It’s May Day, International Worker’s Day. Let’s celebrate!!
Martin Bullock Lawyers does not approach this day from a political viewpoint, but from a social viewpoint.
Trade unions are a good thing – they balance our society. Trade unions have fought long battles to achieve the 8 hour day, weekends for all workers, minimum wages and many other terms and conditions of employment.
Let’s celebrate the relationship between the people who produce the goods, and the people who own the means of production. Let’s celebrate May Day Comrades!
Let’s also recognise the rights achieved by unions over many years and the sacrifices that were made in order to achieve them.
It is a celebration and acknowledgement of labourers and the working classes, without whom the world as we know it would come grinding to a halt.
1 May was chosen to be International Workers’ Day to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago. In that year beginning on 1 May, there was a general strike for the eight-hour workday. In the days that followed, tensions grew between the strikers and the police until the police ultimately fired on the workers, causing mass casualties.
So many of the workers’ rights that we take for granted were born out of the trade union and labour movements of the late 1800s. Today we recognise those rights, and the sacrifices that were made in order to achieve them.