International Workers Day 2015: Why Doesn’t The US Celebrate May Day?

[Purveyor]

As most of the world -- from Dublin to Dhaka -- celebrates International Workers Day on Friday, with demonstrations, commemorations and vacations for the working class, Americans are toiling away on the job. Why hasn’t May Day caught on here? In two words, anarchists and communists.

The United States’ absence -- almost alone among nations -- from the international festivities is all the more ironic, since the day has American origins. On May 1, 1886, workers in Chicago, many of them immigrants, walked out of their jobs en masse, striking for an eight-hour work day. A few days later, at a labor rally in Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded, killing 11 people, including seven police officers. Four anarchists were hanged, on flimsy evidence, and the general strike dissipated.

A few years later, in Europe, a newly formed collection of socialist and labor parties called for a demonstration on May 1 to honor the “Haymarket Martyrs” and sustain the struggle for an eight-hour work day. Over the years, the cause evolved into a broader celebration of labor unions and workers' rights and spread around the world. Governments -- and not just Communist ones -- embraced the day as a public holiday: Workers in Kenya, Brazil, India, France, Germany and elsewhere all have the day off.

But things took a different path stateside. Worried about the political threat of anarchists and socialists, President Grover Cleveland latched on to another day celebrated by some, more moderate trade unionists and proclaimed the first Monday in September as Labor Day in 1894. Although radicals occasionally tried to revive May Day, most U.S. unions, like those in the American Federation of Labor, did not.

“They’re not seeing themselves as part of a broader internationalist movement,” says Jacob Remes, a labor history professor at State University of New York Empire State College. “They were skilled white men, they’re more conservative, their unionism is reformist.”

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http://www.ibtimes.com/international-workers-day-2015-why-doesnt-us-celebrate-may-day-1904853

[KoKo]

1. Part of our Hard Drive Memory for Worker's Rights has been "Wiped Out."

We have a couple of Generations who don't know anything about it....

"Selfies" are more important in the "reality" of today's world. Which does make one wonder if that is all we will have left after the Corporations finish their work--deregulating, privatizing, militarizing and the rest.

Maybe the growth of "Selfies" has a meaning. All that we have left is to photograph what's left of ourselves...That's what the young see. Or, it's just MSM programming them into technology to make their life seem real to them.

Sorry.....for sounding so gloomy. But, it does seem we are losing memories of our history and becoming very self-centered...just to survive?