[Peace-discuss] Fwd: The True Story Of Labor Day: Debunking The Myth

[David Johnson via Peace-discuss]

Image result for pictures of peter j. McGuire 
<https://www.google.com/search?q=pictures+of+peter+j.+McGuire&client=firefox-a&hs=fAW&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=np&tbm=isch&imgil=ahoLk0MLnra9NM%253A%253B1jmAyrxHbxWEoM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.carpentersunionbc.com%25252FPages%25252FPeter_McGuire.html&source=iu&fir=ahoLk0MLnra9NM%253A%252C1jmAyrxHbxWEoM%252C_&usg=__oEfgIPZ7GDk3yMiLBtKvUyVqww8%3D&sa=X&ei=JZ0EVP2HNIrJgwS5hoLQCA&ved=0CDgQ9QEwCw&biw=853&bih=576>
Peter J. McGuire- First National President of the Carpenter's Union ( 
1881-1901 ) and founder of both Labor Day and May Day

The True Story Of Labor Day: Debunking The Myth
First Labor Day Union Square, New York
Educate! <http://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Labor 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/labor/>, Worker Rights and Jobs 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/worker-rights-and-jobs/>
By Eugene E. Ruyle, www.peaceandfreedom.org 
<http://www.peaceandfreedom.org/home/articles/general/1180-labor-day-and-may-day-two-workers-holidays>
August 31st, 2014
   Powered by Translate <https://translate.google.com>
22 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/the-true-story-of-labor-day-debunking-the-myth/#>
Print Friendly 
<http://www.printfriendly.com/print?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.popularresistance.org%2Fthe-true-story-of-labor-day-debunking-the-myth%2F>

/Above: The first Labor Day observance in 1882 at Union Square in New York/

Author's note: these remarks were put together from various sources. A 
longer article with citations is available on request from the author at 
cuyleruyle -- at -- mac.com.


    Labor Day and May Day: Two Workers' Holidays

As we enter the Labor Day weekend, many on the left will repeat the myth 
that Labor Day has no historical significance and is simply a "gift" 
from capitalist politicians to break up the international solidarity of 
American workers by providing an alternative to May Day. For many years, 
I accepted this myth, even while marching with my union comrades in the 
annual Labor Day Parades in Wilmington, California. Then I learned that 
the first Labor Day was in 1882, four years BEFORE Haymarket and eight 
years BEFORE the first international May Day in 1890. How, then, could 
it have originated as an alternative to May Day? A little historical 
research revealed a much different, and more complex.

Peter J. McGuire founder of both Labor Day and May Day

This research showed that both Labor Day and May Day grew out of 
American labor struggles in the 1880s and, surprisingly, that the same 
man, Peter J. McGuire (1852-1906), who founded the International 
Brotherhood of Carpenters, is claimed as the "father" of both Labor Day 
and May Day! However, as the labor movement developed in the 1890s and 
into the 20th Century, different factions favored one rather than the 
other and began to pit the two against each other. But as Yale historian 
David Montgomery notes, "Little is gained by calling one holiday real 
and the other phony. We need to know what both have meant to workers." 
Otherwise, an opportunity to educate the U.S. working class about 
its real history will be lost.

Let us, then, review the intertwined history of Labor Day and May Day 
within the general struggle for the emancipation of the working class.

The roots of Labor Day go back to the Middle Ages. During the French 
Revolution a special day in September was set aside as a labor holiday. 
In nineteenth-century North America, celebrations, picnics, parades, 
benefits, and demonstrations of various kinds were held to support 
shorter hours, to help strikers, and for other labor causes. There are 
reports of early Labor Day celebrations in Toronto, Canada, in 1872 and 
in Boston in 1878. The first Labor Day in Australia was celebrated in 
1856. According to the research of Jonathan Grossman, however, the 
American Labor Day holiday grew out of the parade and picnic of the 
Central Labor Union of New York City on September 5, 1882:

