A Day For Workers
1st May is International Workers' Day
Today is 1st May or May Day, also known as International Workers' Day or Labour Day. It is an annual celebration of labourers and the working-class (everyone except the political, financial and corporate elite to me and you). The origins of May Day date back to the European spring festival of the same name, but its modern association with workers' rights began in 1889 when the socialist organisation The Second International established by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, adopted a resolution calling for a global demonstration in support of the demand for an eight-hour workday. We take it for granted today, but there was a time when working people had little or no rights which included limitless working hours at the call of their employer (slave owner more like). People were mere tools to an financial and economic end and disposed of like old rags. It’s still the case albeit less obvious today.
The American Federation of Labor later selected May 1st to commemorate the Haymarket affair, a general strike in the United States that took place on May 1st, 1886. Since then, May Day has been observed as a yearly event, with the 1904 Sixth Conference of The Second International calling for all social democratic party organisations and trade unions to demonstrate for the establishment of the eight-hour workday, the class demands of the proletariat, and universal peace.
Some Quotes on Work for the day that’s in it
Hey, it’s International Workers’ Day. Take this opportunity to decide to take command of your own working life. You can do that even if you work for someone else. It is the realisation that you are a bonafide human being with legitimate creative interests that you have the right to satisfy over that of any corporation or employer. It doesn’t mean that we take and don’t give. It doesn’t mean that we hang employers on poles in the street. What commanding one’s own work does mean is realising we have a choice, and that our own personal welfare and that of the people we care about must come first.
“The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
― Bertrand Russell
“Earning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy. Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction.”
― Anne Frank
“Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself.”
― Herman Hesse
“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.”
― Bill Watterson
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? ”
―Charles Bukowski