On 30 April 2022, couriers working for Deliveroo in Dubai walked out en masse, taking illegal strike action in protest at the company’s proposed cut in their hourly rate from £2.09 to £1.78, and an increase in the duration of their shifts to 14 hours. Despite the United Arab Emirates’ ban on strikes, the delivery workers stayed out until 2 May, when the company abandoned its attacks on their conditions. Three days had been long enough for the workers to defeat the British-based company, in which Amazon is a significant investor, and in so doing the defiant couriers joined a long list of workers who’ve taken historic industrial action around 1 May.
The celebration of 1 May as International Workers’ Day has its origins in the USA in 1886, the date of the country’s first ever national general strike, called in support of an eight-hour working day – a right which had been established by Congress but was still routinely ignored by bosses. The strike culminated on 4 May in the ‘Haymarket Affair’ in Chicago, when a dwindling demonstration, late in the day and in heavy rain, was disrupted by a bomb thrown by an unidentified person, killing seven police and at least four civilians. In the wake of the violence, strike organisers and trade unionists were rounded up, and a trial resulted in the execution of four labour leaders, which met international condemnation as a terrible miscarriage of justice.
On its founding in 1889, the socialist Second International – an alliance of left-wing political parties and trade unions – called an international demonstration of workers’ solidarity on 1 May the following year, and thus May Day marches took place across Europe and the USA, and some other countries, such as Argentina. In the UK, marches took place on 3 May 1890, with half a million marching in London, and on 4 May in Edinburgh. Glasgow held its first May Day a year later, on 3 May 1891.
It was towards the end of the First World War, and following the arrest of socialist John MacLean for sedition, that Glasgow first marked 1 May in 1918 with a general strike, and somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 people, according to different sources, protested in the city for a living wage, for peace, and justice for soldiers and their families. The event was hugely significant as a turning of public opinion against the bloody and brutal war, which for so long British leaders had insisted was workers’ patriotic duty to support. A mass demonstration in Berlin had also called for peace, two years earlier on 1 May 1916, organised by the revolutionary Karl Liebknecht and other socialists.
In the century since then, while May Day has often been suppressed, banned by Mussolini in Italy and by Franco in Spain, where the day was not openly celebrated until after his death in 1975, across most of the world it has become regularly observed as a workers’ holiday.Â
In South Africa, the date is seen as linked to both workers’ rights and the struggle against apartheid. There in 1950, a 1Â May strike opposing an act making the Communist Party illegal met with violence as police killed 18 people in Soweto. In 1986, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) called for people to stay home on May Day, establishing it as an unofficial holiday until it was officially constituted in 1995 after the end of apartheid.
May Day events are taking place throughout Scotland this weekend. Socialists for Independence will be joining the Glasgow Trades Council-organised march on Sunday 4 May, but we encourage everyone to participate in whichever event is most convenient.
Jo Harvie
Jo Harvie is a socialist of long standing who has lived abroad for several years before returning to Scotland and re-connecting with Socialists for Independence.