Research Paper Semper 1

Instructor’s Name - MD JAWED AKHTAR

Course Title - CONSTITUTIONAL LAW

System ID - 2021509729.

Submitted To - Dr Manvendra Singh Sir.

Report Name

ABSTRACT
We celebrate Labor Day every year with barbecues and picnics, rarely remembering that the holi-
day was born in the midst of tremendous labour struggles to improve working conditions. In the
last century, 16-hour workdays and 6- and 7-day workweeks led to terribly high injury rates in the
nation's mines and mills. Thousands upon thousands of workers died, caught in the grinding ma-
chinery of our growing industries. Today, despite improvements, thousands of workers still die in
what has been described as a form of war on the American workforce. This commentary reminds
us of the historical toll on lives and limbs that workers have paid to provide us with our modern
prosperity. It also reminds us that the continuing toll is far too high and that workers who died
Research Paper Semper 2

and continue to die in order to produce our wealth deserve to be remembered and honoured on
this national holiday

INTRODUCTION

Early Adopters

Before it was a federal holiday, Labor Day was recognized by labor activists and individ-
ual states. After municipal ordinances were passed in 1885 and 1886, a movement devel-
oped to secure state legislation. New York was the first state to introduce a bill, but Ore-
gon was the first to pass a law recognizing Labor Day, on February 21, 1887. During
Research Paper Semper 3

1887, four more states – Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York – passed
laws creating a Labor Day holiday. By the end of the decade Connecticut, Nebraska and
Pennsylvania had followed suit. By 1894, 23 more states had adopted the holiday, and on
June 28, 1894, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each
year a legal holiday.

McGuire v. Maguire: Who Founded Labor Day?

Who first proposed the holiday for workers? It’s not entirely clear, but two workers can
make a solid claim to the Founder of Labor Day title.

Some records show that in 1882, Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood
of Carpenters and Joiners and a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, suggest-
ed setting aside a day for a "general holiday for the laboring classes" to honor those "who
from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold."

But Peter McGuire's place in Labor Day history has not gone unchallenged. Many believe
that machinist Matthew Maguire, not Peter McGuire, founded the holiday.

Recent research seems to support the contention that Matthew Maguire, later the secretary
of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, New Jersey, pro-
posed the holiday in 1882 while serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New
York.
Research Paper Semper 4

According to the New Jersey Historical Society, after President Cleveland signed the law
creating a national Labor Day, the Paterson Morning Call published an opinion piece stat-
ing that "the souvenir pen should go to Alderman Matthew Maguire of this city, who is
the undisputed author of Labor Day as a holiday." Both Maguire and McGuire attended
the country’s first Labor Day parade in New York City that year.

The First Labor Day

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York
City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union
held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.
Research Paper Semper 5

By 1894, 23 more states had adopted the holiday, and on June 28, 1894, President Grover
Cleveland signed a law making the first Monday in September of each year a national
holiday.

A Nationwide Holiday

Many Americans celebrate Labor Day with parades, picnics and parties – festivities very
similar to those outlined by the first proposal for a holiday, which suggested that the day
should be observed with – a street parade to exhibit "the strength and esprit de corps of
the trade and labour organizations" of the community, followed by a festival for the recre-
ation and amusement of the workers and their families. This became the pattern for the
celebrations of Labor Day.

Speeches by prominent men and women were introduced later, as more emphasis was
placed on the economic and civic significance of the holiday. Still later, by a resolution of
the American Federation of Labor Convention of 1909, the Sunday preceding Labor Day
was adopted as Labor Sunday and dedicated to the spiritual and educational aspects of the
labour movement.
Research Paper Semper 6

American labour has raised the nation’s standard of living and contributed to the greatest
production the world has ever known and the labour movement has brought us closer to
the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appro-
priate, therefore, that the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the
nation's strength, freedom, and leadership – the American worker.

International Labour Day 2023: It is observed globally on May 1 every year. The day spreads
awareness about workers' rights and also recognises their accomplishments. Labour Day or May
Day has different origin stories in different countries. But the common thing is that the day fo-
cuses on the achievements and contributions of workers. It spread awareness about the rights and
opportunities of every Labour which they should get for their welfare and betterment.

