[news] Happy May Day!

[Resist!ca]

THE EFFORT to win "eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will" became a crusade for U.S. labor in the years after the Civil War of 1861-65. Many people hoped to win shorter hours through reform laws, and by the 1870s, several states and a number of cities had passed eight-hour legislation. But these proved to be empty promises--filled with loopholes and routinely ignored by employers, leaving workers with nowhere to turn to get them enforced. Under the influence of the growing socialist movement in the U.S., labor turned to more militant tactics. "The way to get [the eight-hour day]," Peter McGuire of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners wrote in 1882, "is by organization...We want an enactment by the workingmen themselves that on a given day, eight hours should constitute a day's work, and they ought to enforce it themselves."

URL: http://resist.ca/story/2005/5/1/74238/81499