Labor Day it will forever be associated with the world socialist workers' movement. The execution of a group of five workers who advocated the achievement of eight hours of daily work (these workers belonged to a union in the United States of America), gave rise to the celebration that takes place in many countries on May 1. The strike, carried out by these workers, took place on May 1, 1886 and reached its most violent moment on May 4 in the so-called Haymarket Square (Chicago) riot. In this riot, someone who could never be identified threw a bomb at the police, who were using repressive methods to control the protesters of a march that, until then, had been peaceful.
The bomb killed fifteen police officers. As a result of these events, a trial was held in which the eight workers were confronted with a court that finally decided to sentence five of the eight workers to death. Years after its completion, the trial was reviewed and deemed unfair, biased, and completely unbalanced.
The events that occurred in Chicago allowed the eight-hour workday to begin to be taken into account by employers around the world. In the same year 1886, the North American president Andrew Johnson, promulgated the law known as Ingersoll, this law established that no worker should work more than eight hours a day.
However, initially this law was not fully effective because in employment contracts, there were still clauses that allowed workers to work 14 hours, for which it was necessary that labor associations and unions will redouble efforts in order to achieve their goals.
Ironically, when the working day that did not exceed eight hours was finally obtained, the celebration of Labor Day it was not institutionalized within the calendar of the society of the United States that currently celebrates Labor's day or Labor Day , the first Monday of September (this celebration was changed to this date for fear of the United States government to commemorate a party considered socialist). In 1954, the church joined the celebration of Chicago workers and the Pope established the day of Saint Joseph the Worker, known today as Labor Day .
The agreement that allowed this date to be established as the day on which American workers would be remembered was finalized three years after the incidents in Chicago, in Paris at the Congress Socialist Worker . It is finally after the First World War that in Europe the eight-hour working day was accepted as a fair working time for the workers. Initially, the companies did not pay the day that the workers took time off, a situation that complicated the establishment of the labor day.
In the former Soviet Union, it was Lenin who decreed May 1 as a day of national strike. In a fact that marked the only positive management of his mandate, Hitler in Germany was the first ruler who managed to get paid on May 1, something that until then seemed unlikely.
The achievement of eight hours of daily work marked a milestone for the consolidation of the international labor movement, because for the first time the workers had the impression that their demands were heard and that the power they could wield over their employers was ultimately achieving important results.
The following quote emerges from the communist manifesto of Frederick Engels and Karl Marx:“For today at the time I write these lines, the proletariat of Europe and America is reviewing its forces, mobilized for the first time in a single army, under a single flag and for a single immediate objective:the legal fixation of the normal eight-hour day, already proclaimed in 1866 by the Congress of the International held in Geneva and again in 1889 by the Paris Workers' Congress. Today's spectacle will demonstrate to the capitalists and landlords of all countries that, indeed, the proletarians of all countries are united.”
With the recognition of May 1 as International Worker's Day , the struggle of the initiators of a feat that raised and highlighted the dignity of those who sustain their respective families through the exercise of a profession or trade was vindicated.