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LABOR DAY AND MAY DAY, BOTH MADE IN AMERICA  
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Jeffrey Sklansky
August 13, 2025
The Conversation
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_ The battles that birthed these labor holidays united native-born
and immigrant workers in an extraordinary alliance to demand an
eight-hour workday at a time when American workers toiled an average
of 10 or more hours daily, six days a week. _

It took more than a century for Chicago’s Haymarket Square to get
this memorial to the historic labor strife that occurred there, photo
Jeffrey Sklansky

 

Most of the world observes International Workers’ Day
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May 1 or the first Monday in May each year, but not the United States
and Canada. Instead, Americans
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celebrated Labor Day as a national holiday on the first Monday in
September since 1894, 12 years after the first observance of Labor Day
in New York City.

The celebrations aren’t the same.

In much of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, the event commonly
called May Day honors workers’ political and economic power
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often with demonstrations by socialist or workers’ parties and
tributes to national labor rights. America’s Labor Day features
labor union parades in many places, but for most Americans, it’s
less about organized labor
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and more about barbecues, beach days and back-to-school sales.

Both holidays, however, arose during the same period, in the U.S.
nearly 150 years ago, in the midst of an explosive labor uprising
[[link removed]] in America’s
industrial heartland. Their founding united native-born and immigrant
workers in an extraordinary alliance to demand an eight-hour workday
at a time when American workers toiled an average of 10 or more hours
[[link removed]] daily, six
days a week.

The call for shorter hours was rooted in a big idea: that workers’
days belonged to them, even if employers owned their workplaces and
paid for their work. That idea inspired the loftiest goals of a
growing labor movement that spanned from Chicago and New York to
Stockholm and Saint Petersburg. And the labor activism of the late
1800s still casts a distant light on Labor Day today, carrying a vital
message about the struggle for control of workers’ daily lives
[[link removed]].

I’m a historian [[link removed]] at
the University of Illinois Chicago, where I study the history of
labor. The fight for shorter hours is no longer a top issue for
organized labor in the U.S.
[[link removed]].
But it was a crusade for the eight-hour day that brought together the
diverse coalition
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of labor groups that created Labor Day and May Day in the 1880s.

[Colorful beach umbrellas cover the sand on a sunny day, with a
lifeguard elevated above the crowd]
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On Labor Day, U.S. beaches are crowded with people who spend the
late-summer holiday relaxing and having fun. One such destination is
Chincoteague Island, Va., seen here on Labor Day weekend in 2018.
Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images
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Labor Day’s radical roots

Led by socialist-leaning trade unions, Labor Day’s founders included
skilled, native-born craft workers defending control over their
trades, immigrant laborers seeking relief from daylong drudgery, and
revolutionary anarchists who saw the quest for control of the
workers’ day as a step toward seizing factories and smashing the
state.

They originally chose Sept. 5, 1882, for the first Labor Day to
coincide with a general assembly in New York City of what was then the
largest and broadest association of American workers, the Knights of
Labor [[link removed]]. Two years
later, labor leaders moved the annual event to the first Monday in
September, giving the majority of workers a two-day weekend for the
first time
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As Labor Day parades and picnics spread, many American cities and
states soon made it an official holiday. But since few employers gave
workers the day off in its early years, Labor Day likewise became “a
virtual one-day general strike in many cities
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according to historians Michael Kazin and Steven Ross.

American roots of May Day

My students come from working-class, mostly immigrant families, and
Chicago’s history of labor conflict is all around our downtown
campus in the heart of what were once meatpacking plants, stockyards
and crowded immigrant neighborhoods.

My office is about 12 blocks from the spot – surrounded today by
upscale office buildings – where the eight-hour movement reached a
bloody climax in the battle of Haymarket Square
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May Day commemorates that battle.

On May 1, 1886, unions of skilled workers organized by their crafts or
trades led a nationwide general strike for the eight-hour day. They
were joined by radical socialists, militant anarchists and many
members of the Knights of Labor. More than 100,000 workers took part
across the country.

The most dramatic demonstrations happened in Chicago, which had become
the second-largest city in the U.S.
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after years of swift growth. Nearly 40,000 striking Chicago workers
shut down much of that burgeoning industrial, agricultural and
commercial hub [[link removed]]. Three
days later, a bomb thrown at a rally in Haymarket Square killed seven
police officers, sparking a sweeping nationwide crackdown on labor
activism.

