Labour day

How it works

The holiday is a workers’ day with more than one clock. In a large part of the world the name Labour Day, Fête du Travail, Tag der Arbeit, or International Workers’ Day points at 1 May. That date was taken up after the 1889 Paris congress of the Second International, looking back to the 1886 eight-hour strikes in the United States and the Haymarket affair in Chicago. The May date is a political and labour anniversary. It is also, in older European custom, a May Day of spring, which is why the same morning can hold both a march and a folk pole.

The United States federal holiday is Labor Day, first Monday in September, made federal in 1894. Canada’s Labour Day sits on that same September Monday. New Zealand’s Labour Day is the fourth Monday in October. None of those Mondays is 1 May. The spelling on this page is Labour, the form used in British, Canadian, and Australian English. An American poster that says Labor Day is the September holiday, not a typing error for May.

The United Kingdom does not put a statutory holiday on 1 May itself. It keeps an Early May bank holiday on the first Monday in May, which can be 1 May when the first lands there and is otherwise another May date. Ireland’s May Day bank holiday follows the same Monday pattern. Calling that Monday “Labour Day” in speech happens. The legal name on the UK calendar is still the bank holiday, not a copy of the US statute.

Australia’s several Mondays

Australia uses the word Labour Day (Eight Hours Day in Tasmania, May Day in the Northern Territory) for a public holiday that commemorates the eight-hour day. The date is not national: Western Australia: first Monday in March.

Victoria and Tasmania: second Monday in March (Tasmania’s name is Eight Hours Day). Queensland and the Northern Territory: first Monday in May (the Territory’s name is May Day). New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, and South Australia: first Monday in October.

A worker who moves from Perth to Sydney changes Labour Day by half a year. There is no single Australian Labour Day weekend you can tattoo on a suitcase. Queensland has also moved its date in past years and moved it back; trust the current state gazette, not a memory from a different premier. If you only remember the barbecue, you have the weekend and not the day.

Which closed door you actually need

1 May closes public offices in countries that made it a statutory holiday. The September Monday closes US federal offices, the Postal Service’s regular delivery, and, typically, bank lobbies that follow the Federal Reserve holiday list. US stock markets have their own Labor Day hours; do not assume the equity tape and the teller window match. Retail is a store-by-store notice. A parade is a city permit, not a national law that every Main Street marches.

Catholic calendars also keep 1 May as the feast of St Joseph the Worker, set in 1955, so a parish can mark labour on the same date without being a secular march. That feast does not move the US Monday in September. Two labour days in one year are possible if you live in a country that holds May 1 and you also keep an expatriate September cookout. They are still two dates.