USA The First Labor Day: The Bloody Strike Behind the Holiday

It’s little more than a day off for shopping now, but when Labor Day was first observed, it wasn’t all fun and back-to-school sales. Its passage as a federal holiday, in 1894, was a sort of peace offering from President Grover Cleveland for the killing of a dozen or more striking railway workers.

The strike began as unrest in the Illinois town founded by George Pullman, creator of the railroad sleeping car.

The town, just outside Chicago, had been built as a utopian home for Pullman’s workers, but the utopia was designed to serve Pullman above all others, according to PBS. “Its residents all worked for the Pullman company,” PBS notes, “their paychecks drawn from Pullman bank, and their rent, set by Pullman, deducted automatically from their weekly paychecks.”

From 1880 to 1893, all seemed well in Pullman (the town), until an economic depression prompted Pullman (the man) to cut employees’ wages — even though their rents remained the same. The workers walked out. In solidarity, members of the American Railway Union (founded, per TIME, by “fiery Socialist Eugene Debs”) took up the cause, and its 150,000 members refused to work on trains carrying Pullman cars, prompting a nationwide transportation nightmare.

It was, according to The Atlantic, America’s first true nationwide strike — and a major milestone for the labor movement. But it didn’t end well, for anyone. President Cleveland, under pressure from the railroad industry and the U.S. Postal Service, whose mail trains had ground to a halt, declared the strike a federal crime and sent troops to break it. David Ray Papke, the author of The Pullman Case, describes the rioting and arson that ensued, and was suppressed; while death counts vary by source, TIME called it “one of the bloodiest strikes in U.S. history.”

Read more: The First Labor Day: The Bloody Strike Behind the Holiday

USA: Labor Day 2011: unions at a crossroads

There are the usual picnics and parades. But after its most tumultuous year in decades, unions have little to celebrate this Labor Day.

Unemployment stood at 8.5 percent in Indiana in July, only slightly better than the national figure of 9.1 percent. And on Friday, a new jobs report showed no net gain of jobs in August, as whatever jobs were added in the private sector were erased by the jobs lost in the public sector.

At the same time as their members were losing jobs nationwide, unions saw their collective bargaining rights under attack in statehouses across the nation, including Indiana.

Note EU-Digest: The Labor Day holiday was first proposed in 1882, according to the U. S. Department of Labor's website.

Some historians say Peter McGuire, the general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, was first to suggest a day to honor those "who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold."

However, many historians credit Matthew Maguire, a machinist, with first suggesting the holiday. The first Labor Day in the US was celebrated on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City under the guidance of the Central Labor Union.

According to labor statistics from 2009, here is a breakdown of the number of professionals in various fields.

• Firefighters: 258,000
• Hairdressers, hairstylists and cosmetologists: 718,000
• Chefs and head cooks: 281,000
• Musicians, singers and related workers: 179,000
• Bakers: 183,000
• Taxi drivers and chauffeurs: 286,000
• Service station attendants: 96,000
• Farmers and ranchers: 825,000
• Pharmacists: 232,000
• Teachers: 6.5 million

For more: Labor Day 2011: unions at a crossroads | The Indianapolis Star | indystar.com

May 1 Labor Day celebrations - working class has not increased the ranks of organized labor

Labour Day or Labor Day is an annual holiday celebrated all over the world. It is to commemorate the solidarity of the world wide labor union movement, and to celebrate the economic and social achievements by workers all over the world. The majority of countries celebrate Labor Day on May 1, and it is popularly known as May Day and International Workers’ Day, while some like the US celebrate it on the first Monday of September.

In Soviet times May 1 was celebrated in Russia as International Workers' Day and saw massive Communist Party rallies. In 1992, the name was changed to Spring and Labor Day but it still remains a national holiday. More than 2 million people are expected to take part in holiday events across the country, including demonstrations by the ruling United Russia party, the Communists and trade unions, the ultranationalist LDPR Party and the opposition Solidarity movement.

In China the People's Daily, the ruling Communist Party's flagship newspaper, extolled the importance of workers in a changing economy and world. "Work diligently, work honestly, work more clever," read the editorial's headline. In Hong Kong, thousands took part in various marches even as the territory's first-ever minimum wage took effect. About 3,000 people took part in a Sunday morning protest while another 5,000 were expected at an afternoon rally.

Thousands of workers also marched in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines to vent their anger over the rising cost of living and growing disparities between the rich and poor.

Police in Seoul said about 50,000 people gathered in a park near the National Assembly, waving signs and chanting anti-government slogans. Some of the protesters marched toward the Assembly building after the rally but no violence erupted, police said. About 8,000 people held a separate rally near City Hall. "We want to put an end to the barbaric times of unlimited competition and winner-take-all systems," Kim Young-hoon, head of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, said in a speech at the rally, according to his office.

Two hundred thousand workers filled İstanbul's Taksim Square on Sunday morning demanding jobs and better work conditions on May Day, also known as Labor Day. Taksim Square carries a significant symbolic importance in May Day celebrations. On May 1, 1977, 34 people were killed during a Labor Day gathering at the same square when shots were fired into the crowd from a nearby building leading to an intervention by security forces and armored vehicles. Most of the casualties resulted from the panic caused by the intervention among hundreds of thousands of participants.

There are more workers today who work for wages than was the case 50 years ago. And yet, ironically, the increase in size of the working class has not increased the ranks of organized labor. Workers’ unions today have considerably less power over the conditions of production. Indeed, one can go further and say that countries like the Philippines have less control over the fate of their own economies than before. It is important to ask why as we go through the rituals of another Labor Day.

EU-Digest

The Telegraph - May 1 labor day: Riots in Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Spain and Turkey fueled by economic crisis - by Henry Samuel

For the complete report from the Telegraph click on this link

May 1 labor day: Riots in Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Spain and Turkey fueled by economic crisis - by Henry Samuel

Police in Berlin arrested 57 people while around 50 officers were hurt as young demonstrators threw bottles and rocks and set fire to cars and rubbish bins. There were also clashes in Hamburg, where anti-capitalist protesters attacked a bank. In Turkey, masked protesters threw stones and petrol bombs at police, smashing banks and supermarket windows in its biggest city, Istanbul. Security forces fired tear gas and water cannon at hundreds of rioters and more than a hundred were arrested with dozens more hurt. There were also scattered skirmishes with police in the capital, Ankara, where 150,000 people marched.In Greece, officers fired flash grenades to disperse rioters in Athens after attacks on banks and traffic cameras. Transport strikes disrupted bus, train and ferry services as well as flights by Greek carrier Olympic Airlines. Twenty people were injured and five arrested after police clashed with demonstrators at a traditional labor day rally in Linz in northern Austria. In France, unions joined forces for the first time since the Second World War, but turnout was not as high as a protest day in March. There were also marches in big cities in Spain, burdened with the highest unemployment rate in Europe. More than 10,000 people gathered in the center of Madrid in a demonstration organized by the country's two largest trade unions.