the Civil War. By 1877, the overwork of rail workers amidst economic crisis and unemployment sparked a spontaneous general strike that spread across the country within days, as fast as striking workers could speed locomotives from one city to the next. This strike movement set the tone for later developments. A number of small union federations came into being at the time, all of which put forward the demand for the 8-hour day. Alongside the still-embryonic official unions, “Eight Hour committees” began to spring up across the country, which not only spread the idea of the 8-hour day, but began to organize workers for strike actions on May 1st to force the bosses and the state to pass legislation limiting the legal work day.
By 1886, the movement for the 8-hour day began to take more shape, based on events in Chicago. The “Eight Hour Committees” were very active, reaching out to and recruiting workers at all the main workplaces in the area, based on this single issue campaign which, despite not having the full backing of the unions, took on a life of its own. At its 1884 national convention, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (which later became the American Federation of Labor) proclaimed that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.” On that date, there was a tremendous response by Chicago workers, who laid down tools for the day and joined 8 hour rallies in the city’s parks and marched in the streets. This strike was a huge step forward in the struggle for the 8-hour day and cemented the date of May 1st as the focal point for the struggle.
In response, the Chicago ruling class set the city’s police and courts after the 8 hour movement, engineering a police provocation and show trial that gave the U.S. labor movement its first martyrs, including Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer and George Engel. But despite the capitalists’ intentions, the trial and execution of these workers’ leaders only intensified the struggle for the 8-hour day, and the case of the “Haymarket Martyrs” became a rallying point for workers internationally.
The unions organized coast to coast to prepare the ground more than a year in advance for a national, one day strike on May 1st, 1890 to demand federal legislation limiting the work day to 8 hours. The growing trade unions created renewed “Eight Hour” committees in nearly every city. In 1889, at its founding congress held in Paris, the newly created Second International took up the demand and also fixed the date of May 1st, 1890 for a general strike on a world scale.
Workers successfully joined forces across the globe in the first mass expression of workers’ internationalism. Alexander Trachtenberg, in The History of May Day, gave this description of the first May Day: “May Day, 1890, was celebrated in many European countries, and in the United States the Carpenters’ Union and other building trades entered into a general strike for the 8-hour day. Despite the Exception Laws against the Socialists, workers in the various German industrial cities celebrated May Day, which was marked by fierce struggles with the police. Similarly in other European capitals demonstrations were held, although the authorities warned against them and the police tried to suppress them. In the United States, the Chicago and New York demonstrations were of particularly great significance. Many thousands paraded the streets in support of the 8-hour day demand; and the demonstrations were closed with great open air mass meetings at central points.”
Frederick Engels, then actively involved in the newly-formed Second International, chose this first international May Day as the day to finish the fourth German preface of the Communist Manifesto, where he wrote:
“As I write these lines, the proletariat of Europe and America is holding a review of its forces; it is mobilized for the first time as One army, under One Flag, and fighting One immediate aim: an eight-hour working day, established by legal enactment... The spectacle we are now witnessing will make the capitalists and landowners of all lands realize that today the proletarians of all lands are, in very truth, united. If only Marx were with me to see it with his own eyes!”
This first global May Day marked a turning point for the struggle for the 8-hour day. In Europe, the Second International, made up of the mass parties created by the working class alongside the unions, were able to win 8-hour legislation which became the norm in many countries. In the United States, where the working class had only its unions, these were able to force the bosses to accept the 8-hour day as the norm as well. Thereafter, May Day remained a key date for the labor movement.
Lenin, addressing the first May Days held in Soviet Russia, explained the political significance the demonstrations continued to have: “The demand for an eight-hour day, however, is the demand of the whole proletariat, presented, not to individual employers, but to the government as the representative of the whole of the present-day social and political system, to the capitalist class as a whole, the owners of all the means of production.”
The reduction of the working day has always been a central demand for the working class movement and for the Marxists who form a part of it. Above all, it is a political issue, not just an economic one. When people are forced to work the greater part of the day there is little time or energy left for anything else. Work consumes everything. There is barely enough time just to take care of “domestic chores” and the health and well being of individual workers. There is also less time to participate in union meetings and to participate in politics.
The burden of too much work and too little time weighs especially on female workers, who often have to face the “second shift” at home, of the majority of the domestic chores, child care and so on, which is made worse by the lack of affordable, quality child care and other services. The high rates of divorce, growing levels of stress, obesity, the dwindling amount of contact between family members, neighbors and friends, etc., are all in part the result of overwork. There is simply too little time for millions of working people to take care of their basic individual needs, let alone time for furthering their education or participating more in the life of society.
Workers need time to participate in political life: to be able to attend meetings, read, discuss, participate in unions and above all to take an interest in the running of society. For all of the talk of how the United States is a democracy, where all people enjoy the fullest amount of freedom, how can it be a genuinely “free country” when the vast majority of the population doesn’t have the time to participate in politics? In reality, under capitalism, this is a luxury afforded only to a tiny, largely un-elected and unaccountable minority which controls society’s culture, politics, and the economy.
In the midst of the current “jobless recovery” there is a contradictory situation facing working people. As of April 2010, some 15 million people in the U.S. -- almost 10% of the labor force -- are counted as unemployed. Another 9.5 million people in March 2010 were counted as working part-time but desiring full-time work. At the same time, the Washington Independent reported that the profits of the Fortune 500 in 2009 tripled to $391 billion, while cutting 821,000 jobs in a single year. How is this possible? In large part it is explained by the capitalists squeezing more productivity from the remaining workers.
According to the Department of Labor, productivity per worker grew by 9.5% in the 3rd quarter of 2009 and by 6.9% in the 2nd quarter, in addition to increases in working hours in many parts of the economy. While the average number of hours worked per week in 2009 declined to 33, this is a distorted average explained by the fact that while millions are forced into involuntary idleness, others are worked to the bone.
This situation highlights the need for a renewed struggle to reduce the hours of work, for 30 hour work week -- the 6 hour day -- with no loss in pay. This would allow for full employment and greater leisure time for everyone to continue education, pursue other interests, and so on. Such legislation would have to be part of an overall economic recovery plan dictated not by the needs of capitalism, which led over the past two years to the wholesale destruction of giant chunks of the economy, but by the needs of the working class majority and under its direct and democratic control.
This struggle must be given a lead by the unions, which represent the only mass organizations of American workers, and which alone have the numbers and resources to mobilize millions of union and non-union, immigrant and U.S.-born workers on the streets in a new wave of class struggle.
Source: Socialist Appeal - USA