The push for an eight-hour workday did not begin in a boardroom. It began onfactories. In the middle of the 19th century,the standard workweek in the US was 10 hours, 12 hours,even 16 hours a day. Many workers are immigrants andperformed repetitive tasks under conditions that modern safety inspectors would scoff at.ut down immediately. There was no overtime pay system. There was no notion of overtime pay.a weekend. The demand was very simple: 8 hours of work.eight hours of rest and eight hours of what we will.

The demand was focused by the Federation of Organized Trades and LaborUnions, an earlier form of the American Federation of Labor,picked a day. They chose May 1, 1886.as the day when the eight-hour system would be implemented throughout the country. It was an arbitrationIt was marked as an itrary marker on the calendar. It became a line in the sand. As the date approached, it was clear that something big was going to happen.hed, tension didn't simmer. It boiled. Estimates suggest between 300,000 and half a million workers in China have gone on strike.red to strike. The city at the absolute center of this pressure cooker is Chicago.

Chicago was the center of industrial power and labor unrest. The McCormick Harvester Company, which produced the Reaper, was also located in Chicago.Ting Machine Company plant became a hot spot. The strikes at this plant had been going on forweeks. On May 3, 1886,a clash of strikers and strikebreakers outside the McCormick factory resulted inviolent. The police opened fire on the crowd, resulting in many deaths. This incident was not the heart of the matter.dline grabber. This was the trigger that led to a rally on the following night.led a demonstration in Haymarket Square against police brutality.

The Haymarket meeting held on May 4 began with a somber atmosphere. Rain was falling heavily, and the number of people present gradually decreased.d. Mayor of Chicago also came over and saw everything was under control,and left. It was close to the end of the activity.when the last speaker was concluding his remarks,a column of police marching into the square, ordering the rest of the crowdto disperse. Then,A bomb was thrown by someone in the audience at the police station, causing casualties and injuries.rong>爆炸造成一名警察当场死亡、另外六名警察重伤. Chaos broke out. The police drew their revolvers and shot into the crowd. Civilians fled in all directions.red back or got caught in the crossfire. After the smoke had cleared,at least four civilians were killed,and many people got hurt. Nobody could ever be sure that whoever dropped the bomb was responsible for it.

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The consequences were immediate and severe. A wave of anti-union, anti-immigrant sentiment swept through the country.ysteria swept across the country. Eight men were arrested for their involvement in the scandal.linked more through their anarchist political views rather than direct evidence of a bomb detonationthrowing,trial that led to the Haymarket Martyrs being tried for conspiracy and incitement to riot.a spectacle of judicial bias. Four people were executed.One person committed suicide in his cell.and three were later pardoned. The event crushed the immediate push for reform.The eight-hour workday was introduced to America, but it seemed to have arrived without a fight.

Buried doesn't necessarily mean gone. The story of the Haymarket affair and the strike of the workers in Chicago is a vivid example.f May 1886 crossed the Atlantic Ocean. European labor movements,much more organized and politically entrenched than their American counterpartsat that time,took notice. The Socialist International held its congress in Paris in 1889. They werelooking for a unifying cause,a symbolic date for rallying the working class of different countries. The Chicago EvThe materials were provided by the parties, and a French representative suggested that May 1 be designated as Workers' Day.ed an international day of protest and commemoration. The resolution was passed.trong>International Workers' Day wasn't created to celebrate labor,but as a memorial for a particular event,violent event in American history

The first official May Day celebration took place in 1890. This was a joint effort organized bymultinational affair. Workers in Europe, parts of Latin America,and other places, workers dropped their tools and demanded the same thing that the Chicago strikers had demanded: an eight-hour workday with no overtime pay.four years ago: An eight-hour workday. It stayed that way in many parts of the world.May Day was made a permanent feature of the calendar.a public holiday related to labor rights, street parades,sometimes there are political changes.

