The story of May Day often starts with the end of the Civil War. It is not incorrect to begin here; the modern labor movement should be defined by the creation of the modern working class. However, this approach ignores one of the most important aspects of May Day: the triumph over slavery. If we want to truly learn the lessons of the past, we should look into the conditions leading up to the war against slavery and how working people learned that we needed to come together.
Racism was one of the biggest hurdles American workers needed to overcome – and it still is. British aristocrats injected racism as a form of legal oppression into the laboring classes dating back to the colonial period. Since then, it has been a convenient and easy tool for them to use to divide working people against ourselves.
One benefit slavery offered the British aristocracy was that it pitted the laboring classes against each other. Since the laboring classes (slaves, indentured servants, and wage-earners) vastly outnumbered the aristocracy, gentry, and slave-owners, they needed ways to divide people. Slavery kept wages down. Wage-earners protested, the “Employment and Lowness of wages occasioned by the Number of Negroes...hired out to work by the day.” Like then, our employers use racism as a means to suppress our wages and prevent us from earning the full value of our labor. Hard working people moved from job to job to survive. It functioned in a way similar to the role of prison labor today. Just as prisoners produce lingerie and garments for cheap, the effect of it is to drive down wages, so that employers can force workers to accept low wages.
Pictured: "May the Enemies of Liberty Feel the Evils of Slavery"
Slavery added a deeper component as it prevented the unionization of workers. Frequently, if factory workers formed a union, their bosses highly considered closing it down and moving it to the South. It was a danger to the trade union movement, and workers realized the “peculiar institution” needed to be removed from society. In Labor’s Untold Story, the authors discuss how much workers dreaded the institution of slavery, particularly the Dred Scott decision which effectively spread it all over the country. The slave-owning class controlled the Supreme Court and used the judicial branch to eradicate any legal barriers to the spread of slavery.
The level of violence that forced bondage inflicted upon the enslaved class is indescribable. Ranging from the breeding plantations to the separation and destruction of families to the wholesale kidnap of Africans. It was an institution that existed only for the benefit of the slave-owning class. The industrialists only used it as a means to an end in order to crush the trade union movement.
Throughout the 1800s, American workers slowly came to the realization that slavery actively worked against us. We shaved down our working day from 16 hours to 14 hours to 12 hours to 10 hours. It was a slow push. When we attempted to go below 10 hours a day, we often failed and the factories would shut down. The Voice of Industry, a leading labor magazine, articulated the frustrations of American workers perfectly, “The question of slavery is in truth a question of labor. Whenever the rights of labor are discussed or upon whatever department of reform we insist that the influence of slavery is arrayed against us.” Slavery was an existential threat to the labor movement and it had to go. Workers enthusiastically joined the war to fight the slave-owners to secure the rights of working people, both enslaved and free.
Students of history can observe the effects of the Civil War on the wage-earning movement by watching the events of 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed and it had a profound effect on wage-earners. During the same year, on October 10, 1863, Fincher’s Trades’ Review, a labor magazine, reported that unions and working people declared the Eight-Hour Day to be a key objective for workers’ rights. This moment was pivotal for working people. Once working people eliminated slavery and the slave-owning class removed from society, the next task for wage-earners, both white and black, was to secure a shorter working day without a loss in pay.
We cannot overstate the importance of the removal of slavery as a key component to May Day. It is a history that is often overlooked. We should not forget it. It is only when we, working people, unite as a whole, and fight for each other, can we truly live and create a better world for all of us.
Comments