    The year 1882 was charged with excitement for organized workers in
    New York City. On January 30, thousands of workers packed Cooper
    Union in support of Irish tenants against their British landlords.
    Under such banners as "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a
    prey/Where wealth accumulates, and men decay," union leaders
    expressed the unity of labor's cause throughout the world. Among the
    participants were Matthew Maguire, Secretary of the Committee on
    Arrangements, who read letters from labor unions from every part of
    America, and Peter J. McGuire, who "spoke eloquently for half an
    hour, retiring among continued applause,"

Maguire and McGuire, both members of the Socialist Labor Party Club of 
New York, had proposed the holiday to the Central Labor Union of New 
York. On Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882, about ten thousand workers took an 
unpaid day off and marched around Union Square in support of the holiday 
and celebrating labor's international cause. It became an annual event 
that spread to other cities and states as the movement for a national 
Labor Day grew. Over the next decade, thirty states recognized Labor Day 
as a legal holiday so that workers would not have to lose pay in order 
to celebrate their achievements.

Legal limitation of the working day was an important part of labor's 
achievements. Even before the Civil War, the ten-hour day movement had 
made significant gains. With the rise of industrial capitalism after the 
Civil War, the eight hour day movement began in earnest. In his chapter 
on "The Working Day" in Capital, Marx wrote:

    Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black
    it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once
    arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours'
    agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive
    from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.

Marx continues to write that on August 16, 1866, the General Congress of 
labour at Baltimore (August 16th, 1866), "to free the labour of this 
country from capitalistic slavery," as the Congress put it, called for a 
law limiting the working day to eight hours, A few weeks later, the 
Congress of the International Working Men's Association at Geneva, 
passed a similar resolution. Thus, with the leadership of the American 
working class, the movement of the working-class on both sides of the 
Atlantic set itself to the struggle for an eight hour day. Marx concludes:

    In place of the pompous catalogue of the "inalienable rights of man"
    comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day,
    which shall make clear "when the time which the worker sells is
    ended, and when his own begins."

Later, Lenin would describe the importance of the eight hour day 
movement as a time when the workers, as a class, confronted the state as 
an instrument of the capitalist class.

    The demand for an eight-hour day . . . 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.

Responding to working class agitation, Congress passed an eight hour day 
law in 1868. Federal authorities did not enforce it, however, so labor 
activists such as McGuire and his friend, Samuel Gompers, realized that 
it would only be enforced by direct action from the workers themselves.

Image of poster from 8-hour day struggel not available
*Poster from the 8-hour day struggle*

In 1884, at McGuire's urging, the national conference of the Federation 
of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the organizational forerunner of 
the American Federation of Labor (AFL), passed a resolution establishing 
May 1, 1886, as the day on which the workers themselves would institute 
the eight-hour day. May Day was already a day with deep historical roots 
and rituals such as the May Pole dating back to the Middle Ages. It was 
a day when workers would make their demands. The modern May Day dates 
from this action by the American labor movement.

The first May Day was a huge success, According to one source, "In all, 
the May 1 actions involved 340,000 working people. Of these, 150,000 won 
shorter hours without striking; 190,000 struck, and 42,000 of the 
strikers improved their conditions."

The largest of the May Day demonstrations was in Chicago, where 80,000 
workers went on strike, with another 45,000 in New York and 32,000 in 
Cincinnati. One of the largest strikes was in Chicago at the McCormick 
Reaper Works, where Pinkerton agents and the police harassed and beat 
locked-out steelworkers as they picketed. On May 3, the police attacked, 
killing at least two workers and wounding many more. The next day, a 
rally was called for Haymarket Square in Chicago to support the strikers 
and oppose police brutality.

