On May 1, 1886, some eighty thousand workers took to the streets of Chicago to demand the eight-hour day. But what had started with peaceful demonstrations soon turned sour. On the 4th, in Haymarket Square, between the explosion of a homemade bomb and the subsequent police shooting, there were several victims, both among officers and protesters.

There were executions. Four activists, the so-called “Chicago martyrs”, were convicted after a trial without any guarantee of impartiality. It is said that they went up to the scaffold singing La Marseillaise. Three years later, in commemoration of that massacre, the Second International proclaimed May 1 as the great annual day of demand for workers around the world.

Curiously, in the United States, home of the Chicago martyrs, Labor Day began to be celebrated on the first Monday in September: the so-called Labor Day. Thus the festival was disassociated from the Haymarket tragedy and from movements such as socialism or anarchism.

With the same purpose, Pope Pius XII proclaimed in 1955 the festival of San José Obrero, coinciding with May 1. It was about Christianizing the celebration and stripping it of its combative character.

The Franco dictatorship welcomed the Vatican’s initiative with enthusiasm, as it could not be otherwise, because it was very much in line with the Vertical Union, an institution founded immediately after the Civil War, in 1940, as an organ of utopian harmony between employers. and workers. A “union” with many quotes.

At the other extreme, in the countries in the orbit of the former Soviet Union, the May 1 demonstrations were organized by those in power as a reaffirmation of the communist regime, with spectacular parades in front of the Kremlin and Lenin’s mausoleum. The result, as one might imagine, was not very vindictive.

The first reductions in working hours were private pacts between workers and employers, which were respected or not depending on the wind blowing. In 1848, France limited the day to 12 hours; a year earlier, England had limited it to 10 hours, but only for women and children.

In the United States, President Andrew Johnson enacted the Ingersoll law, which set the working day at eight hours, as long as the employer did not consider it essential to work more. Apparently, it was almost always essential… The employers predicted that such a drastic reduction in working hours would cause a terrible economic crisis. The reality was very different.

On the other hand, the most lucid rulers understood that they had to make concessions if they wanted to maintain social peace. The first social security system was invented by a character not suspected of leftism: Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. With one hand he illegalized socialism and with the other he created three public insurance policies: illness, accidents and pensions.

It must be noted that, at that time, only a quarter of men and a third of women lived to be 70 years old, which was the retirement age, so, in practice, it did not involve very high public spending. , but, for a time, this gesture managed to partially calm social tensions in Germany.

To delve deeper into the history of social movements, from the pyramids of ancient Egypt to Hollywood, Isabel Margarit, director of History and Life, and journalist Ana Echeverría Arístegui recommend the English book Working Class History (PM Press, 2020), a work collective generic with an original approach, and the documentary The Silent Strike, by Pilar Requena (RTVE Play), which delves into the mining protests of 1962 in Asturias.

Cinema also brings us closer to numerous episodes in the history of social movements. From classics such as Modern Times, by Chaplin, or The Grapes of Wrath, by John Ford, to more recent films, such as Billy Elliot or Pride, with the failed fight of the British miners against Margaret Thatcher as a backdrop.

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