How May Day is celebrated around the world today
Labor Day in addition to Russia is a public holiday in almost all European countries. May Day is also celebrated in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Africa, Central and South America. Europeans and South Americans celebrate May Day with woven wreaths of grass, dances, and gift baskets of flowers to loved ones. In dozens of countries, May Day holds special significance for workers’ rights activists. On this day, marches commemorate the struggle of workers against the many violations of workers’ rights in the past, including long working days and weeks, poor working conditions and child labor.
“May Day for French trade unions is a bit like July 14 July 14, this day has acquired a ritual character,” French historian Stéphane Sireau told Le Figaro, adding that May Day has recently been politicized because this date falls between two rounds of presidential elections in the country. Thus, on May 1, 2012, before meeting François Hollande in the second round of the elections, Nicolas Sarkozy brought together 200,000 people during the May Day rally on the Place du Trocadéro in Paris.
In the Old World, May Day is not officially celebrated in Switzerland and the Netherlands, but some companies and international organizations in these countries give their employees a day off in honor of Labor Day. In Belgium and Luxembourg, on May 1, the socialist parties take advantage of this public holiday to parade and reaffirm their attachment to leftist ideas. In Australia, some socialist or communist unions organize a May Day parade. In Brazil, May 1 is called Labor Day. But, as in many Latin American countries, trade union marches in Brazil have given way in recent years to fun activities: picnics, football, entertainment on the beaches. In Paraguay, in 2002, the country’s president tried to cancel the celebration of May Day. But public opinion rejected the reform, and on May 1, this Latin American country continues to celebrate “Workers’ Day”: the authorities invite their employees to “asado” (outdoor barbecue).
Concertone del Primo Maggio traditional of May 1st in Italy. Photo: Reuters
In Italy, in 1990, the Concertone del Primo Maggio (May Day Concert) appeared. It’s a musical marathon that starts in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome during the day and ends late at night. Dozens of artists perform at the festival in the presence of several hundred thousand spectators. Italians can enjoy the concert on TV, radio or streaming. In Scandinavian countries, May Day coexists with more traditional celebrations of the arrival of spring. In Finland, alongside work parades, May Day (Vappuaatto – in Finnish) is celebrated across the country. In Sweden, large student demonstrations take place every year on May Day.
Perhaps the most unusual May Day celebration takes place in Senegal today. A procession of demonstrators, dressed in the same way, takes to the streets of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, on May Day with whistles and tam-tams. In this African state, a former French colony, after the parade, the workers, through the most representative unions, give the head of state a “book of grievances”. In this petition, a sort of “petition” to the president, they list a long list of demands whose implementation “will contribute to a significant improvement in their living and working conditions”.
Photo: GEORGES GOBET / AFP
In Germany, this date is celebrated with dance and music. There is a good tradition in Cologne – hang a birch branch on the door of the person to whom you want to confess your love. In Switzerland, especially in Zurich, May Day is celebrated with the opening of bazaars, music and the launching of balloons. In a number of Western and Eastern European countries, there are unusual rituals on the night of May Day, referring to ancient Celtic holidays, symbolizing peace, love and harmony. In Stuttgart, Germany, children take advantage of this night to play pranks on their friends, neighbors and relatives. In Burgundy, young people cut flowers and put them in front of their girlfriend’s window. In the Czech Republic, on this night, people protect themselves from evil forces and witches by lighting large fires in height. In northern Moravia, the boys decorate the biggest tree with ribbons and flowers.
Today, “May Day” is a holiday for the defense of peace, but rather not as peace against war with its disasters and destructions, but peace as a harmonious existence of the different strata of society, a world in which all work is respected, and solidarity comes first and partnership. The word ‘peace’ in the slogan emphasizes that May Day actions are peaceful in nature and that there will never be a repeat of the events in Chicago, protest shootings, clashes and pogroms, as in the motorcades that took place on both sides of the Atlantic in the century before last.
May Day started with a bloodbath
The Federation of Trade Unions of the United States and Canada decided in October 1884 to hold an action from May 1, 1886 to establish an eight-hour working day for workers. The date of May 1 was not chosen at random. In America, at that time, it was the first day of the business reporting year. As the capitalist system took hold in industrial-age America, the position of the working class deteriorated. Thus, it was not uncommon for workers to have a 16-hour shift.
