May 1st is the International Worker’s Day, the date on which the first demonstration of 500,000 workers on the streets of Chicago began, and a general strike was held throughout the United States in 1886.
Three years later, in 1891, the International Workers’ Congress called an annual demonstration in France in honor of the union struggles in Chicago. The first one ended up with 10 deaths as a result of police intervention.
It was the historical events that transformed May 1st into Workers’ Day. Until 1886, the workers never thought of demanding their rights: they just worked.
In Portugal, the workers marked the 1st of May as early as 1890, the first year of its international realization. But the actions of Worker’s Day were initially limited to a few picnics of fraternization, with speeches in between, and some pilgrimages to cemeteries in honor of the workers and activists who fell in the struggle for their labour rights.
With the qualitative changes assumed by Portuguese trade unionism at the end of the Monarchy, throughout the First Republic it became a claiming, consolidated and expanded trade unionism. The 1st of May also acquired characteristics of mass action.
Until 1919, after some of the most glorious struggles of trade unionism and Portuguese workers, the eight-hour day for workers in commerce and industry was conquered and enshrined in law.
Even in the Estado Novo, the Portuguese knew how to overcome the obstacles of the regime to the expression of freedoms. Strikes and manifestations in 1962, a year after the beginning of the colonial war in Angola, are probably the most relevant and full of symbolism.
In that period, despite the prohibitions and repression, there were manifestations held by fishermen, coral workers, telephone operators, bankers, Carris and CUF workers. On May 1st, in Lisbon (100 000), Porto (20 000) and Setúbal (5000), people gathered to express themselves.
Indelible landmarks in the history of the Portuguese workers turned to be the uprisings of agricultural workers in the fields of Alentejo, with the great impulse on May 1st, 1962.
More than 200,000 agricultural workers, who until then worked from sunrise to sunset, took part in the strikes and imposed an eight-hour day’s work on the farmers and the Salazar government.
Of course, the most extraordinary 1st of May ever held in Portugal, with a right to a prominent place in history, was the one that took place eight days after the 25th of April, 1974.
