Celebrate MAY DAY: International Worker’s Day 2026

May Day, or International Workers Day, is a day of workers’ internationalism. Proposed by American workers’ delegates at the founding conference of the International Workers Congress (IWC) (the ‘Second International’) in Paris in 1889 it was formally recognised as an annual event at the IWC’s 2nd Congress in 1891.

The idea that workers have no country, that we are workers of the world, is written into the DNA of May Day in more ways that one. May 1st was proposed and adopted because it marked the beginning, in Chicago USA, of a wave of nation-wide strikes demanding an: “Eight-hour day with no cut in pay”. The strikes across the USA involved both native born and immigrant workers. They involved men and women. They involved workers who were white as well as black workers and other people of colour.

In WISE-RA (the Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England Regional Administration of the IWW) we are proud that we continue that internationalist tradition of organising workers regardless of national origins. We are also proud of our international solidarity work and in our opposition to imperialism and militarism around the world. (You can read more about our work in these areas in the pages of Wildcat, past and present).

May Day was also initiated in recognition of the importance of the struggle for the eight-hour day. This struggle is one that we continue to fight today in new forms; like zero-hours contracts where we don’t know if we’ll have enough hours to pay for our needs, like ‘flexible’ working hours that ‘flex’ to the needs of capital and not the needs of workers, like ‘crunch time’ where workers are pressurised into working long hours to meet impossible deadlines.

May Day is a day of worker solidarity. The idea that workers have common interests, regardless of their occupation, is one of the principles that has underpinned the IWW since our inception. We are, as our name says, an industrial union, not a trade union. We organise by industry because we recognise that what workers have in common is not our occupation – cleaner, porter, orderly, nurse, doctor – but our relationship to the boss class.

This year, 2026, is an important year for us in WISE-RA to remember worker solidarity. It is the 100th anniversary of the General Strike, the only ever general strike in British history. The Strike began on 4th of May 1926 and it involved workers from a range of industries coming out in support of striking miners. Another General Strike may not be imminent in Britain or Ireland today, but when we join pickets and take action in solidarity with other workers we are keeping alive the spirit of the General Strike.

Today – when we are witnessing the rise of the far-right across the world, when there is an ongoing genocidal push against Palestinians in Gaza, when anti-union laws continue to frustrate our attempts to fight back in the workplace – it is easy to feel like the tide of history is against us. May Day reminds us, however, that the struggle for workers’ freedom has never been easy and that we have been able to prevail in the past and can continue to do so in the future.

This year, 2026, is the 140th anniversary of that pioneering May Day march in 1886. Those struggles in Chicago 140 years ago were brought to a dramatic end through state repression. Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons’ partner, was stitched up by the courts and, along with three other labour organisers, hanged for his part in organising the demonstrations. On the day of the hanging, Lucy and her children were stripped and thrown naked into a jail cell and released only after her husband was dead. State repression, however, did not defeat the struggle as state after state in the USA passed laws limiting the length of the working day.

Capital cannot exist without labour, we can only be defeated if we give up the struggle.

On this May Day we stand with workers all over, and from all over, the world, and inscribe on our banner our words of international worker struggle:

An injury to one is an injury to all!

(IWW WISERA International Statement, 2026)