Around the world, nearly everywhere, but the U.S., May the first is a big deal.

It's called International Workers Day or May Day.

Here in the U.S., it's called this coming Saturday.

In a way, the American worker last year revived International Workers' Days American Roots.

We created it, after all.

Donna Haverty Stack is a professor of history at Hunter College at the City University of New York.

She's also the author of America's Forgotten Holiday, May Day, and Nationalism, 1867 to 1960.

She began the story in 1886.

Labor unions had been fighting for the eight-hour workday for years and years,

but they'd only won battles, city by city.

They needed a new strategy.

This was the era of the Second Industrial Revolution, the rise of corporate capitalism.

They needed to come together, and so that was the goal for 1886.

Why did these labor unions going for that big

push choose May 1st? For the building trades, May 1st was the date when the annual contracts were

renewed. The goal was they begin organizing in 1884, making demands.

Hopefully they would succeed and they would celebrate on May 1, 1886.

If they did not succeed, they held out the threat of striking on May 1, 1886, which in many cases happened.

Once that date was chosen, the more traditional trade unionists and the anarchists who have a broader revolutionary goals, also tap into the associations of May Day with the spring rights, with gathering flowers, with bringing in the green, with what do the spring rights have to do with labor? Nothing. But they use it in the green. What do the spring rights have to do with labor?

Nothing.

But they use it in their iconography, in poetry, in plays, and things that become central to the annual anniversary.

So now it's May 1st, 1886, 80,000 people, march in Chicago, 30,000 in Baltimore. How many in New York?

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