History of Europe

How May Day became Labor Day

Labor Day on May 1st is a holiday like no other, even though we often don't realize it that way. But the reason for this is simple. While in Germany and elsewhere pretty much every public holiday is either religious or otherwise at least national (i.e. also quasi-religious), Labor Day is a class holiday. The working class! It all seems normal to us today, but it's quite remarkable. After all, there is no festival day for the bourgeoisie or a day for the nobility. You can then ask yourself:Why and since when do we celebrate this Labor Day on the first of May? What is this holiday anyway, what is its origin, what is the story behind it?

Labor Day:an American invention

When asked about the origin of the holiday and its historical background, the surprises begin. Labor Day comes from the USA of all places! This is somewhat absurd because May Day is not even a public holiday there. Whereby:The Americans generally don't have it that way with the holidays. Or vacation days. Or a right to sick leave. Let's not ask too much... Still, Americans were the first to give May Day a work-related meaning. And it wasn't even that long ago!

It was in 1886 that the first May Day demo in history took place in the United States. The background from back then was to remain the same around the world for years to come:the demand for an eight-hour day. In the United States, as elsewhere, it was still common in the 19th century to work at least ten hours a day. Often more. So on May 1, 1886, the unions called a general strike to change just that. And the strike had it all! A total of 400,000 people across the country laid down their jobs on that day. Incidentally, the fact that it was May 1 of all times had a rather unspectacular reason. This is simply the day on which new employment contracts were traditionally signed in the USA. They wanted to accommodate the eight-hour working time right away. And then someone says again that the left has no sense of pragmatism.

Unfortunately, with the first so peaceful general strike of the trade unions in 1886, things quickly went downhill. After two days of demonstrations and work stoppages, riots broke out in Chicago. Eventually, someone threw a bomb in the direction of the police, killing seven police officers and up to twenty demonstrators. This incident went down in history as the "Haymarket Affair" and haunts the labor movement to this day. The eight-hour day was not decided at the time. Mess... Just four years later, in 1890, the time had come in the USA.

The origin of May Day in Europe and Germany

That turned out to be a magical year for the labor movement in Europe and Germany. Because in 1890, Labor Day really got going in Germany too. At the time, the European workers' movement was also demonstrating in favor of the eight-hour day and, like the Americans, decided on May 1st. But that had no special background in Europe either. It was simply based on the pioneers in the USA. Again, this isn't something that's only been around for the past few decades. On the first official Labor Day in 1890, a good 100,000 workers showed up in Germany, and thousands also gathered on the streets in Austria, France and many other countries. Almost everywhere, however, they had to wait quite a while for the eight-hour day. A quarter of a century later, however, there was at least a bit of variety in their dull everyday life. Instead of ten hours in the factory, people were then allowed to spend 24 hours in the trenches of the First World War. It's something.

After the First World War, however, the eight-hour day suddenly caught on in almost all European countries. So it was finally done! The working class has achieved all its goals. We'll certainly never hear from them again... In order to show the newly discovered joy in the proletariat to the outside world, May 1st was even declared Labor Day as an official holiday in many countries. In Germany it took place for the first time in 1919. This origin of the festival was so successful that it was abolished again the next year. Why should you celebrate Labor Day? You had already achieved everything anyway.

Sozis aren't the only ones who find work great

But, of course, the working class and the trade union movement were far from having achieved everything. And even if the first of May was not a public holiday in the interwar period, social democrats and communists still celebrated the day with rallies every year. Some of them were even really exciting! For example, in 1929, when more than thirty people died... Shortly thereafter, May 1st became a public holiday again, albeit under the name "National Labor Day". You can now guess three times who introduced it. The friendly Herr Hitler found the workers' movement so great that after the first day of national labor in 1933 he had the entire trade union movement stamped out on May 2nd.

After the end of the Second World War, however, Labor Day quickly celebrated its comeback. In some parts of Germany, former trade unionists and socialists celebrated it again as early as 1945. At that point, the Wehrmacht hadn't even surrendered! In the GDR, May 1st was later hyped up as a national holiday par excellence. International Day of Struggle and Holiday of Working People for Peace and Socialism was the not at all bulky title they found for it. And while the number of participants in the May Day marches in West Germany fell again soon after the war, those in the GDR were always filled to capacity. This could partly be because every East German citizen was simply obliged to appear at the parade. The events were always really close to the people. The party bosses of the regime then sat on a high stand and the people were allowed to pass them below. Life in the GDR must really have been a dream...

Labor Day as a holiday today

With the turnaround, the celebrations in the GDR and in the rest of the communist Eastern bloc were over. Now, Labor Day is definitely no longer of interest to anyone. May Day celebrations have been languishing across Europe since the 1990s. A fate that the holiday shares with the social democratic parties of Europe, not entirely by accident. And who wants to blame people? The idea of ​​working class as class consciousness is simply completely obsolete in the 21st century. Fewer and fewer people in this country actually still work in factories and those who do have better things to do on May 1st than to waste the day off on some kind of march. They prefer to drive into the country with their families or have a barbecue or something.

Nevertheless, Labor Day is now a well-established public holiday, and not only in Germany and Austria. In large parts of Switzerland, in France, as far as Russia and China, the first of May belongs on the list of public holidays. In the UK, they even went a step further and simply made the first Monday in May a bank holiday. Should May 1st happen to fall on a weekend and such. Well, the Brits aren't particularly famous for their number of public holidays. You can't go out into the countryside and have a barbecue there anyway. As already mentioned, the big outlier of the western world is the USA. The whole movement may have had its origins there 130 years ago. The historical background of Labor Day can be found there. But to release it to the people... nobody there ever had the idea.

If you are now interested in the origin of other holidays, I have already dealt with Christmas and Easter. If you're wondering what we're supposed to learn from this story, I've thought about that as well. And we'll hear each other again next week in the Déjà-vu podcast. Until then, take care!