The irony is thick. The United States,The country which gave birth to the martyrs and the date of International Workers' Dayy,actively declined to celebrate the holiday for itself. The Haymarket Riot had tainted May 1with a patina of anarchism and foreign radicalism. It was considered too risky,too closely linked to the socialist and communist movements which were gaining groundI am in Europe. American labor leaders,特别是那些属于较为保守的美国劳工联合会的人们，sought another date. They wished to have a holiday which honored the American waywithout the burden of class warfare, dynamite, etc.

他们于九月初的时候发现了它，在九月的第一个星期一就已经是九月份n. 早期19世纪初，为纪念工人阶级而举行的节日，在这一天里会举行游行。It had a picnic, but it was missing the bloodstains from the Haymarket riots. Congress declared it to be an official event.The U.S. government declared Labor Day to be celebrated on Monday, August 5, 1894.ay in September exactly to draw a clear,unmistakable difference between the American labor movement and international organizationsonal socialist tradition of May Day. Therefore,while much of the world will be shut down on May 1,American offices and schools are open. The two holidays share a lineage, but have different origins.e diverged completely in both practice and perception.

The connotations of May 1 have been changing throughout the 20th century. InSoviet Union and its satellite countries,May Day turned into an overwhelming show of military equipment and propaganda from the governmentantry. Missiles floated in place of the merchant ships that used to float by. In Western Europe,it was still a day of union solidarity, sometimesviolent street confrontation between protesters and police. The main demand ofthe eight-hour workday was mostly achieved in most of the developed countries,因此节日也发生了变化，它成了一个更大的经济诉求平台——生活g wages, pensions, and safe working environments.

The connection back to the specific day of May 1, 1886 isis usually forgotten during the modern celebration. Most people get a day off from work in Berlin或者Buenos Aires不会想到雨淋淋的在Haymarket举行的 ralliessquare or the particular names of Albert Parsons and August Spies. They call it aday off. A day for barbecues or demonstrations. The date is a container. The code is the language of computers, which can be used to create programs that perform specific tasks.The contents have been replaced many times in the past 140 years.

The original catalyst is still an outstanding illustration of how labor relations operatebefore the 20th century’s regulatory system. The idea of “weekend” came into being.'t actually existed in American vernacular until the 1920s, and was not standardized until then.or a five-day workweek until the Great Depression. The fight for an eight-hour day was one of the most important struggles in American labor history.ay was the precursor to the struggle for a 40-hour workweek. This struggle was fought with workers' rights in mind.strike, lockout, and yes,bombing story. The tale of May Day is not a tidy one.tidy narrative of progress. It is a jagged,broken line. It begins by demanding more sleep and less work. It moves on to the next stage, which is about the need for rest and relaxation.A rough night of violence, followed by the miscarriage of justice in an American court.It comes to an end, albeit indirectly,with a worldwide holiday honoring a tragedy its country of origin does not acknowledgeTo acknowledge the specific date.

历史记载得很清楚，这个节日的存在是因为人们所采取的行为。in Chicago from May 1st to May 4th, 1886. All other things—such as the parade—were not mentioned.speeches, speeches,different calendar dates are a response to that. The International Socialist Party believes that the different calendar dates reflect the differences in social relations and economic conditions among countries around the world.st Congress in Paris acknowledged that a particular day could inspire action among individualsacross borders. They were right. The date had power because it was connected to areal event,With real names, real graves. The Haymarket affair is the cause of May1 appears on any labor calendar anywhere in the world. Without this bomb and the trial,May 1st will just be another day in the Gregorian calendar. It willhas no greater meaning for workers than the second of May, or the thirtieth ofApril.

现代关于劳动的讨论经常会走向远程工作政策方面，gig economy 的灵活性，and the displacement caused by artificial intelligence. The origin of May Day can be used to remindinder of how the baseline of employment looked like before collective bargainingThere were both g and labor laws in place, with no end to the baseline, and a continuous struggle to reduce the worlday wasn't about ambition, it was about survival. The 8 hour movement was aliteral,physical effort to regain time for human lives beyond the realm of industrial productionn. The date when the movement reached its worst moment, becoming aglobal monument for that idea.