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.
Labor Day There was disagreement among labor unions at this time about when a holiday celebrating workers should be, with some advocating for continued emphasis of the September march-and-picnic date while others sought the designation of the more politically-charged date of May 1. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket Affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe.[8] In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative.[9] The date was formally adopted as a United States federal holiday in 1894.