This is an archive of prayers and song composed for, or relevant to, International Workers’ Day, a civic day celebrating laborers and the working classes. Promoted by the international labor movement, the civic day occurs every year on 1 May, coinciding with the European spring festival of May Day. The International Workers Congress held in Paris in 1889 established the Second International for labor, socialist, and Marxist parties and adopted a resolution for a “great international demonstration” in support of working-class demands for the eight-hour work day. The date had been selected by the American Federation of Labor to commemorate a general strike in the United States, which had begun on 1 May 1886 and culminated in the Haymarket affair on 4 May. The demonstration subsequently became a yearly event. The 1904 Sixth Conference of the Second International, called on “all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the eight-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace”.

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