Labor Day Ironies

From Logos: a journal of modern society & culture; hat-tip to Danny Postel of Interfaith Worker Justice.

Labor Day Ironies



By John G. Rodwan, Jr.

Appreciation of Labor Day requires an active sense of irony. Local celebrations of workers' collective strength in the United States predated the declaration of May Day, its international equivalent. While May Day never took root in the United States, the day's selection for a global event resulted from the earlier scheduling of an American one. The president who made Labor Day a national holiday did so soon after sending federal forces to end a major strike, precisely the maneuver he'd opposed while campaigning for office around the time of another labor action with a bloody ending. The leader whose union that president decimated had initially backed his electoral campaign. For his involvement in the strike, the unionist ended up in jail, from which he emerged as a national figure who became one of the most prominent third party presidential candidates in the nation's history. May Day and Labor Day share decidedly secular origins, but workers grafted religious elements to their holidays. Unions in the city that first celebrated Labor Day eventually saw it members preferring to use the day off from work that their efforts have won for activities other than a parade, which they eventually held on another day, if at all.

The convocation of socialist parties and unions known as the Second International in 1889 passed a resolution calling for a simultaneous, worldwide demonstration in favor of law limiting the working day to eight hours and since such a rally had already been planned in the United States for the following May 1, the body decided to use that date. As it fell on a Thursday, unions in various countries found themselves having to decide whether members should go on strike in support of the cause. Cautious parties and unions opted to demonstrate on the first Sunday of the month instead. However, historian Eric Hobsbawm insists that refusing to work made May Day meaningful. In a paper on it in Uncommon People, he writes:

It was the act of symbolically stopping work which turned May Day into more than just another demonstration, or even another commemorative occasion…. For refraining from work on a working day was both an assertion of working-class power – in fact, the quintessential assertion of this power – and the essence of freedom, namely not being forced to labour in the sweat of one's brow, but choosing what to do in the company of family and friends. It was thus both a gesture of class assertion and class struggle and a holiday: a sort of trailer for the good life to come after the emancipation of labour.


The call for this symbolically potent event did not specify it as a recurring one, but with the day's success, in the form of unexpectedly high levels of participation in many cities, the Brussels International Socialist Congress of 1891 pledged that May Day should be celebrated every year. By the time of its centenary, May Day qualified as an official holiday in more than 100 countries.

The holiday's symbolism extends beyond the act of stopping work. "Spring holidays are profoundly rooted in the ritual cycle of the year in the temperate northern hemisphere," observes Hobsbawm, "and indeed the month of May itself symbolizes the renewal of nature." Flowers figured prominently in celebrations from the very start. Indeed, May Day celebrations of seasonal renewal happened long before an organized labor movement seized the day. Even then the day involved symbolism involving both economic class and seasonal renewal. For example, during Shakespeare's lifetime, according to scholar Stephen Greenblatt, "on May Day people had long celebrated the legend of Robin Hood, with raucous, often bawdy rituals" involving dancing around a Maypole "decked with ribbons and garlands" and a young Queen of the May also decorated with flowers. One of the most popular May Day icons depicts a Phrygian bonnet-wearing girl amid garlands.

Before May Day blossomed internationally, Labor Day celebrations started in New York City, gradually spreading to other areas. "Ironically, in the USA itself May Day was never to establish itself as it did elsewhere, if only because an increasingly official holiday of labour, Labor Day, the first Monday in September, was already in existence," explains Hobsbawm. At that time, however, it did not exist as a holiday throughout the country. The Central Labor Union organized the first Labor Day in New York on September 5, 1882. After celebrating it again on the same date the next year, the union picked the first weekday of the month as the time for the "workingmen's holiday" in subsequent years and urged other cities to do so as well. Although the New York unionists' creation effectively kept May Day from catching on in the United States, holiday imagery connects the city with the international festival: A German plaque commemorating the first May Day represents the Statue of Liberty on one side and Karl Marx on the other.

Early local Labor Day events included calls for the establishment of a national holiday, which happened in 1894, immediately after the movement suffered a shattering defeat. President Glover Cleveland signed the bill just days after the end of a massive strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in Illinois. He was responding to protests against his aggressive tactics to suppress what became called the "Debs Rebellion." Eugene Debs led the American Railway Union, which had come into being less than a year before Pullman workers, angered both by severe wage cuts and by the firing of three men who had presented management with a list of grievances, put down their tools. Not only did they stop building Pullman sleeping cars; they and railroad workers around the country (against Debs's advice) began a boycott of any railroad that continued to pull them, refusing to run any train with one attached. The boycott went into effect on June 25 and by the end of the month almost 125,000 workers joined it, affecting twenty railroads. "Across the nation the American Railway Union was so successful during the first week that the old Knights of Labor slogan, 'An injury to one is the concern of all,' seemed fulfilled, as yet another impressive display of labor unity spread throughout the country," writes Nick Salvatore in Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Union members' muscle-flexing aggravated and worried management, which aimed to dismantle Debs's young union and its brand of militancy. The railroad corporations' General Managers Association persuaded the federal government that the strike disrupted mail delivery and impeded interstate commerce. Judges issued an injunction against Debs and the union on these grounds and Cleveland (against Governor John Altgeld's advice) agreed to send troops to enforce it. The troops arrived the evening before Independence Day.

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