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May Day Is About More Than Just Pretty Flowers [1]
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Date: 2024-05-01
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
May Day is viewed by many folks living in the Northern Hemisphere as the start of spring, hence the floral-adorned celebrations that have long accompanied the first day of the month. But a lesser-known aspect of May Day is attributed to the labor movement, which has used the day to highlight and fight for workers’ rights for more than five centuries. The fight continues today.
In the 1500s, people across Africa, America, Asia, and Europe celebrated the beginning of spring with maypoles, dancing, music; it was “always a celebration of all that is free and life-giving in the world,” wrote historian Peter Linebaugh in his book “The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day.”
“Whatever else it was, it was not a time to work,” Linebaugh wrote.
But authorities in these places persecuted people who celebrated May Day by not working. Women were burned at the stake for witchly May Day behavior, and English Puritans outlawed maypoles and the games played by peasants on May Day. The ruling class attempted to rebrand the day as one for justice, liberty, and patriotism by using the day to punish conspirators against the ruling class. But the day’s labor roots remained strong.
Contemporary labor interpretations of May Day in the United States originate in Chicago, according to the Illinois Labor History Society. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions called for a strike starting May 1, 1886, to demand an eight-hour workday.
Illinois law had actually established an eight-hour workday two decades prior, but it was never enforced, which is why union organizers called for a rally at Haymarket Square on May Day. The rally lasted four days before erupting into violence as police clashed with protestors. On May 4, a dynamite bomb was thrown into the crowd by a person whose identity is still unknown, killing and wounding many protestors, union organizers, and police officers. In 1889, to commemorate the strike and the lives lost, the International Socialist Conference declared May 1 would be celebrated as “International Workers’ Day.” Former president Dwight Eisenhower would later rebrand May 1 as “Loyalty Day” during the early days of the Cold War to distance it from worker solidarity.
In the years that followed the strike, anti-labor politicians pointed to the violence at Haymarket Square as a reason to clamp down on labor organizing, but movements continued to pop up in rural and urban areas across the country.
One such example is the labor union United Farm Workers of America, which was founded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in the mid-1900s. The Central Valley of California became the site of major farm worker organizing to protect migrant workers from exploitative working conditions that violated far more than just an eight-hour workday. One of the union’s biggest accomplishments was the Delano strike and boycott of 1965 when grape workers refused to work until their demands for increased wages were met. United Farm Workers remains one of the largest agriculture unions in the country.
The mid-1900s marked the height of union membership in the United States: 35% of the country’s workforce was part of a union in 1954, according to the Department of the Treasury. Rural areas in particular saw high union membership, with more than four times the union elections per 10,000 workers in rural counties than urban ones during the 1960s and 70s, according to an analysis from the Regional Economic Development Institute.
Union membership has now reached record lows. In 2023, the percentage of wage and salary workers who were part of a union was 10%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This decline has been even more severe in rural workplaces than urban, according to the Regional Economic Development Institute.
Yet on average, people who are union members make more money: nonunion workers’ median weekly earnings were 86% of the median weekly earnings of union workers. But modern American labor law has made it increasingly difficult for workers to unionize, according to NPR reporting. “Right to work” laws are in place in 27 states to attract new businesses at the cost of workers’ rights.
But it’s not impossible to unionize in these states: in April 2024, a huge labor win occurred in right-to-work state Tennessee where 75% of all workers at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant voted to join the United Auto Workers union. The union has been working to organize employees in auto plants in several Southern states where protection for workers is tepid at best, and the Chattanooga win marked the first of what union organizers hope is many labor victories for U.S. auto workers.
May Day is often accompanied by protests, and it looks to be the case this year as well. Some of the biggest news in the U.S. right now is the thousands of students at college campuses in almost every part of the country demanding their universities divest support for corporations that arm Israel amid the ongoing attacks on Palestine. Some student groups and labor organizations are urging this year’s May Day be celebrated in solidarity with Palestinian workers.
In an article from May 9, 1969, Time Magazine wrote that “throughout this century, May Day has usually served as a handy barometer of the feelings of the working class.” Today is May Day 2024, and it could prove to be a similar barometer of the feelings of the working class in this century.
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