On Saturday hundreds of people, representing different unions, organizations, and labor campaigns, gathered at Union Square to celebrate May Day and later marched on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s Midtown mansion.
May 1st, also known as International Workers Day, is an official holiday in much of the world outside the United States. The holiday’s origins date back to the May 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago that saw police violently suppress the movement for an eight-hour work day. May Day virtually disappeared from the United States during the Cold War but was revived by the immigrant rights movement in 2006 and has been widely celebrated in the U.S. ever since