Visiting the city of Chicago, Illinois, in 1988, Eduardo Galeano asked his friends to take him to the Haymarket District. “Show me the place where the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st were hanged,” he said.

The Uruguayan journalist was searching for a memorial to the Haymarket Martyrs who, on 1 May 1886, joined hundreds of thousands of striking workers across the United States to demand the right to an eight-hour working day.

When a demonstration was called three days later to denounce the police’s efforts to break the strike, a bomb — from a still unknown location — was tossed into the crowd. The police reacted immediately, gunning down dozens of workers. Martial law was declared in the city and, absent any evidence directly tying them to the incident, seven of Chicago’s leading labour organisers were charged and executed.

The repression following the Haymarket affair confirmed the threat organised American workers posed to the capitalist class. Meanwhile, European socialism was gaining ground across the Atlantic. After numerous abortive initiatives throughout the decade, the formation of the Second International in July 1889 marked the first time that a workers’ International bound together millions of workers identified with socialist parties across Europe. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the International’s constituent members represented upwards of three million people.

Held in Paris to mark the centenary of the French Revolution, the Second International’s founding Congress of 400 delegates resolved to call for a global demonstration. When the American delegation raised their intention to mark the anniversary of the Haymarket Affair on 1 May, the date was set. “In all countries and in all cities on one appointed day, the toiling masses shall demand of the state authorities the legal reduction of the working day to eight hours,” declared the Congress resolution.

In the years that followed, International Workers’ Day came to serve as an important reminder that labour has always been in the vanguard of social and political change. After the Russian working class established history’s first proletarian state after October 1917, May Day was declared a public holiday across the Soviet Union. Six decades later, on May Day in 1975, the revolutionary people of Vietnam won their liberation from over a century of colonial rule.

Today, the legacy of May Day’s past survives in the struggle of workers around the world. In India, platform workers are uniting to resist the oppression of algorithms and the exploitation of invisible employers. Last week, the Progressive International dispatched a delegation to Hyderabad to support their efforts and celebrate Telangana’s historic Gig and Platform Workers Act 2025.

"This is a landmark shift,” economist Jayati Ghosh told our App Worker Power event. “Unlike earlier rights focused on state-delivered services like food or education, this is the first to directly intervene in the labour market. It moves beyond welfare to regulating work itself, much like minimum wage laws.”

Meanwhile, in Argentina, a nationwide general strike — the third since Javier Milei took office — brought trains, ports, and planes to a grinding halt on 10 April as hundreds of thousands of workers withdrew their labour. Elsewhere, alternatives to “chainsaw” austerity are blossoming. In Slovenia, workers are stepping closer to power. Led by Progressive International member Levica, the Government introduced the Employee Ownership Participation Act in 2024 to encourage workers’ control and democratise the Slovenian economy.

These fights, however, are not isolated. They might be distinct and distant, but together they represent an organised and international challenge to the extraction and exploitation of monopoly capitalism. The case of Amazon offers a striking illustration.

Last month, on Good Friday, thousands of Amazon delivery drivers went on strike across Italy’s 41 distribution centres. “Alexa, find me a fair contract,” read one worker’s banner as an estimated 10,000 drivers escalated their campaign for job security. To bring Jeff Bezos’ sprawling $2 trillion operation to heel in Italy and internationally, workers are taking action at each stage of the company’s supply chain with the support of the Progressive International’s campaign to Make Amazon Pay.

The interconnected nature of capital was among the early reasons to establish an International Workers’ Day. It was never simply about jobs, pay or conditions. May Day has always celebrated the importance of the broader struggle against imperialism. A bayonet, after all, is a weapon with a worker at both ends.

Throughout April, Moroccan workers took to the streets in their thousands to protest their government’s complicity in the flow of arms to Israel. Supported by the No Harbour For Genocide campaign led by the Progressive International and the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Port Workers' Union of Morocco was alerted to the arrival of a Maersk vessel carrying weapons components to Netanyahu’s genocidal regime. While the union called on "workers, employees, and companies" to boycott the ship, workers resigned their jobs rather than load the arms.

But the role of workers in the struggle for justice in Palestine reaches far beyond the front lines. For months, workers at Booking.com have been organising against their employer’s 55 illegal listings in the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights. Now, the Progressive International, together with a wide-ranging coalition of organisations, is launching the Stop Booking Apartheid campaign. As one company employee said, “It’s time to put an end to this complicity — or else Booking.com becomes a shameful, indelible stain on our resumes and conscience.” On 8 May, workers and activists in Manchester and Amsterdam will take our campaign to Booking’s doorstep. We invite you to join them in taking action to Stop Booking Apartheid.

In 1988, Eduardo Galeano left Chicago disappointed. “No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago,” he wrote years later. “Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.” But the Haymarket martyrs will never be forgotten. Their struggle lives on in our movement’s enduring fight for freedom and dignity, from the docks of Tangier to the villages of Telangana.

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An Attack on Solidarity Itself

At 00:23 on Friday morning, Israeli drones attacked the Conscience Ship while the civilian vessel was travelling in international waters near Malta.

The Freedom Flotilla’s 30 crew members, who were attempting to deliver essential aid to the Gaza Strip, were left without power and at risk of drowning after the bombing caused a fire on board and a breach in the hull. The Maltese government, however, has ignored the Conscience Ship’s SOS request and the vessel remains stranded despite the risk of further attack.

“For the sake of our more than fifty thousand brothers and sisters martyred in Gaza, and for the hundreds of thousands of our siblings living in Gaza, which has been turned into an open-air prison, we will resist,” said crew member and aid worker Beheşti İsmail Songür. “We will not be discouraged by the attacks, and we will continue the struggle!”

Art of the Week

Togetherness.org was one of many web domains purchased in the early 2000s by Mai Ueda as domain poetry, linked to the Neen movement. The graphic presents two compact discs “playing together”, evoking the seminal work "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) by Félix González-Torres. Untitled presents two identical wall clocks hung side-by-side, displaying the same time, although gradually falling out of sync, and has been referenced by Claire Fontaine and Ahmet Öğüt, with both works featured on past briefings.

Mai Ueda is a Japanese tea artist based in Kyoto and co-founder of World Tea Gathering. Udea is a longstanding collaborator with Rirkrit Tiravanija, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1961 and raised in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada before becoming known internationally for cooking in the context of contemporary art, leading to what’s now known as relational aesthetics. With this Art of the Week, instead of considering booking.com, we encourage you to think of togetherness.org and the international community that can host you if you cultivate good relations.