May Day is International Worker's Day

Haymarket Square Riot

     It happened in Chicago. Violence punctuated by a bomb in Haymarket Square sparked a movement that went viral in 1886 spreading around the world. The reverberations are still heard today. Sound preposterous? It is true.

A Movement Comes of Age

Haymarket Square Bombing, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

     May Day, also known as International Worker’s Day, is a celebrated around the world, It is akin to the U.S. Labor Day celebrations held in September. It is a holiday set aside to honor the worker's role in building society and civilization.  May Day became synonymous with worker's rights after the Second International recognized it as day to commemoration of the Haymarket Square Riot in 1889. Previously, May 1, 1886, had been set for the recognition of the eight-hour work day by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions.

Big Shoulders and More

    Chicago, also known as the city of big shoulders, was a bustling, hustling place in 1886. At the time it was becoming an economic juggernaut, hovering at the edges of the rapidly changing western frontier. No other city in the United States could match the manufacturing muscle that Chicago possessed. It was a magnet for business in part because of one tragic event. Nor could any city compare with its transportation system. Chicago had become the central hub of the of the railroad industry.

Chicago Fire of 1871, courtesy of Blogspot Public Domain Clipart

       The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 made available vast swaths of open land for development. Opportunities in the west of the Mississippi River were emerging. Huge businesses arose out of the ashes. With business came the need for railroads. There was plenty of space to develop an even better transportation infrastructure.

     Work opportunities were plentiful in Chicago. Yet work conditions were often atrocious as later depicted by Upton Sinclair in his famous book The Jungle in 1906 about the Chicago Stockyards. Worker abuse was rampant.

Courtesy of Royalty Free Stock Images

 It was the Bomb

    

     On May 4, 1886, four anarchists exploded a dynamite bomb on the second day of worker's rights rally. Police the previous day, had harassed workers striking for an 8-hour day at the McCormickHarvesting Machine Company. Policeman sided with the local business men, not considering the workers demands legitimate. There is still controversy as to who the bomber was.

  Revolutionary Times

     At the time, workers rights were being hotly debated in the United States and all across Europe too. The Industrial Revolution which advanced rapidly after the Civil War was maturing. The days of unimpeded growth and wealth accumulation became hotly debated. It was the dawn of the Gilded Age. Concurrently, the Second International in Paris decided to recognize the Haymarket Square Riot as representative of worker's rights struggle. They designated May 1 as a day to commemorate the incident.

     An outgrowth of the Haymarket Square Riots decades later was the formation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) one of the most powerful union forces in the United States in the twentieth century.

Binary code,
courtesy of Royalty  Free Stock Images

     

    Today, the Technology Revolution is changing all aspects of our civilization. It is causing great disruption within business as old profit models breakdown and jobs evaporate. We face similar conditions of wealth . This is the new frontier in which the living wage is claiming legitimacy.