Here’s one idea about it, from a decidedly Left-Anarchist perspective.
From May Day-The Real Labor Day:
May 1st, International Workers’ Day, commemorates the historic struggle of working people throughout the world, and is recognized in every country except the United States, Canada, and South Africa. This despite the fact that the holiday began in the 1880s in the United States, with the fight for an eight-hour work day.
In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions passed a resolution stating that eight hours would constitute a legal day’s work from and after May 1, 1886. The resolution called for a general strike to achieve the goal, since legislative methods had already failed. With workers being forced to work ten, twelve, and fourteen hours a day, rank-and-file support for the eight-hour movement grew rapidly, despite the indifference and hostility of many union leaders. By April 1886, 250,000 workers were involved in the May Day movement.
The heart of the movement was in Chicago, organized primarily by the anarchist International Working People’s Association. Businesses and the state were terrified by the increasingly revolutionary character of the movement and prepared accordingly. The police and militia were increased in size and received new and powerful weapons financed by local business leaders. Chicago’s Commercial Club purchased a $2000 machine gun for the Illinois National Guard to be used against strikers. Nevertheless, by May 1st, the movement had already won gains for many Chicago clothing cutters, shoemakers, and packing-house workers. But on May 3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works Factory, killing four and wounding many. Anarchists called for a mass meeting the next day in Haymarket Square to protest the brutality.
… The meeting proceeded without incident, and by the time the last speaker was on the platform, the rainy gathering was already breaking up, with only a few hundred people remaining. It was then that 180 cops marched into the square and ordered the meeting to disperse. As the speakers climbed down from the platform, a bomb was thrown at the police, killing one and injuring seventy. Police responded by firing into the crowd, killing one worker and injuring many others.
The article goes on to tell us the following:
It is not surprising that the state, business leaders, mainstream union officials, and the media would want to hide the true history of May Day, portraying it as a holiday celebrated only in Moscow’s Red Square. In its attempt to erase the history and significance of May Day, the United States government declared May 1st to be “Law Day”, and gave us instead Labor Day – a holiday devoid of any historical significance other than its importance as a day to swill beer and sit in traffic jams.
Compare this perspective to the explanation of Labor Day found in David Montgomery’s “Labor Day and May Day”:
The first of May was not only well established in European traditions as a day of hope, but it was also in every 19th century industrial country the day on which workers were most likely to go on strike. Workers were usually paid at the end of the month, which made the beginning of the next month a time when they both had a little money to sustain them and could see just how ittle money they had for all their recent work. Moreover, the spring months lead the strike list (at least for offensive strikes, when workers chose the time and place) because the cost of living was lower than in winter and because the building season was just beginning. I would say that everywhere building trades workers played a decisive role in making May 1 strike day. When socialists and anarchists declared a labor holiday, they had one which the working class had already made ready for them. It was a natural fit between political movements and “spontaneous” action.
One way in which this shows up is in the first round of eight-hour day laws and strikes in 1867-68 in the United States. May 1 was the most common deadline — starting with the great May 1, 1867 strike in Chicago, almost twenty years before the Haymarket Affair.
According to Montgomery, striking a less polemical note than the writers of the anarchist treatment of Labor Day quoted above, the institution of Labor Day in the U.S. is a “more complicated affair.” He tells us that Labor Day was originally an idea of the Knights of Labor in New York and was later adopted by state and then federal governments. He also tells us that the first Monday of September was a compromise day aimed at appeasing employer’s demands because the original proposed date of the holiday, September 1st, might disrupt the middle of the work week.
This, in turn, is a slightly different telling than the article we find at holidayspot.com, which gives a decidedly less political history. It tells us that the first person to propose Labor Day in the U.S., either Peter McGuire, a carpenter and New York Labor leader, or Michael McGuire, another labor leader and a machinist, (there’s some dispute here) recommended September 1st as the date and this was carried out by the Knights of Labor with a parade and picnic on that day in 1884. They then passed a proposal to make that the recognized day from then on, until an act of Congress in 1894 changed the holiday to the first Monday of September.
This latter telling, misses all of the historical background regarding workers strikes and the contention history of labor and management relations. It seems very important to recognize this historical background regardless of whether or not Labor Day in the U.S. was established when it was as a way to disconnect the laborers in the U.S. (and Canada) from their fellow workers in other countries, who predominantly celebrate May Day (May 1st) as Labor Day, partially in memory of the Haymarket Massacre in the U.S., as well as the movement to establish the 8-hour work day first catalyzed in America.
Now go enjoy your labor-less Monday, you.