As we know that labour is the part of society on which all economic advancement rests. Even in
the mechanical era of the present time, the importance of labour is not decreased. For example, in
industry, trade, agriculture, construction of buildings, bridges and roads etc. contribution of
labour plays a crucial role. So, we can say that labour is the aggregation of all human physical
and mental effort used in the creation of goods and services. It is the primary factor for produc-
tion.

Labour Day provides the Labours with the right to work for only 8 hours a day. This gives labour
relief from the stress and pressure from lots of activities performed in a single day. Various
Themes are provided by the Government to the people to focus on their Rights to be achieved in
a better way. However, there is no official announcement for this year's theme yet. International
Labour Day: History

On 1 May 1886 labour unions went on a strike in the United States of America and demanded
that workers should not be forced to work more than eight hours a day.

On 4 May during the strike, the bomb blasts in Chicago's Haymarket took place. Due to this sev-
eral people and police officers died and more than 100 people were injured. However, the strike
did not have any immediate effect on labourers' work but it helped in establishing the eight-hour
workday rule in several countries of the world.

The real statement about the event: “Reliable witnesses testified that all the pistol flashes came
from the centre of the street, where the police were standing, and none from the crowd. Moreover,
initial newspaper reports made no mention of firing by civilians. A telegraph pole at the scene
was filled with bullet holes, all coming from the direction of the police.”

In 1889 a meeting took place in Paris where it was decided to celebrate May Day on an annual
basis through a proposal given by Raymond Lavigne which said that international demonstrations
Research Paper Semper 7

are required to celebrate the anniversary of the Chicago protests. In 1891, the International sec-
ond congress officially recognized celebrating May Day as an annual event.

In different countries, May Day or Labour Day is observed on different dates. Like in the United
States, Labour Day is observed in September.

In India, celebrating Labour Day was the first initiative taken by the Labour Kisan Party of Hin-
dustan wherein Comrade Malayapuram Singaravelu Chettiar, founder of the first trade union,
arranged two meetings to celebrate the day. One meeting was held at Triplicane Beach and anoth-
er at the beach opposite the Madras High Court. Singaravelar passed a resolution that the gov-
ernment should announce a national holiday on 1st May and marked it as a Labour Day. For the
first time, a red flag was used in India.

May Day 2023 marks a hundred years since it was first commemorated in India on May 1, 1923,
in the city of Madras. The initiative is attributed to M Singaravelu Chettiar, a towering nationalist
figure, and an early communist associated with the anti-caste movement. By introducing May
Day in India, Singaravelu sought to draw on a rich tradition of May Day celebrations in many
parts of the world; thereby connecting the struggles of Indian workers with the global-level resis-
tance of labour against brutal exploitation and dehumanisation. What began with a workers’ rally
in Chicago, in May 1886, created a momentum which reached Indian shores by 1923, and un-
leashed consequences that are still being felt in different corners of the world.
The tradition of May Day which Singaravelu drew on comprised a vibrant history that can be
traced back to the nineteenth century when a pertinent common demand for the legalisation of an
eight-hour workday emerged from within working-class platforms and organisations in Europe
and America. In 1866, for example, the International Workingmen’s Association, at its Congress
in Geneva, promoted eight hours as the legal limit of the working day; arguing that it was a pre-
liminary condition, without which efforts to emancipate the working class would prove futile. As
aptly expressed by Karl Marx, “By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production…
not only produces a deterioration of human labour power by robbing it of its normal moral and
physical conditions of development and activity but also produces the premature exhaustion and
death of this labour-power itself”.
The unfolding momentum of the labour movement and its increasingly articulate critique of capi-
talism paved the way for many iconic labour agitations, like the Chicago Haymarket workers’
rally (1886), which in turn had a huge signalling effect. In the process, there emerged a steady
realisation of the need to establish a common day for the assertion of non-negotiable labour
rights, and for commemorating important labour struggles. By 1890, the Second International
adopted the resolution for a worldwide struggle on the issue of a universal eight-hour work day.
By the early 1900s, the May Day tradition was fairly entrenched with workers’ political organisa-
tions and trade unions stopping work wherever possible, and using the occasion to energetically
demonstrate universal working-class demands.

