It’s a week early, but let’s talk about Labour Day… Why in North America is Labour Day in September rather than on May 1st, which is celebrated as International Workers’ Day, also known as Labour Day or May Day, in many parts of the world? Let’s see if we can sort out the origins of these holidays.

While Labour Day brings to mind the start of the school year, it is of course related to unions and the rights of workers. In Canada in April 1872 a labour demonstration in Toronto led to the enactment of the Trade Unions Act. In 1879 the Provincial Workmen’s Association was organized in Nova Scotia and commemorated by annual picnics and parades. In 1882 a labour celebration in Toronto inspired American labour leader Peter J. McGuire to propose that the Central Labor Union (CLU) set aside a day to celebrate the laboring classes and a parade was held in New York City on September 5 of that year. He chose the date because it was midway between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. Subsequently celebrations were held in both Canada and the United States on the first Monday in September.

(An alternative theory is that this first September Labour Day celebration [1882] was held by the CLU in connection with a clandestine Knights of Labor assembly. Matthew Maguire, the secretary of the CLU, is credited with proposing a national holiday on the first Monday of September.)

At the 1885 convention of the American Federation of Labor a resolution was passed calling for adoption of the eight-hour day effective May 1, 1886. That day a general strike was held throughout the United States. On May 4 police in Chicago were attempting to disperse a public assembly in support of the movement when an unknown person threw a bomb. The bomb and ensuing gunfire killed seven police officers and four civilians; over 160 other people were wounded. I don’t have time to do justice to the “Haymarket Affair,” but it is what inspired the Marxist International Socialist Congress (Paris, 1889) to choose May 1st as International Workers’ Day. Since then May Day has been an important holiday in communist countries and a popular day for demonstrations by socialist, communist and anarchist groups.

Also in 1889 the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital in Canada recommended that an official Labour Day be recognized by the federal government. Unions lobbied Parliament for this in the spring of 1894, legislation was introduced in May, and it received royal assent in July.

Meanwhile in the United States there was disagreement among labour unions over whether a holiday celebrating workers should be held in September or on May 1st. President Grover Cleveland supported the September holiday as being less politically charged. He signed it into law as a federal holiday in 1894.

There you have it, the entwined history of Labour Days around the world.