The meaning of Workers' Day
May Day or Workers’ Day has just passed. How many of us, I wonder, know of its historical origins and how it links into Catholic Social Teaching on work?
Workers’ Day has its roots in the United States. In October 1884 the alliance of trade unions later called the American Federation of Labor [AFL] declared that from May 1, 1886 the working day was to be limited to eight hours and that the unions would try to see that businesses kept to the limit. To help get this accepted the unions prepared for a general strike on May 1, 1886. By the evening of May 3rd, however two strikers (some reports claimed six) were killed by police at a Chicago factory. The next day, in Haymarket Square, police opened fire on demonstrators. Someone threw a pipe bomb that killed a policeman. A shootout followed: eight policemen and two workers died.
Eight union activists were arrested. The trial was highly irregular: a relative of a policeman killed on May 4 was included among the jury. Although evidence of actual guilt was flimsy, seven of the eight were sentenced to death. Four were hanged, one committed suicide, and two had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
In 1889 the AFL delegate at a conference of unions and socialist parties in Paris recommended that May 1 be commemorated, primarily for the 8-hour day struggle but also to commemorate those who had died during the Haymarket Affair. The following year, the first May Day demonstrations occurred worldwide, as far afield as Peru and Chile. As time passed, governments in many countries have accepted that May 1 should be recognised as a public holiday to honour those who work.
How should Catholics consider this day, given its bloody origin? In 1891, one year after the first May Day, Pope Leo XIII issued his encyclical Rerum Novarum, which proclaimed not only the importance and dignity of work, and the need for cooperation rather than conflict between labour and business, but also the right of workers to form trade unions and the right to a decent wage and working conditions. This teaching, rooted in Catholic belief in the equal dignity of all people, is upheld in subsequent Catholic social teaching. Indeed in 1981, Pope John Paul II – hardly a communist! – declared in Laborem Exercens that the labour’s rights to decent wages and fair working hours has priority over the interests of business. We, many of whom benefit from the gain of an 8-hour working day, need to see that the Church has long supported the values, if not the methods, of the secular labour unions that made our better working conditions possible.
