While Worker’s Day is a public holiday many of us take for granted as a welcome day off somewhere in between our mostly eight-hour work days, we tend to forget that the origin of Worker’s Day stems from a global work force’s fight to overthrow inhumane work hours to arrive at the more manageable and civilised eight-hour work day we now accept as the norm.

The origin of Worker’s Day (aka May Day) can be traced back to a movement initiated in America in 1884. While the fight for better wages was always a grievance amongst workers, so too was their fight for a shorter work day. Prior to the movement in 1884, tradesmen were known to be working intolerably long hours. During the trial against striking cordwainers (shoe cobblers) in 1806, and the bakers’ strike in 1834, it came to light that workers were forced to work between 19 and 20 hours per day. The initial demand for a ten-hour work day was finally realised in the mid-1840s, but no sooner had this been secured than the fight for an eight-hour day began. Robert Owen, a Welsh social reformer and industrialist in Scotland, coined the slogan ‘eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest’. Proving to be a global uprising of the labour force against the capitalist system, even far-flung Australia’s building trade workers demanded the eight-hour day which was finally achieved in May 1856.

Nearly thirty years later, on 7 October 1884, the Federation of Organised Trades and Labour Unions in the US and Canada decreed that a legal day’s labour, as of 1 May 1886, should only be eight hours long, which is why the date is still pertinent 132 years later.

According to South African History Online, the first recorded celebration of May Day in this country took place in 1895 and then again in 1910. While marked intermittently and in different ways after that, it was only after World War I that May Day became an annual event; and it was only in 1928 that May Day was adopted by African workers en masse when they participated in that year’s mass May Day march.

The 100th anniversary of May Day was commemorated on 1 May 1986. That year the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), formed in December 1985, demanded it be recognised as a paid public holiday and called for a mass stay-away. ‘Subsequently, more than 1,5-million workers observed COSATU’s call, joined by thousands of school pupils, students, taxi drivers, hawkers, shopkeepers, domestic workers, self-employed and unemployed people.’ Unilaterally declared a public holiday by the majority of South Africa’s workers, Premier Foods became the first large employer to declare it a paid holiday with other companies following suit, until it was officially recognised as such across the board in 1990.

Twenty six years later we enjoy the privilege of a paid day off from work, along with many other countries around the globe. So on 1 May, while we celebrate all who went before us and the many struggles they had to endure, let’s also remember to honour work itself, because as Thomas Jefferson said ‘I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have’.

Happy Worker’s Day!