Another informative piece, "Never Forget the Power of the Strike," was based in part on an article by Leighton Woodhouse that was originally published by Huffington Post and then served as the basis for an article in the Daily Kos that was later republished by OpEdNews. As published in the Daily Kos, the article begins with a quote from the Woodhouse piece that provides a disturbing assessment of strikes in America:
"Striking has gone out of style. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, last year had the second lowest number of walkouts involving more than 1,000 workers in over 60 years--eleven in total. And 2010 was no anomaly: the only year since 1947 with a lower number of strikes than last year was the year immediately before, which saw a grand total of five strikes of a comparable size nationwide."
May Day, 1886, and the Haymarket Affair
Unfortunately, the Daily Kos article begins its history of strikes in America with the Pullman Railroad Strike of 1894. It overlooks what to the rest of the world is the most important date in American labor history: May Day, the 1st of May, 1886. This is the day every nation in Europe and most of Latin America celebrates as Labor Day, in memory of the martyrs for labor rights killed in Chicago because of the Haymarket Affair.
Let me begin by quoting Jerry Elmer's article "The Haymarket Affair and the Origins of Mayday." Elmer writes: "On Saturday, May 1, 1886, a nationwide general strike in support of the eight-hour [work] day was observed. In Chicago alone, 60,000 workers walked off their jobs."
The general strike for the eight-hour day continued on Monday, May 3. On the afternoon of May 3, August Spies was addressing a rally of striking workers that had been locked out of the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago, when hundreds of police officers simply began shooting into the crowd of workers.
The nest day, Tuesday, May 4, 1886, the Knights of Labor organization attempted to hold a peaceful rally in Haymarket Square. Someone (probably an agent of the businesses that the strike was against) threw a small bomb that knocked down 60 policemen, killing one and mortally wounding six others.
Quoting Mr. Elmer's article again: "Hundreds of police officers fired into the terrified, fleeing crowd. An unknown number of people were killed and many others were wounded. Many police officers were wounded, some seriously, by gunfire. Every such wounded police officer--every one!--- had been shot by other police officers. In the bloody police riot that followed the bombing, police officers shot wildly and at random; labor protesters and police officers alike were shot down."
I should interject here that the vast majority of violent acts that occur during labor troubles are instigated by the actions of owners or their surrogates, both official (police, National Guard) and unofficial (Pinkertons, private militias, and agents provocateurs).
"In the days after the riot, eight local Chicago anarchists were indicted and arrested: [Albert] Parsons, [August] Spies, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden, Louis Lingg, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, and Oscar Neebe. The indictment acknowledged that the bomb had been 'thrown by an unknown person' but alleged that the unknown bomb-thrower had been 'aided abetted, and encouraged' by the indicted anarchists. In the aftermath of the indictments of the eight anarchists, a kind of brutal martial law was imposed on Chicago. Anarchist and labor meeting halls were closed down. Hundreds of suspects were rounded up, interrogated, and held by police without charges being brought. Mayor Harrison closed down Chicago's leading labor newspaper and banned public meetings--all by ukase [a word denoting an Imperial Proclamation in Czarist Russia]. Mainstream newspapers blamed the eight-hour movement for the bombing and ensuing bloodshed, and in the Red Scare that followed, the eight-hour movement fizzled for a time. In fact, the eight-hour work day did not become law in the United States until the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938."
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