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May Day is A Rust Belt Holiday
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 May 1, 2024 | LABOR HISTORY | (Click image to enlarge) When forty-thousand workers marched down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue in 1886, their platform was the slogan “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will,” coincidentally the same as the number of strikers who would be killed in the coming melee, half of them shot in Haymarket Square and the other half executed following a sham trial. The first of May, which long had resonance as a celebration of spring in many of the countries of origin for immigrant labor, had been idealistically set two years before by vote of the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions as the date by which an eight-hour work day would be standardized. Protests for that May 1st, followed by a general strike, were organized throughout the northeast and the Midwest; in Chicago, the former occurred peacefully, until at the conclusion of what would be the day’s first shift, the police fired into a group of fighting workers and scabs, murdering two of the former… BELT Magazine
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