2023-05-01 09:13:33
May 1, 2023, International Labor Day, will be celebrated in a less spectacular way this year in Mali. The decision was taken by the National Union of Workers of Mali (UNTM), the largest trade union organization in the country, in a circular letter dated April 11, 2023. For security reasons and financial difficulties, the UNTM canceled the most important festivities, namely the parades and the making of fabrics.
It is important to note that May 1st is an American holiday. In 1884, American labor unions gave themselves two years to obtain an eight-hour workday. This date also marks the end of the accounting year for companies and the end of contracts for workers. In 1886, large-scale demonstrations were organized across the country, but in Chicago, the situation escalated with the explosion of a bomb that killed police officers and led to the death sentence of unionists.
In 1889, during the congress of the Socialist International in Paris, it was decided to make every May Day a day of demonstration in order to obtain an eight-hour working day. The first parades took place the following year. But in 1891, during a demonstration in the commune of Fourmies in northern France, the army fired into the crowd, killing nine people, including two children. In remembrance of this massacre, the demonstrators decided to wear a scarlet rosehip, a traditional flower of the north. May Day has thus become an important day for European workers. In France, the first advances were made with the creation of a Ministry of Labor in 1906. In 1919, the eight-hour working day was finally legalized.
Under the occupation, the Vichy regime tried to appropriate May Day by establishing a day off without a pay cut in 1942. However, propaganda imposed its own vision of work, renaming the day “workers’ day”. “, then “labor and social harmony day”, considered more in line with the ideology of the time. After liberation, May Day was renamed “Labour Day” and became a paid non-working holiday in 1948.
Kaduss Kadetty
Source : mali24
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