May Day was first celebrated in Dublin in 1890 when a demonstration was organised by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions on the first Sunday in May. One of the key demands of the platform speakers was an eight-hour day.
The Dublin celebration was part of an international movement for shorter hours. It started out in America when May 1, 1886 was declared by an America union to be the day when workers would cease to work more than eight hours.
Hundreds of thousands went on strike and marched nationwide. The biggest march was in Chicago, and the response of the city’s ruling class was a murderous police attack on unarmed strikers. The next day, a protest meeting in a spot known as Haymarket Square was also attacked by armed police and this time, an unknown person threw a bomb. This bomb was the pretext for mass arrests and the trial of the movement’s leaders, who were executed the following year despite massive national and international protests.
In 1888, the American Federation of Labour defiantly called for another eight-hour strike, and they sent a delegate to the founding conference of the Second (Socialist) International in 1889 calling for international action. It was this conference that organized the first ever simultaneous international workers’ demonstration on May Day 1890.
Ever since May Day has been marked across the world as a day of struggle for workers’ rights. But it has also been a day where socialists and trade unionists discuss their strategy for liberating working people from capitalism.
Today workers on the North and South of this island are facing an employer class who hide behind the slogan of social solidarity but who try to reduce wages, force workers to take holidays during the lockdown, or make workers go back to factories, offices and building sites which are unsafe.
Tragically, the official leaders of the unions have gone quiet, or worse, seek a new social partnership with the employers.
People Before Profit reject this approach. We want:
- A Minimum wage for workers – €15 an hour in the South – £12.60 an hour in the North.
- An automatic right of workers to bargain collectively with their employer.
- A mandatory sick pay scheme for all workers.
- A Four day week with no loss of pay.
- Reduce the retirement ager to 65 and force employers to pay a proper pension.
To achieve even these limited demands, we have to build a different, fighting trade union movement. One inspired by the ideas of fighters like Connolly and Larkin rather than leaders who have cow towed to the political establishment.
In our fight for workers’ rights, it will become clear just how rotten the current system of capitalism is. As their system spirals into yet another economic depression – which started even before the Covid-19 crisis – we need a better way of organising our society. One built on 21st century socialism that outs our lives ahead of a brutal profit system.