On This Day in History: May 4

Haymarket affair

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Fuck da police! And give thanks for the eight-hour workday. In Chicago in 1886, workers were striking in protest of shitty employment conditions. The cops got involved, shooting into the crowd who were protesting against strike breakers on May 3. But it was the following day that things really went to shit, and it had a lasting negative effect on labor unions in the U.S.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: May 4, 1886--

Industrial work was dangerous, the pay was shit, and you had to work 60 hours a week. Fuck, and I mean this in all sincerity, that. Protests had been taking place for some time in Chicago, and they reached a head on May 4, 1886, in Haymarket Square to protest the killing and wounding of union members the previous day. It began peacefully, with approximately 2,000 workers and activists present, but by nightfall, when police tried to disperse the crowd, someone threw a bomb at the cops. The explosion immediately killed one officer and mortally wounded six others. The cops said well fuck you guys and started blasting away like 30 to 50 feral hogs had invaded a hillbilly barbecue. In the darkness, the police wounded several of their own with friendly fire. They also killed four protestors as they fled the scene, and wounded countless more. 

The Haymarket affair was devastating for unions. There was a crackdown, and much of public opinion was for the police. Over a hundred arrests followed, and eight anarchist leaders were convicted of conspiracy despite a dearth of evidence, seven of whom were sentenced to death. Two of those sentences were later commuted to life in prison, one of the condemned took his own life the day before his scheduled execution. The other four were hanged by the neck until dead in November 1887. 

The bomber was never identified, but the Haymarket affair became known internationally, contributing to anti-labor sentiments on one side, and seeing the condemned men as martyrs on the other. Three years after the event, as a symbol of struggle for workers’ rights, the Haymarket affair influenced the adoption of May 1 as International Workers’ Day. But the May 1 date became too associated with that socialism stuff that scares the everloving shit out of many Americans so later on they decided to focus more on the first Monday in September as Labor Day. 

The move toward a five-day, eight hours per day work week was gradual over the ensuing decades, with the Ford Motor Company playing a lead role. It wasn’t federally mandated in the United States, however, until October 24, 1940, when the Fair Labor Standards Act went into effect. 

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