what happened on workers day in south africa
International Workers' Day In South Africa, Workers' Day has been celebrated as a national public holiday on 1 May each year since 1994. It has its origins within the historical struggles of workers and their trade unions internationally for solidarity between working people in their struggles to win fair employment standards and more importantly, to establish a culture of human and worker rights and to ensure that these are enshrined in international law and the national law of those countries aligned to the International Labour Organization. In pre-1994 South Africa, the demand for the annual observance of the day as a public holiday became a rallying point for workers and their trade unions and was one of a number of annually significant days to symbolize and mobilize resistance to the Apartheid government and its racial policies.
Workweek and weekend The Christian Sabbath was just one day each week, but the preceding day (the Jewish Sabbath) came to be taken as a holiday as well in the twentieth century. This shift has been accompanied by a reduction in the total number of hours worked per week, following changes in employer expectations. The present-day concept of the 'week-end' first arose in the industrial north of Britain in the early part of nineteenth century[1] and was originally a voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers allowing Saturday afternoon off from 2pm in agreement that staff would be available for work sober and refreshed on Monday morning.[2] The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Union was the first to successfully demand a five-day work week in 1929.