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Winnipeg's Revolutionary May Day Traditions

- Part II

May Day 2000 is being marked in Winnipeg with a social/political evening at the Ukrainian Labour Temple on April 29 and a rally on May 1. This will mark the 106th anniversary of the first May Day celebration held in Winnipeg - a meeting organized in 1894 by the International Typographical Union.

Up until the onset of the Second World War, militant May Day celebrations were an annual event in Winnipeg, with workers using the occasion to put forward their economic and political demands.
However, in the aftermath of the post WWII anti-Communist hysteria, immense pressure was put on the organized workers to give up their revolutionary traditions. Instead, rallies in Winnipeg were organized on Labour Day - organized with the full support of the capitalists in opposition to the
militant May Day demonstrations. Eventually the Labour Day celebrations lost any pretext of being political and were converted into picnics or parades, or just another reason for a long weekend.

In the early 1980s, however, a group of workers, all active in the Winnipeg Labour Council, got together convince the Labour Council to recognize May Day on a permanent basis. In 1985 this group of workers succeeded in setting up a permanent May Day committee of the Winnipeg Labour Council. The first WLC-sponsored May Day march was held on May 1, 1986 on the 100th anniversary of the 1886 strikes for the eight hour day which were held throughout North American beginning May 1st. They began organizing a yearly May Day march, rally or picket of some kind on the basis of bringing together workers from all the different sectors of the economy. The aim was to ensure Winnipeg's revolutionary working class traditions were honoured, not just by talking about the glories of the past, but by actually organizing in the present.

Despite the official recognition of May Day by the Winnipeg Labour Council, the actual participation in the May Day events was generally limited to the "left". An exception to this was May Day 1994 which fell on the 75^th anniversary of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. That year saw very broad participation by most of the trade unions in Winnipeg and over 1000 workers joined the march. That year also saw the introduction of the May Works Festival of Labour and the Arts, which has been organized annually during the month of May every year since.

The revolutionary traditions of May Day were also kept alive in Winnipeg through the past three decades by various various revolutionary and progressive organizations which understood the importance of those traditions to the working class. For example, prior to the WLC-sponsored May Day marches, the Manitoba Branch of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) organized annual May Day demonstrations beginning in 1970. In 1978 it began the tradition of a May Day banquet at which workers could get together in a social-political atmosphere and discuss the important issues of the day. Other political organizations also marked May Day with their own events. The united May Day 2000 banquet marks the bringing together of those various revolutionary traditions in celebration of International Working Class Day.