These crucial landmarks in the global resistance of labour marked a strong assertion and defence
of lesser work hours, which has not only challenged the internal logic of the capitalist economy to
overwork a few but also exposed the resultant problem of rampant unemployment and deteriora-
tion of workers’ health. Thereby, an intrinsic part of the spirit of May Day has been the assertion
Research Paper Semper 8

that overwork and unemployment are two sides of the same coin. The decreasing work hours of
employed workers are seen as generating the scope for gainful employment of those who are un-
employed. In other words, labour’s evolving critique of estranged labour came to vigorously ar-
gue against the encroachment on a large part of the day by extensive work hours, which denied
much regular employment, and at the same time deprived employed workers of hours which they
could otherwise utilise for politics, spending time with friends and family, leisure, and basically
to enjoy life as human beings.

CONCLUSION
Clearly, by the early 20th century an entire discourse had crystallised which drew attention to an
essential fact; namely, that the wealth of the economy is a creation of labour. Indeed, everything
in the modern world – from a sewing needle to huge aircraft carriers and skyscrapers is the prod-
uct of human labour. And yet, the entitlements of labour in the economy are negligible. For all
long hours of work and physical exertion, what labour gets in return is simply poverty, precarity
and powerlessness.
In the early 20th century in India, the exploited, precarious condition of labour was bolstered by
colonial rule. The colonial state refrained from regulation of work relations between employers
and employees, arguing that these constituted a private matter of contract. However, the assem-
blage of large numbers of workers at crucial points of the capitalist value creation chain, and
labour’s visible collective mobilisation against exploitative work arrangements in new work-
places, such as mines, plantations, dockyards, and factories, gradually propelled the recognition
of employer-employee relations not as private relations, but as constituting the public domain of
social relations.
At the time when Singaravelu launched the tradition of May Day in India, the horrors of the First
World War and the appended radicalization of labour had facilitated worker-led revolutions in
Europe, as well as numerous militant strike waves in India’s industrial centres. Hence, in order to
placate (in particular) organised labour and labour militancy, governments and post-War in-
ternational institutions of diplomacy sought to install a uniform standard for labour rights. In this
way, the first international treaty to mention the eight-hour workday was the Treaty of Versailles,
which in the annexe of its thirteenth part established the International Labour Office, now the In-
ternational Labour Organization (ILO). Given the spectre of revolution that loomed large, it was
no coincidence that the eight-hour workday was the first topic discussed by the ILO, culminating
in the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, of 1919.

Since then, an expansive corpus of labour laws evolved in India. However, only a small number
of employer-employee work relations – associated mostly with the formal sector – have been
governed by the country’s labour laws, and thus, subject to state regulation. Further, in the
present conjuncture, we have seen a rapid decline in state regulation of labour-capital relations
even in the formal sector. The deregulation of a large number of work relations is most evident in
the rapid privatization of the public sector; the watering down of the provisions of labour inspec-
tion; the growing paradigm of self-certification by employers of their compliance with labour
laws; the exemptions provided to smaller industrial and commercial establishments from furnish-
ing proof of their compliance with statutory labour laws; and the tweaking of many statutory
Research Paper Semper 9

labour laws on occupational safety standards, work hours, minimum wage, compensation, indus-
trial disputes, etc. by successive governments, both at the state and central level.
Consequently, the private power of employers to unilaterally fix wages, extract overtime, deter-
mine compensation, etc. has substantially increased; returning labour to the colonial precarity of
the early twentieth century. We are witness to the burgeoning of an under-consuming majority,
high unemployment rates, and a huge workforce of underpaid, overworked, and dehumanized
workers – who are often tied down to firms that fail to enhance the size of their operations in or-
der to avail exemptions from crucial labour laws. In dismal times such as these, the tradition of
May Day proves even more relevant and potent, especially if we seek to go beyond the smoke-
screen of India’s supposed ‘growth’ story perpetuated by the ruling dispensation.