In 1889, socialist trade unions and workers’ parties, meeting in
Paris for the first congress of a new Socialist International
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proclaimed May 1 an international workers’ holiday
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following the lead of the new American Federation of Labor
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renewed strikes on the anniversary of the 1886 action.

And they were honoring the memory of the eight labor activists who had
been tried and convicted for the Haymarket bombing solely on the basis
of their speeches and radical politics, in what was widely viewed as a
rigged trial. Four “Haymarket martyrs
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had been hanged and a fifth died by suicide before he could be
executed.

An earlier labor win

Though May 1 had long been associated with European celebrations of
springtime
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its modern meaning has deeper American roots that precede the
Haymarket tragedy. It was on that date in 1867 that workers in Chicago
celebrated an earlier victory.

At the end of the Civil War, campaigns for an eight-hour workday arose
in cities across the country, championing a common interpretation of
the abolition of slavery
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for many workers, emancipation meant that employers purchased only
their labor, not their lives.

Employers might monopolize workers’ means of making a living, but
not their hours and days.

The movement led to laws declaring an eight-hour day in six states,
including Illinois, where the new rule went into effect on May 1, 1867
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But employers widely disobeyed or circumvented the laws, and states
failed to enforce them while they lasted, so workers continued to
struggle for a shorter workday.

Seizing the day

In the 19th century, American workers’ labor came to be measured by
how long they worked
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and how much they were paid. While they were divided by their widely
different wages, they were united by the generally uniform hours at
each workplace.

The demand for a shorter workday without a pay cut was designed to
appeal to all wage earners no matter who they were, where they were
from, or what they did for a living.

Labor leaders said shorter hours meant employers would have to hire
more people, creating jobs and boosting hourly pay. Spending less time
on the job would enable workers to become bigger consumers
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spurring economic growth.

Having “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours
for what we will
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a popular labor movement refrain, would also leave more time for
education, organization and political action.

Most broadly, the fight for shorter hours encapsulated workers’
struggle to control their own time
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off the job. That far-reaching struggle included efforts to limit the
number of years people spent earning a living by ending child labor
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retired workers
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– a topic I’m currently researching.

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Time is money
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meaning that time off costs money that workers could be making on the
job. But the message of the movement for a shorter workday was that
the worth of workers’ lives could not be calculated in dollars and
cents.

Diverging holidays

In the Haymarket battle’s aftermath, the alliance of radicals and
reformers, factory operatives and skilled artisans, U.S.-born workers
and immigrant laborers began to come apart. And as union leaders in
the American Federation of Labor parted ways with socialists and
anarchists, each side of the divided workers’ movement claimed one
of the two labor days as its own
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making the holidays appear increasingly opposed and losing sight of
their shared foundation in the campaign for a shorter workday.

Conservative politicians and employers hostile to unions began to
equate labor organizing with bomb throwing
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In response, trade unions seeking acceptance as part of American
industry and democracy displayed their allegiance on Labor Day by
waving the American flag, singing patriotic songs and portraying
themselves as proud, native-born Americans as opposed to foreign
workers with subversive ideas.

Many political radicals and the immigrant workers among whom they
found much of their following, meanwhile, came to identify more with
the international workers’ movement associated with May Day than
with American business and politics. They disavowed May Day’s
origins among American trade unions, even as many trade unions
distanced themselves from the radical roots of Labor Day. By the turn
of the century, May Day moved further from the center
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of American culture, while Labor Day became more mainstream and less
militant.

20th-century gains and losses

In the 20th century, labor unions won shorter hours for many of their
members across the country. But they detached that demand from the
broader agenda of workers’ autonomy and international solidarity.

They gained a landmark achievement with the federal enactment of the
eight-hour day and 40-hour workweek
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for many industries during the 1930s. At that point, economist John
Maynard Keynes projected that the rising productivity of labor would
enable 21st-century wage earners to work just three hours a day
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Workers’ productivity did keep climbing
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their wages rose apace – until the 1970s
[[link removed]]. But their work hours did
not decline, leaving the three-hour day a forgotten vision of what
organized labor might achieve.[The Conversation]

Jeffrey Sklansky
[[link removed]],
Professor of History, _University of Illinois Chicago
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This article is republished from The Conversation
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the original article
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