On May 3, 1886, police shot and killed striking workers outside the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago. They had been asking for an eight-hour workday.
The next day, a rally at Haymarket Square. Someone threw a bomb. Police opened fire. Seven officers died. At least four civilians died. Eight men were arrested. None of them had thrown the bomb. All eight were convicted.
Albert Parsons. August Spies. Adolph Fischer. George Engel. Hanged on November 11, 1887. Louis Lingg killed himself in his cell the night before with a smuggled blasting cap. As the noose was placed around his neck, Spies shouted: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”
Three years later, the Second International designated May 1 as International Workers’ Day. In their honor. Because of what happened in Chicago.
Today, more than 160 countries celebrate May Day as a public holiday. Germany. France. India. China. Brazil. South Africa. Spain. Most of Europe. Most of Asia. Most of Africa. The entire continent of South America.
The United States celebrates Labor Day. In September. On purpose.
In June 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed Labor Day into law while federal troops were crushing the Pullman railroad strike in Chicago β a strike that left some 30 workers dead. He chose September specifically to avoid associating the American holiday with the socialist politics of May 1. Same city. Same violence. Different calendar.
Today is May 1, 2026. Nearly 500 organizations have planned over 750 events across all 50 states under the banner “Workers Over Billionaires.” In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson endorsed the marches: “Encouraging participation allows Chicagoans to honor our history while advocating for our future.”
Fox News covered it this morning. Their word for the organizers: agitators.
In 1886, the press called them agitators too.
The word hasn’t changed in 140 years. Neither has the ask. Eight hours of work. Eight hours of rest. Eight hours of what we will. That was the demand at Haymarket. It’s still the floor in most labor negotiations β not because corporations chose to grant it, but because people were hanged until it became too expensive to say no.
An economist quoted in the Fox News piece dismissed the boycott, arguing consumers will just “go to store B instead of store A” and the movement amounts to workers making “your circumstances worse.”
That’s the analysis. A boycott for dignity is inefficient. The workers who died for the eight-hour day were inefficient too. So were the ones who burned to death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. So were the coal miners at Ludlow. Efficiency was never the point.
America built the world’s most celebrated labor holiday on the bodies of workers in Chicago. Then it moved the furniture around so nobody would notice. 160 countries honor what happened at Haymarket. Chicago honors what happened at Haymarket. The federal government pretends it happened in September.
The export worked. The original didn’t.
// NEON BLOOD
Perhaps this time, the General Strike many have been clamoring for, will finally come to fruition. It is long overdue, this country, nay, this world can only suffer so much at the unbearable weight of capitalist gains before the common person has nothing left and society completely collapses under repressive regimes.
The word will be the same. It was “agitators” in 1886 and “agitators” this morning on Fox News. If the general strike comes, they will call it that again β not because the word fits, but because the word works. It reframes a collective demand as a collective threat.
What is different now is that the demand has not moved. Eight hours. A living wage. Dignity at work. The same floor. The fact that we are still negotiating for the floor after 140 years is not evidence that strikes fail. It is evidence that the people who benefit from the current arrangement have 140 years of practice taking back what was won.
The general strike is overdue not because people have not wanted it. It is overdue because the cost of striking falls on the people who can least afford to stop working. That is by design. It always was.
// NEON BLOOD
[…] Signal 025 documented the pattern: UNDRIP adopted in 2007, nineteen years of non-compliance, four settler states that voted no then “endorsed” it without changing policy, three donors out of 193 funding the trust. The Permanent Forum was the closest thing Indigenous peoples had to a collection agency for that promissory note. […]