May Day / International Labor Day
Other countries celebrate International Labor day (also known as May Day) on May 1. The date was adopted in Canada in 1894 and by socialist delegates in Paris in 1889, in commemoration of the Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago of 1886. Fearing a commemoration of socialism, US President Grover Cleveland opted for the holiday to take place in September, honoring the original Labor Day parade of 1882.
International Labor History
Although there were associations of journeymen under the medieval system of guilds, labor unions were essentially the product of the Industrial Revolution. In Great Britain after the French Revolution, fear of uprisings by the working classes led to passage of the Combination Acts, declaring unions illegal. Although those acts were repealed (1824), little progress was made in union growth until the organization of miners and textile workers in the 1860s, after which the struggle for legal recognition was waged with vigor. After the Trade Union Act of 1871, British labor unions were guaranteed legal recognition, although it required the laws of 1913 and 1915 to assure their status. In the latter part of the 19th cent. the socialist movement made headway among trade unionists, and James Keir Hardie induced (1893) the trade unions to join forces with the socialists in the Independent Labor party. The central organization of the British trade unions, the Trades Union Congress was formed in 1868 to coordinate and formulate policy on behalf of the whole labor movement.
Labor unions developed differently on the Continent than they did in Great Britain and in the United States, mainly because the European unions organized along industrial rather than along craft lines and because they engaged in more partisan political activity. In Germany the printers' and cigarmakers' unions were started after the uprisings of 1848; German unions until World War I were responsible for much social legislation. In France labor unions were organized in the early part of the 19th cent. but received no legal recognition until 1884. In most European countries labor organizations either are political parties or are affiliated with political parties, usually left-wing ones. In some European countries, notably Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands, there are rival Christian and Socialist trade-union movements. In Russia, trade unions first appeared on a considerable scale in the revolution of 1905 but were later stamped out. They reappeared in the 1917 revolution and became highly organized in a national movement under Communist control. Between the revolution and fall of the Communist party in 1991, the trade-union movement in the Soviet Union was mainly an instrument of the state in its drive for higher industrial production.
In the Third World
Organized labor in the Third World, although generally small numerically, has played a disproportionately large role in political developments in those countries. Many union movements in the underdeveloped countries, particularly in Asia and Africa, rising on the wave of nationalism, have led anticolonial movements toward political independence; the leaders of many newly independent nations have owed their rise largely to the support of workers they have organized. In Latin America, too, labor unions are a powerful force, constituting as they do the most important mass political organizations in the nations of that region.
International Organizations
Internationally, world trade unionism was split after 1949 between two rival organizations: the, largely Communist, World Federation of Trade Unions (WTFU), originally set up in 1945, and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), founded in 1949 by member unions that had withdrawn from the WTFU in protest against its Communist domination. The international federations are recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organizations (UNESCO), and there is close cooperation between the ICFTU and UNESCO in the field of education. The International Labor Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations; some of its aims include raising living standards, improving working conditions, gaining recognition of the right to collective bargaining, and the protection of workers' health.
Article extracted from http://www.history.com/
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