May day!

Did you enjoy the labour day the other day!?

Lucky you!

Then again you have to thank stonemasons and a riot for your holiday!

So apparently on 21 April 1856, Australian stonemasons in Victoria undertook a mass stoppage as part of the eight-hour workday movement.

This started to become a yearly commemoration, inspiring American workers to have their first stoppage.

Then again the whole thing started to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago. That was another strike which became chaos!

In that year beginning on 1 May, there was a general strike for the eight-hour workday. On 4 May, the police acted to disperse a public assembly in support of the strike when an unidentified person threw a bomb. The police responded by firing on the workers. The event led to the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; sixty police officers were injured, as were one hundred and fifteen civilians.
Hundreds of labour leaders and sympathizers were later rounded-up and four were executed by hanging, after a trial that was seen as a miscarriage of justice! The jury and the judges were blamed to be very unfair and biased!

The following day on 5 May, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the state militia fired on a crowd of strikers killing seven, including a schoolboy and a man feeding chickens in his yard

In 1889 an international federation of socialist groups and trade unions designated May 1 as a day in support of workers, in commemoration of this Haymarket Riot in Chicago .

Five years later, U.S. Pres. Grover Cleveland, uneasy with the socialist origins of Workers’ Day, signed legislation to make Labor Day—already held in some states on the first Monday of September—the official U.S. holiday in honour of workers. Canada followed suit not long afterwards.

The Haymarket tragedy inspired generations of labour leaders, leftist activists, and artists and has been commemorated in monuments, murals, and posters throughout the world, especially in Europe and Latin America.

In 1893 the Haymarket Martyrs Monument was erected in a cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Forest Park. A statue dedicated to the slain police officers, erected in Haymarket Square in 1889, was moved to the Chicago Police Department’s training academy in the early 1970s after it was repeatedly damaged by leftist radicals.

Now that is history! Which leads to May day or Labour day! Some lucky ones get a holiday while many like us fake a smile and move on!

May day is thus a celebration of the work done by workers all over the world and a reiteration of the 8 hour a day work and six days in a week work rule!

Of course not everyone and every country has to follow the day! Though they do follow the 8 hour work rule most of the time!
A rule breaker of sorts also was Aruna with her unique roles!

Now you may not have had a holiday on may day, you can make tomorrow the star wars day!
Since then you can say MAY The fourth be with you!

Shubh Ratri!