**Martires de Chicago** 👷‍♂️👷‍♀️👨‍🔧👩‍🔧

abreusoleidy

@abreusoleidy · 10 Jun 2021

Martires de Chicago 👷‍♂️👷‍♀️👨‍🔧👩‍🔧

#history

They required eight hours to work, eight hours to sleep and eight hours for the house,” because they demanded this, because they worked at least 11 hours until the children worked these hours were inhumane.

This was the demand that thousands of workers requested on May 1, 1886, when they began a strike in all Chicago factories to demand from the employers an eight-hour working day. They called for their guild to be included in the Ingersoll Act signed by President Andrew Johnson in 1868 and which established an eight-hour day for all federal office employees and public works workers, with exceptions and in “absolutely urgent cases”. But this law did not contemplate industrial workers whose strenuous days were more than eleven hours a day.

The highlight of those demonstrations would arrive three days later, on 4 May, in the known as the Haymarket revolt (also called the Haymarket massacre), when in the middle of one of the demonstrations an explosive device was thrown at the police. That event unleashed violence that ended in a trial that sentenced five workers to death and three others to imprisonment. Just a few days later, several sectors of the employers agreed to recognize the fairer day.

The balance was 38 workers killed and 115 wounded. The leaders were promptly arrested and eight of them subjected to questioned judicial process.

The press defined the strikers as “truhans and evildoers,” and called their protests “madness” by calling for an eight-hour working day.

It is for this reason that every year May 1 is celebrated on International Worker's Day in homage to the martyrs of Chicago