The rally itself was peaceful, attended by families with children and 
the Mayor of Chicago himself. But as the crowd was dispersing, the 
police attacked. A bomb was thrown---no one to this day knows who threw 
it---and police began to fire indiscriminately into the crowd, killing 
several civilians and wounding forty more. One officer was killed by the 
bomb and several more died from their own gun fire. The aftermath is 
described by a writer for the Industrial Workers of the World:

    Aside from the bomb thrower, who was never identified, it was the
    police, not the anarchists, who perpetrated the violence. Eight
    anarchists -- Albert Parsons, August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Oscar
    Neebe, Michael Schwab, George Engel, Adolph Fischer and Louis Lingg
    -- were arrested and convicted of murder, though only three were
    even present at Haymarket and those three were in full view of all
    when the bombing occurred. The jury in their trial was comprised of
    business leaders in a gross mockery of justice similar to the
    Sacco-Vanzetti case thirty years later, or the trials of AIM and
    Black Panther members in the seventies. The entire world watched as
    these eight organizers were convicted, not for their actions, of
    which all were innocent, but for their political and social beliefs.
    On November 11, 1887, after many failed appeals, Parsons, Spies,
    Engel and Fisher were hung to death. Louis Lingg, in his final
    protest of the state's claim of authority and punishment, took his
    own life the night before with an explosive device in his mouth.

The remaining defendants were later pardoned by a new Governor of 
Illinois and declared innocent of any wrongdoing. A monument to the 
Haymarket Martyrs was dedicated in 1893, inscribed with the prophetic 
last words of August Spies: "There will come a time when our silence 
will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."Police 
repression had not killed May Day or the eight hour day movement,. In 
1888, the AFL defiantly called for another national eight hour strike 
for May 1, 1890. When AFL leader Samuel Gompers learned that the 
International Workingmen's Congress would consider a similar eight-hour 
day resolution, he arranged for a representative, Hugh McGregor, to 
travel to the Congress and deliver a letter asking that they also adopt 
May 1, 1890 for their action. Inspired by the example of the American 
workers, the Paris Congress adopted the following resolution:

    The Congress decides to organize a great international
    demonstration, so that in all countries and in all cities on one
    appointed day the toiling masses shall demand of the state
    authorities the legal reduction of the working day to eight hours,
    as well as the carrying out of other decisions of the Paris
    Congress. Since a similar demonstration has already been decided
    upon for May 1, 1890, by the American Federation of Labor at its
    Convention in St. Louis, December, 1888, this day is accepted for
    the international demonstration. The workers of the various
    countries must organize this demonstration according to conditions
    prevailing in each country.

The first International Workers Day on May 1, 1890 was a success, with 
demonstrations in all the major European cities, including London, 
Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Brussels, Budapest, Berlin, 
Prague, Warsaw, Vienna, and Amsterdam, as well as in Cuba, Peru, and 
Chile, and in cities throughout the United States. In Chicago and New 
York, slogans included:

  * Abolish Wage Slavery,
  * No More Bosses---Wage Slavery Must Go.
  * The 8-hour day is the next step in the Labor Movement, The Socialist
    CommonWealth is the Final Aim.

On May Day, 1890, in London, Frederick Engels was writing an 
introduction to a new edition of the Communist Manifesto, and included 
the following:

    Today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat
    is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time,
    mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the
    standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal
    enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International
    in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers' Congress of 1889. And
    today' s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and
    landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians
    of all countries are united indeed. If only Marx were still by my
    side to see this with his own eyes!

Across the ocean, Gompers (who probably actually deserves the honor of 
being called the "father" of May Day), noted with satisfaction in 1891:

    May 1st of each year is now looked upon by the organized
    wage-workers and the observing public as a sort of new Independence
    Day upon which they will every year strike a blow for emancipation
    and steadily weaken the shackles of wage slavery.

Although originally proposed to be a one-time affair, May Day soon 
became an annual event. For over a century, every year on May Day, 
workers on every continent honor the Haymarket Square martyrs and 
labor's continuing struggle for an eight hour day.

The struggle to set aside the September Labor Day as a legal holiday 
never subsided, however. The labor movement has never been a 
single-issue movement and has always exhibited tensions between 
different tendencies. By the early 1890s, thirty states and many cities 
recognized Labor Day as a legal holiday for workers.

