By Jorge Jorquera
On May Day we recall past victories and foreshadow future battles. This day we join with our comrades around the world to demonstrate our conviction that one day society will belong to all. We should remember the class-struggle tradition of May Day and reignite the fighting spirit it stands for.
On May 1, 1886, Chicago workers went on strike, demanding an eight-hour day. Workers from industrial and commercial enterprises totally paralysed city business. Capitalists mounted a savage counter-offensive.
A labour rally to protest against police harassment was held in Haymarket Square on May 4. The peaceful assembly was descended upon by police after a bomb explosion. Police fired into the crowd, killing and injuring several workers. Arrests of workers' leaders followed; four were sentenced to death and hanged on November 11, 1887.
In memory of this battle, the July 1889 Paris congress of the Second International decided to declare May 1 a day of annual demonstrations. May 1 was celebrated for the first time as an international holiday in 1890 in Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the USA, Norway, France, Sweden and several other countries. The main demand was the eight-hour workday.
Shorter working day
The eight-hour movement that inspired May Day had its origins in Australia, in the working-class struggles that emerged after transportation and the assignment of convict labour ended in 1840. At that time, in Australia and internationally, under the best conditions employees worked 10 hours daily for six days a week.
But only a small minority had those conditions. Shop assistants, for example, had notoriously long hours; 14 or more hours per day were common. Consequently, the first agitation for a reduction in working hours was that of the drapers' assistants in the 1840s.
The stonemasons took up the fight for an eight-hour day in February 1856. The Collingwood and Melbourne lodges appointed a deputation to present their proposal to the newly formed Master Builders' Association, and the employers agreed. Meetings of other trades in the industry pledged support, and a central committee was appointed to take control of the campaign.
In Melbourne, in contrast to Sydney, the reduction in hours was without a reduction in wages. The agitation then spread to other industries, and an Eight-hour League was established to organise the campaign. By the end of 1856, the eight-hour day extended to most of the skilled trades throughout Victoria.
While victories for skilled workers did flow through to many of the unskilled, for most shop assistants, general labourers and rural workers, the longer working week continued for years. The worst off were usually women workers, who suffered the longest hours of continuous work in needlework and tailoring.
Likewise "apprentices" suffered horrible conditions. Many employers engaged "apprentices", exploiting them 12 to 16 hours a day for several years without pay and dismissing them when they asked for wages.
Shop assistants and waitresses worked up to 90 hours per week for wages which came to about a penny per hour. In many factories children continued to be employed for nothing, on the pretence of being apprentices or improvers. In 1895, 15 of the registered dressmaking factories in Victoria had no paid workers at all.
The maximum possible percentage of Victorian workers benefiting from the eight-hour day grew from 14.7% in 1857 to 21.9% in 1881 and 33.3% in 1891: still a minority of workers. Another weakness was that many unions that gained the eight-hour day in the 1850s lost it during economic recessions. The Melbourne coach builders, for example, lost the eight-hour day in 1859 and did not regain it until 1882.
However, the eight-hour day movement played an important role in the development of Australian unionism. By 1881, 56 of the 76 unions in Melbourne had their origins in demands for an eight-hour day.
The movement also encouraged different trades to unite in struggle and increase their effectiveness. The Sydney metal trades formed the Eight-hour Conference in 1872. The Eight-hour System Extension and General Short Hour League, which operated in Sydney from August 1869 to May 1871, was the direct predecessor of the New South Wales Trades and Labour Council.
Class struggle
May Day was not intended only to "celebrate" the gains of the eight-hour movement, but to express the international unity of the working class and the basic antagonism between working people and the capitalist class. The revolutionary leader Rosa Luxemburg expressed it like this:
"The first of May proclaims this slogan of the eight-hour day. But even after the attainment of this aim, the May Day celebration will not be abolished. As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeois and against the government will last, as long as all demands are not fulfilled, the May Day holiday will be the annual expression of these demands."
Today, with an increase of attacks on many of the basic hard-won rights of working people in Australia, we should recall the best traditions of May Day. To have any chance of defending what we have left — let alone regaining what we have lost — we have to re-establish these traditions.
On the job, industry wide and across the community, we need to rebuild worker solidarity. We need to win working people again to collective action and consistent industrial militancy — focused, not on bargaining through government and business forums, but on mobilising the collective power of workers to stop capitalist industry and impose community demands, whether economic or political.
On May Day all union activists would do well to consider the words of the NSW Labour Council Annual Report in 1924:
"The Australian movement desires not only that the day [Labour Day] be fixed for May 1, but that the whole character and purpose of the demonstration should be changed. Dinners, sports, picnics — these are not good enough. The movement is worth more than this. Let our May Day certainly be a day of rejoicing, but let it also be a day in which all active elements of the movement take stock of the work of the last year, of the prospects ahead, and the program required. Let it also be a day of demonstrations which express a growing class-consciousness of the working class and a declaration of war upon capitalist society. We want a Labour Day which will give the movement a chance to unite for a real move forward on the basis of all the more pressing interests of the workers. Forward to new battle. Forward to world revolution."