May Day

[mendeleyev]

Happy May Day!



Most large cities in the FSU hosted parades this morning or will sometime day and you may find many traffic routes closed. For those in Moscow, the centre is cut off from vehicle traffic today.

For more info and alternate routes here is a video link from the First Channel: http://www.1tv.ru/news/social/205845




May your day be special.

[Aloe]

It is labor day here in Belgium, official state holiday. Weird, why would LABOR day be a non-working day

[The Natural]

I was working on this day and I like it because it gives me my hourly wage plus 133% 

[mendeleyev]

For video coverage of the May Day parades from 1950, 1974, and the last Soviet May Day parade in 1991 check out today's Mendeleyev Journal: http://russianreport.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/may-day-parades-in-moscow/

[Ranetka]

And I was working like a slave because it's a first day of Month End....
 
Bring on Bank Holiday the 7th of May ! (The "joy" of working for an American company - they do not care about our state holidays so I will probably working unpaid overtime the rest of the week so I can have same holiday the rest of the country is having )

[Anotherkiwi]

It is labor day here in Belgium, official state holiday. Weird, why would LABOR day be a non-working day

Our Labour Day is the fourth Monday in October - unlike most countries, we only have one public holiday between now and then (Queen's Birthday, the first Monday in June).  Presumably othe countries have Labour Day for the same or a similar reason as us - to celebrate the introduction of the 40 week (i.e. no more Saturdays, no more 12 hour days, etc, etc, etc...), which for us was in the 1920s.
 
Now what have we got?  Oh, yeah - most non-office businesses open 6 or 7 days a week; the average working week at least 45 hours; people in lower-paid jobs having to take on extra work just to make ends meet because life now is just too expensive...talk about irony!
 
I've just had my first month without any overtime whatsoever in (I think) four years!  Oh dear - how can I pay for my next trip to the FSU???    At least I'm grateful that I have a good job and a good life. 

[SANDRO43]

Presumably othe countries have Labour Day for the same or a similar reason as us - to celebrate the introduction of the 40 week (i.e. no more Saturdays, no more 12 hour days, etc, etc, etc...), which for us was in the 1920s.

Actually Labour Day is an 'adaptation' of the International Workers' Day celebrated on May 1st, in

commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago, which occurred after an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they dispersed a public assembly during a general strike for the eight-hour workday. In response, the Chicago police fired on the workers killing dozens of demonstrators and several of their own officers. In 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle, following a proposal by Raymond Lavigne, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International's second congress in 1891.

which probably had too strong a Socialist/Communist flavour for some .

As for the 40-hour working week, it was introduced at different times in our countries, in 1963 as far as Italy was concerned - in 1962 it was still 44 hours, which meant a Saturday morning on and one off.  When transferred to the UK in 1971, I was delighted to discover that they had a 36.5-hour week . IIRC, France introduced the latter a few years ago, but don't know if it still applies .