Responding to the demands of the labor movement, Congress legalized 
Labor Day as a national holiday in 1894, after a watershed event in 
American labor history. On May 11, 1894, employees of the Pullman Palace 
Car Company in Chicago went on strike to protest wage cuts and the 
firing of union representatives. On June 26, the American Railroad 
Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, called for a boycott of all Pullman 
railway cars, crippling railroad traffic nationwide. To break the 
strike, the federal government dispatched troops to Chicago who 
violently suppressed the strike, killing thirty workers in the process.

In the wake of the ensuing massive unrest, Congress finally passed an 
act making Labor Day a legal holiday. No longer would workers have to 
take an unpaid day off to relax and celebrate their history. Like the 
weekend, Labor Day was brought to America by the organized action of the 
labor movement.

Photo of 1894 Pullman strike not available
*More than a dozen strikers were killed in the Pullman Strike of 1894*

Both May Day and Labor Day are days of celebration for workers. Both 
grew out of the struggles of workers for the eight-hour day and better 
working conditions, and many of the same people and organizations were 
involved in the origin of both holidays. Unfortunately, conflicts 
between different tendencies within the labor movement have affected the 
history of these two labor holidays.

 From the very beginning, the U.S. press has described the May Day 
demonstrators as "wild-eyed agitators" of the "European type," 
"radicals, mostly socialists and anarchists," with "accents and foreign 
mannerisms predominating." The Labor Day parade, by contrast, is seen as 
"a demonstration of the honest American workingman," "sober, clean 
quiet," and "well-clothed and well-appearing men."

The two workers' holidays are indeed different. On Labor Day, workers 
can take a well-deserved day off and enjoy their achievements without 
having to fight the bosses and cops to do so. On May Day, workers 
themselves assert their power, without legal sanction, in defiance of 
the bosses, the state, and even union leaders if necessary.

Curiously, Labor Day was started by members of the Socialist Labor Party 
in 1882, but by the 20th Century, the SLP was denouncing it, saying that 
Labor Day "represents a gift handed to the workers free, gratis and for 
nothing by the capitalist politicians . . . meant as an antidote for 
labor's own May Day." Conversely, May Day was started in 1886 by the 
American Federation of Labor, but by the 20th Century, the AFL would 
ignore May Day and its own role in starting it. Even today, the website 
of the national AFL-CIO does not mention its role in starting May Day, 
but many local AFL-CIO unions and federations do sponsor May Day events.

This is especially true since 2006, when May Day mobilizations in the 
United States made headlines for the first time in living memory. 
Millions of immigrant workers---documented and undocumented---took to 
the streets as Immigrant Rights groups and Latino organizations called a 
nation-wide one day strike and huge marches were staged across the 
country. Hundreds of thousands of workers marched in Los Angeles, San 
Francisco, and Oakland and throughout the nation and throughout the world.

For most workers around the world---and not only in the socialist 
countries---May Day is a legal holiday. Even the Catholic Church, in 
1955, dedicated May Day to Saint Joseph The Worker, the patron saint of 
workers and craftsmen.

Labor Day, like the weekend, was brought to us by the labor movement. If 
Labor Day has become de-politicized, we need to re-politicize it. We can 
do so by honoring the 30 union strikers murdered by federal troops 
during the Pullman Strike of 1894. It is to them, not the capitalist 
politicians, that we owe this holiday.


Labor Day and May Day---two holidays to honor the Haymarket Square 
martyrs, the union strikers shot down by federal troops during the 
Pullman Strike of 1894, and the thousands of workers continuing to be 
murdered by police violence. Labor Day and May Day are also two days to 
celebrate the achievements of the labor movement.



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140901/55f590a4/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: imgthumb12
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 3645 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140901/55f590a4/attachment-0004.jpe>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 109098 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140901/55f590a4/attachment-0005.jpe>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/png
Size: 2357 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140901/55f590a4/attachment-0001.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 1848 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140901/55f590a4/attachment-0001.gif>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 76232 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140901/55f590a4/attachment-0006.jpe>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 12444 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20140901/55f590a4/attachment-0007.jpe>