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Isolating the population in most parts of the world to prevent the spread of the coronavirus will prevent millions of workers from all continents from taking to the streets this May 1st to commemorate Labor Day.
However, This date, chosen for more than a century as an emblematic day of the labor movement, will not go unnoticed.
This Friday marks the 134th anniversary of May 1 in which a workers’ strike paralyzed the United States industry for the first time, and half a million workers from that country took to the streets to demand the eight-hour workday. .
That was the culmination of a crusade led by anarchist and socialist leaders and repressed three days later in a violent day that went down in history as the Haymarket massacre, which occurred in the plaza of that name, in the heart of Chicago.
The second city in the United States had become a huge center of development. Hundreds of thousands of workers, many of them immigrants, had come there to hook up in the factories of the nascent industrial revolution.
There also began the fight against low wages and long working hours. With the demand for an eight-hour day, which is taken for granted everywhere today, the workers went on strike with such a bloody result that the date became an infamous symbol in United States history.
To erase the memory of that event, the day was long removed from the official US calendar and replaced by the first Monday in September.
Haymarket Square was split in two by a highway and a memorial that had been erected on one side was replaced by a building.
However, none of this erased the imprint of the Chicago ‘martyrs’, as the trade unionists who fell in the square under police bullets were called and those who were later executed as instigators of the strike.
First struggles
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, unionism gained a lot of strength in the United States with the support of anarchists, socialists and communists. In 1877, a railroad workers strike paralyzed much of the country’s transportation.
American authorities and entrepreneurs they began to fear that the Paris Commune would be repeated on their territory, the popular insurrection of March 18, 1871 that constituted the first experience of socialist government in Europe.
Although this rebellion lasted only seventy days, it was viewed with alarm in the world’s power centers, as a warning of the revolution.
After the civil war and economic depression that followed years later in the United States (called by economists ‘prolonged depression’ because it lasted two decades), the unrest was felt especially in the factories and fueled a rebellion that came to have revolutionary features. .
European immigrants, familiar with the socialist and anarchist theories in vogue in their countries, helped fuel the struggles of the workers, that during good part of the nineteenth century revolved around the need to shorten the strenuous working hours, which ranged from 12, 14, 16 and even 18 hours.
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This was the main demand of the workers since the beginning of the transformation of the United States. in an industrial power.
Construction workers, shipyard caulkers, and factory workers were the first to demand a reduction in working hours, which stabilized in the middle of the century at eleven hours.
In response to numerous strikes and worker demonstrations, President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln after his assassination in 1865, enacted the so-called Ingersoll Act three years later, which established the eight-hour day for government workers, but it was not it was applied in practice because it included too many exceptions that allowed the working day to be increased to 2 and 6 pm.
In 1880 the Federation of Workers of the United States and Canada was organized, which placed the topic of the working day at the top of its agenda.
In one of his meetings he agreed to call a general strike in favor of the eight-hour day and set May 1, 1886 as the date to start it.
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As that day approached, several conflicts arose between employers and workers due to a succession of dismissals of workers. who refused to leave the movement.
Once the strike started, in the following days there were rallies in several cities, the main one of which occurred on May 4 in Chicago and gave rise to what would go down in history as the Haymarket massacre.
The workers gathered in the square of that name, in the heart of Chicago, had heard several speakers when they were surrounded by the Police, whose commander ordered to dissolve the meeting.
At that time, an explosive device exploded, causing casualties among police and protesters., and in response the Police made a closed discharge against the concentration.
Shortly afterwards a state of siege was declared in the city and a persecution was unleashed against the organizers of the strike.
This was the main demand of the workers since the beginning of the transformation of the United States into an industrial power.
Eight of them were subjected to summary judgment on various charges, including that of causing the death of a police officer by launching the explosive device and that of belonging to a “secret association” that sought to carry out the social revolution and destroy the established order. Five of the accused were sentenced to death and three to prison.
Most of the death row inmates were German nationals, including a journalist, August Spies, editor of the Arbeiter Zeitung, an anarchist newspaper founded in Chicago by veterans of the great rail strike of 1877.
Two others, Georg Engel and Adolph Fischer, were typographers from the same newspaper. There was also an American, Albert Parsons. Another of the Germans, Louis Ling, committed suicide in his cell.
An exceptional witness to the execution was the Cuban apostle José Martí, who was then a correspondent for La Nación de Buenos Aires in the United States. This is how he described the scene: “They come out of their cells. They shake hands, they smile. They read the sentence, they hold their hands behind their backs with handcuffs, they wrap their arms around their bodies with a leather sash and they put a white shroud like the robe of Christian catechumens. Below is the crowd, sitting in rows in front of the scaffold as in a theater … Firmness on Fisher’s face, prayer on that of Spies, pride on that of Parsons, Engel makes a joke about his hood, Spies screams: “The voice you are going to stifle will be more powerful in the future than how many words I could say now.” The hoods are lowered, then a sign, a noise, the trap gives way, the four bodies fall and sway in a frightening dance… ”.
The persecution was not limited to union leaders. In the following months, thousands of workers were fired, detained, and prosecuted.
Almost all were immigrants, not only from Germany but from Italy, Spain, Ireland, Poland, Russia and other Slavic countries. A wave of xenophobia spread through the United States and many excesses were committed under it.
The trial of those who were convicted was full of irregularities. The judge ordered that it be collective, which allowed the inclusion of all kinds of evidence against the inmates.
The members of the jury were chosen by a state official after they expressed their animosity towards the accused.
The person responsible for throwing the explosive device could not be identified. However, on August 28 the jury handed down the sentence. The case was submitted to the Supreme Court of Justice, which confirmed the decision in October 1887.
This was fulfilled on the following November 11. Six years later, on June 26, 1893, Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld, in response to a petition for pardon for the three unionists remaining in prison signed by 60,000 people, granted them absolute pardon and stated that the Chicago ‘martyrs’ had not had a fair trial.
The persecution was not limited to union leaders.
The consequences
The tragic episode of Haymarket and its bloody aftermath caused a strong impact on the American employers, who accepted the eight-hour workday the same year.
On the other hand, May 1 acquired enormous symbolic value for the labor movement worldwide.
In many countries their commemoration was formalized in tribute to the workers, with the exception of the United States, Canada and other countries of British origin, which chose other dates to divert attention from a cause they identify with socialism.
In the United States, Labor Day is celebrated instead of Labor Day on the first Monday in September since 1894, when President Grover Cleveland established it as a national holiday, seeking to appease unionism.
The irony is that he did it in the midst of another railroad workers strike that they continued to demand arbitrary dismissals, excessive hours and low wages.
Labor Day became the only celebration of work in the United States, unlike almost the rest of the world, where May 1 is commemorated with mass marches. With the exception of today, when the coronavirus has forced millions of workers to stay home.
LEOPOLDO VILLAR BORDA
For the time
