Happy Labor Day!

Happy Labor Day! for those of you in the United States, Canada, or Australia, where I understand the first Monday of September is an official holiday to celebrate working people and their efforts and status. I had long been under the assumption that this date was a pacifying alternative created in the US to distract workers from the more socialistic and radical May Day version that is celebrated in all the rest of the world that has such a day (not all countries do, e.g. Saudi Arabia).

In fact, the US version predates the May Day version, although not by much. Whereas I had long presumed the US version came out of the relatively conservative AF of L, in fact it was started by the much more radical Knights of Labor, with the first march celebrating it taking place on Monday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, with a carpenters sub-unit of the K of L being the main organizers, with this being repeated in 1884. In 1887, Colorado became the first state to make the first Monday of September an official holiday called "Labor Day," with this being adopted at the national level in the US in 1894, although certain individual states held off.

May Day was to memorialize the Haymarket massacre in Chicago, which happened on May 4, 1886. May Day was declared an international labor festival in 1889 in London by the Second International, with May Day having deep roots in Britain with its positon in the Celtic calendar opposite All Saint's Day, with Candlemas and Lammas as the quarter points. I am not sure which nation first had May Day as an official national holiday, but I suspect it was the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution.