OB Rag

Editor’s note: recently we reposted Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges’ essay that leftists such as Tom Hayden had lost their nerve….

SAN DIEGO, CA. Remember when? It was five years ago today, when President Bush stood on the deck of the…

by Arianna Huffington The last ten days have been among the most shameful in the history of American journalism. On…

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman / April 30, 2008 / The Free Press The US Supreme Court has just…

Everyone out in solidarity. * Meet in front of City College on Park Blvd at 2:30 pm for rally *…

Click on the image to see a larger version Dockworkers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have decided to…

By Peter Cole- Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 29, 2008 On Thursday, May Day, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union will declare…

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. Hundreds of Bay Area dockworkers plan to march this morning after their stop-work meeting. The union members…

BREAKING NEWS: Members of the Port Workers Union of Iraq plan to shutdown the ports of Umm Qasr and Khor…

“There is no one here, the streets are dead,” says Oakland, CA trucker OAKLAND, CA. An initial ABC KGO NEWS…

Beginning May 1, and continuing for the rest of that week, the Department of Homeland Security is planning to undertake…

May Day was officially founded in 1886, during a Chicago strike for the eight-hour workday. In 1889, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) delegate to the International Labor Congress in Paris proposed May 1 as international Labor Day. Workers were to march for an eight-hour day, democracy and the right of workers to organize. Delegates approved the request and chose May 1, 1890, as a day of demonstrations in favor of the eight-hour day.

On a separate track, U.S. labor leaders had agitated for creation of a labor holiday years before the Chicago rally. Among them, Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and labor union leader, had proposed his idea for a holiday honoring America’s workers at a New York labor meeting in early 1882. (Others say the “founder” of Labor Day was Matthew Maguire, a machinist who served as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York.)”

History of May Day Bound Up In the 8-Hour Work Day Movement and the Martyrs of the “Haymarket Massacre”

The story of the Haymarket Martyrs, and their monument in Forest Home Cemetery, begins at a convention of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1884. The Federation (the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor) called for a great movement to win the 8-hour workday, which would climax on May 1, 1886.