Celebrating Labor Rights, on May Day and Beyond

ON MAY 1, tens of millions of people across the globe celebrate International Workers’ Day, often called May Day or International Labor Day. Countries around the world have made May Day a major holiday, but its origin as a day to fight for and honor the rights of workers has strong roots in the United States and the struggle for the eight-hour workday. During the Great Depression, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin chose May Day 1933 to launch the first issue of The Catholic Worker, a newspaper dedicated to the proposition that it is “possible to be radical and not atheist”—an idea that has also been central to Sojourners these past 50 years. In fact, a radical commitment to labor rights and economic justice is because of our faith, not in spite of it.

The dedication and sacrifice of labor activists has led to hard-won rights—including the eight-hour workday, the weekend, safe working conditions, an end to most child labor, and more—rights far too many of us can take for granted. And yet standing up for the dignity and rights of workers remains incredibly important because these rights are not enjoyed by everyone equally and have been relentlessly eroded over the past four decades. The struggle for labor rights has shifted amid an evolution in the nature of work, with many workers exercising greater agency in the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving behind jobs that are often underpaid, unsafe, or underappreciated.

In 2021, just 11.6 percent of U.S. workers were represented by a union, roughly half of the 1983 percentage. At the same time, economic inequality is as bad as it’s ever been—since the start of the pandemic, U.S. billionaires’ wealth has surged by more than 70 percent, an increase of an unfathomable $2.1 trillion. Amazon defeated the efforts of overwhelmingly Black warehouse employees in Bessemer, Ala., to form the first-ever union of the company’s workers. Soon thereafter Jeff Bezos self-funded a trip for himself into orbit. Meanwhile, the Senate failed to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage or to advance the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would strengthen labor law and eliminate some of the barriers to unionization, and Congress has failed to guarantee paid family leave and universal access to childcare, which remain essential ways to support parents in the workforce.

Christ boldly confronted unjust and exploitative systems, evidenced by his prophetic act of overturning the tables of the money changers because they were defiling the temple by exploiting the poor. As his followers, we must also elevate people over greed. We must remember the ways in which the earliest disciples—most of them urban and rural workers themselves—lived in community and shared their possessions with each other (Acts 4:32-35). In recent years, Pope Francis has been outspoken about the dignity of workers, decrying modern slavery and insisting that workers’ dignity must be respected with just pay and conditions that respect human dignity. Let’s honor working people this May Day and beyond by advocating for policies that affirm the dignity of work and put workers over greed.