You may not: Trade unions and May Day celebrations and rallies trace their roots back to medieval Europe. Photo: Nic Bothman/EPA
Long before the red flag waved from factory gates and trade union halls, 1 May was a day of greenwood misrule. In medieval Europe, it marked the turning of the seasons. Villagers gathered around the maypole, to celebrate the fertility of the earth and renewal of communal life.
On this day, the usual hierarchies were unsettled. Peasants and nobles danced in the same space and the daily rhythm of labour briefly gave way to collective celebration.
Yet even these early rituals carried the seeds of organised struggle. As historian Peter Linebaugh reminds us, May Day was not only a tribute to spring, it was a rehearsal of freedom.
In the forests and commons surrounding early villages, people gathered herbs, cut wood, grazed animals and met to share knowledge and organise resistance. These communal forms of life represented early collective politics. Long before formal trade unions existed, there were forms of mutual obligation and shared labour that resisted exploitation.
As pioneering social historian EP Thompson argued in The Making of the English Working Class, these customs reflected a moral economy grounded in reciprocity and collective rights. In medieval England, peasants held woodland, marsh and pasture “in common”, defending them through customary law and communal action.
When these spaces were enclosed and turned into private property, they were defended, often collectively, through early proto-union-style alliances between villagers.
But with the rise of capitalism, the commons were systematically dismantled. From the late 15th to the 18th century, enclosure laws stripped communities of access to shared land.
Hedges were raised, fences hammered into the soil and what was once held in common became the property of landlords and merchants. This was the beginning of what would become a generalised wage relation.
Resistance erupted, not just through riots, but through coordinated efforts to reclaim land, sabotage fences and defend communal labour. The revolts of 1607, and the Diggers of 1649, embodied this spirit.
These were not yet trade unions but they were precursors — collective, organised, rooted in the workplace (the land) and resistant to extraction.
May Day became a day of resistance. The apprentices who rioted in London in 1517, and the communities who defied maypole bans in the 17th century, were not simply defending tradition. They were asserting a collective identity against the emerging regime of profit, discipline and surveillance.
This pattern was not unique to England. Across Europe, communal labour structures were destroyed by capitalist agriculture and centralising states. The Highland Clearances in Scotland removed entire communities in the service of profit. As communities were uprooted, they carried with them memories of shared land and collective struggle. Many of the workers who later filled the factories of Manchester and mines of Lancashire in England had grown up in villages shaped by communal labour.
By the 19th century, as industrial capitalism replaced feudal agriculture, these older forms of collective life re-emerged in a new form — the trade union. Born in the factories, docks and mines of the industrial age, unions were the organisational answer to the violence of enclosure and brutality of waged labour.
They gave structure to resistance. They offered protection, education and a political vision. They also laid the foundation for socialism, not as abstract theory, but as the political expression of collective labour.
In 1886, in Chicago in the US, trade unionism and May Day converged. Thousands of workers, many immigrants, struck for an eight-hour day, an idea that had been fought for by unions around the world. Police opened fire. Bombs exploded. Several organisers, including anarchists and trade unionists, were arrested, subjected to show trials and executed. Their real offence was to insist life could not be reduced to production. Their sacrifice gave May Day its global significance.
From Chicago, the idea of May Day as a worker’s day spread. In the cities of Europe and across the colonial world — in the ports of Buenos Aires, the shipyards of Algiers, the railways of Bengal and the mines of Southern Africa, workers took up the red flag. May Day became the people’s holiday. And the unions carried it forward.
The structures of industrial discipline, surveillance, debt and dispossession were exported to the colonies. In Kenya, the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1915 dispossessed African farmers. In South Africa, the 1913 Land Act confined blacks to 7% of the land, creating a permanent reserve of cheap labour. In India, through land taxation and forced salt production, millions were pushed into bonded and wage labour. In these sites, it was organised labour, often informal, often banned, often led by women, that kept resistance alive.
Trade unions were never only about wages. In colonial contexts, they were schools of political education, spaces of interracial and gendered solidarity and the first institutional vehicles for anti-colonial nationalism. From the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union in 1920s South Africa to the All-India Trade Union Congress, unions linked workplace demands and national liberation.
Women were central to these struggles. They led strikes in textile mills, organised pass law protests and held together union structures while being denied equal rights. In Nigeria, the Aba Women’s War of 1929 was an anti-tax revolt and an assertion of collective labour rights. In South Africa, domestic worker unions, long ignored by mainstream federations, challenged the boundaries of who was considered a worker.
May Day, as marked in these struggles, was more than symbolic. It was a day of action, of stayaways, of underground meetings, of pamphlets distributed at dawn. In apartheid South Africa, May Day was used to build mass defiance. In Brazil, under dictatorship, unions became the centre of opposition. These were not marginal organisations; they were often the most coherent vehicles for working-class democracy.
Socialism, in these contexts, was not imported from Europe. It emerged from collective struggle, from the need to imagine a world beyond hunger wages, broken bodies and landlessness.
The union became the workshop of socialist politics. Not the only one, but perhaps the most enduring.
Trade unions did not only negotiate wages. They fundamentally changed how society worked. The weekend, the eight-hour day, paid maternity leave, sick leave, pensions, public holidays, workplace safety standards, unemployment insurance were not gifts from the state. They were fought for — carried on the backs of workers who risked everything to be treated as human beings, not tools.
They humanised work. The union meeting became a school for working-class politics. It was where domestic workers learned about rights, where migrant workers found solidarity and where women began to insist gendered labour was also political.
In South Africa, unions helped lead the charge against apartheid. In Brazil, union militancy helped dismantle the military regime. In Senegal, Zambia and India, unions seeded the base of anti-colonial nationalism.
The red flag crossed oceans because of shared material conditions; dispossession, exploitation and the refusal to accept them. In its most radical form, May Day has always cut against the grain of narrow nationalism and patriarchal unionism. It insists that to be free, we must undo the systems that bind race, class and gender into the machinery of exploitation.
In South Africa, the story of May Day is tied to the resistance of the working class. From the multiracial organising of the Industrial Commercial Workers Union to the strikes of the Seventies, to the formation of powerful trade union federations, 1 May remains one of the clearest markers of working-class memory and a call to rebuild what has been weakened.
Today, many unions are embattled; hollowed out by bureaucracy, division and state, NGO and donor capture.
But even now, in informal settlements and on farms, in warehouses and taxi ranks, workers are organising. They are demanding the union form meet them where they are. That it adapts, renews and fights again.
May Day reminds us that workers built this world. That even in an era of surveillance, platforms and precariousness, the struggle for dignity, time and solidarity continues.
As we mark this May Day, we must renew our support for the trade union movement. Despite its limitations, it remains the most effective vehicle we have for building organised resistance to the violence of capitalism.
It must adapt to the realities of informal work, climate collapse and platform extraction; but it must not be abandoned. It is in the union that we find the tools of solidarity, the infrastructure of struggle, and the ability to act collectively in a world that isolates and fragments us.
Vashna Jagarnath is a historian, political risk and DEI consultant, labour expert, pan-African and South Asian political analyst and curriculum specialist.