May Day, or as it was then called “Labour Day”, came about after a tragic public march in Chicago on May 1, 1886, in which thousands of workers demanded that authorities introduce an eight-day work day. hours instead of 12-15 hours of grueling work. They also protested against the use of children for heavy work. According to various estimates, between 300,000 and 500,000 American workers went on strike in cities across the country. In Chicago, which was the center of the struggle, around 40,000 people protested and went on strike. On May 4, police broke up a demonstration in Chicago in support of the strike and an unidentified person threw a bomb during the march. Historians still disagree on whether it was intended for the police or a crowd of civilians. In response, the police opened fire on the workers. As a result, seven policemen and four civilians were killed, sixty policemen and over a hundred demonstrators were injured. Dozens of Chicago union leaders, anarchists and sympathizers were subsequently arrested. The court sentenced seven to death and one to 15 years in prison. Four were hanged, one committed suicide to avoid being hanged and two had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. One of the condemned, shortly before his execution, shouted the famous words: “The time will come when our silence will be louder than the voices you strangled today. His words spread all over the world. Across Latin America, across Europe and North America, for many, this day has become a holiday dedicated to working people, notes National Public Radio.
The action of the Chicago workers’ union was supported in other major American cities, in some of them it resulted in bloody clashes with the police. In 1889, out of deference to American workers and trade unionists in Chicago, the Socialist International, meeting in congress in Paris, decided to make May 1st “International Workers’ Day”.
In France, the celebration of May Day first took a tragic turn: on May Day 1891, in the commune of Fourmi, in the north of the country, the police opened fire on the crowd, killing nine people and injuring around thirty, specifies the French edition of Geo. After this tragedy, May Day in France became the day for the presentation of workers’ social demands to the authorities. The workers obtained the creation of the French Ministry of Labor in 1906, but it was not until 1919 that the eight-hour working day was legalized in the country. If traditionally the demonstrators marched with a red rosehip hanging from their buttonhole, this flower of the May Day processions in France has been gradually replaced by a lily of the valley, which can be seen during today’s actions.
Participant of the May Day demonstration in Paris. Photo: Julien Mattia / RIA Novosti
Peace as solidarity and unity
The main slogan of May Day was the call “Peace, May, Work”, and the day has long been associated with revolutionary May Day meetings and demonstrations by workers in defense of their rights, with demands that employers observe the eight hours of work. day and pay monetary rewards worthy of their hard work.
Marxist leaders around the world, including Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, saw the war as an example of capitalist and imperialist countries pitting members of the international working class against each other. They argued that workers should unite and wage a revolutionary war for peace against the ruling classes in their own country. And the May Day holiday is the best manifestation of such unique mass action on a global scale.
By the way, in North America, where the May Day movement was born, the “Workers’ Solidarity Day” gave way to “Labour Day”, which is celebrated on the first Monday of September. The reason is that the powerful North American trade unions, which are traditionally strong in America, did not want to unite and have contact with the pro-Marxist European trade unions. However, some organizations in French-speaking Quebec are organizing a demonstration of solidarity with their European counterparts on May Day. However, in the United States, the “Labor Day” finds its origin in the strike of the railroad workers who went on strike in 1894 against their employer. US President Grover Cleveland did not hesitate to send 12,000 troops against the strikers, and two male protesters were killed in clashes in Kensington, near Chicago. The strike was declared over on August 3, 1894 and the workers, frightened by the authorities, agreed not to organize themselves into unions. American citizens, outraged by President Cleveland’s brutal methods, members of Congress in Washington voted to introduce a day off in honor of working people. The president himself signed the bill just six days after the military intervened, hoping to be re-elected that year, but was defeated in the presidential election.
For a long time, there were no “may-days in the forest” where proletarians gathered “to fight against all oppression”, as in pre-revolutionary Russia. There are no leaflets calling for the change of bourgeois regimes or for bloody clashes with the police. In today’s world, the actions of May Day, which for the most part have lost their political character, are followed not only by workers, but also by teachers, doctors, civil servants and the population in general to show solidarity, festive unity with each other.
However, May Day protests last year in a number of European countries, France, Italy and Greece, were not without political slogans and clashes with law enforcement.
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