Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

dustries, trades, and nationalities-it became the first truly
international campaign of European workers, as the First
International spread it to England, France and all of
Europe. The largest single Eight-Hour demonstration was
not in Europe or the U.S., however, but was in Manila;
Filipino workers defied the Spanish colonial authorities
and struck in a massive rally of one million. Many
Afrikan, Mexicano and Chinese workers responded
militantly to the call for the Eight-Hour struggle, and in
some areas Afrikan workers took an early lead in stirring
up action. But the campaign, instead of uniting working
people, furthered disunity.
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8-Hour Day Movement, New York--1872
Of course, when Kennady talks about "the working
population" he isn't refering to Mexicanos, Chinese,
Indians, or Afrikans-he is only discussing white settlers.
When he proudly points out how "every branch of skilled
industry has its own union", he means unions of white
workers. While he refers to these new unions taking care of
"domestic differences", it is interesting that he fails to
mention the trade-union role in the primary labor conflict
of the time-the drive by the white unions to annex the
jobs of oppressed workers. This is a curiously right-wing
result from such a supposedly "class-conscious" labor
campaign.
This contradiction sums up the Eight-Hour struggle
(and the great strike wave of 1873-77). The Eight-Hour
demand was not only righteous, but it was a demand that
hit home to working people across the widest variety of in-
It was no coincidence that no sooner had the early
victories of the Eight-Hour campaign unified and
strengthened white labor in California then they began
stepping up the attack against Chinese workers. Nor is it
true that the Eight-Hour campaign was the work of noble,
class-conscious trade-unionists, while the anti-Chinese and
anti-Afrikan campaigns were the work of some totally
separate bands of declassed hoodlums and bigots. Both
were the acts of the same hands. All of the individual craft
unions, the large federations such as the National Labor
Union and the Knights of Labor, the local trades
assemblies, the labor press, the left organizations such as
the Socialist Labor Party and the Communist-led General
German Working Men's Association, were involved in
these white supremacist offensives.
Unlike the experience of other nations, the Eight-
Hour campaign in the U.S. Empire had an anti-democratic
character, consolidating the settler masses around procapitalist
politics. In regard to the pivotal struggle of Black
Reconstruction, it is clear that the overwhelming majority
of the Eight-Hour Day activists wcrc in the camp of the
Anti-Chinese cartoon by Thomas Nast, famous "reform" cartoonist--1870
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