Strikes, Trials, and Gallows: How Workers Won Their Rights

July 30, 2026

Picture a Monday morning with no concept of a weekend waiting at the end of it. There is no fixed time your workday ends — it ends when the person who owns the factory decides it does, and today that might be fourteen hours from now. There is no sick pay, no injury compensation, no pension. If a machine takes your hand, you are simply no longer useful, and there is no shortage of desperate people waiting outside the gate to replace you. Your eight-year-old works the same floor you do, because the household cannot survive on one wage. If you try to talk to your co-workers about asking for better conditions, you can be dismissed on the spot — or, in some periods and some countries, arrested.

This is not a dystopian thought experiment. It is, with only minor variation, how much of the industrialized world worked for most of the nineteenth century, and how parts of the world still work today. The eight-hour day, the weekend, paid leave, a minimum wage, safety inspections, maternity benefits, pensions, the right to unionize — none of it arrived because industry concluded, on its own initiative, that workers deserved better. Each protection was fought for, litigated for, legislated for, and in a great many cases, bled for. Understanding that history matters not because it flatters any particular political tradition, but because rights built through generations of struggle can be worn down by a few decades of collective forgetting.

What Work Actually Looked Like Before These Rights Existed

To understand why people were willing to strike, march, and go to prison over working hours, it helps to be specific about what industrial work demanded of them.

In the textile mills and mines of early nineteenth-century Britain — the world's first industrial economy — a standard workday ran anywhere from twelve to sixteen hours, six or seven days a week, with almost no legal limit on how long an employer could keep an adult working. Children as young as five or six were employed in mines and mills, often because their small size let them crawl into machinery spaces adults couldn't reach, and because their labor was cheaper. Parliamentary inquiries in the 1830s and 1840s documented children working twelve- to fourteen-hour shifts in textile factories, frequently beaten to keep them awake at the machines. Coal mines employed children as "trappers," sitting alone in the dark for entire shifts to open and close ventilation doors.

Workplace safety, in the modern sense, essentially did not exist. Machinery ran unguarded. Mine ventilation was minimal, and explosions and cave-ins were routine hazards treated as an ordinary cost of doing business rather than a preventable failure. When workers were injured or killed on the job, there was typically no legal obligation for an employer to compensate them or their families — the injured worker was simply out of a wage, and in the case of the family's primary earner, often out of a livelihood altogether. Wages sat at subsistence level or below it in many cases, calculated to keep a workforce alive and working rather than to allow for savings, education, or any meaningful cushion against illness or bad luck.

This pattern repeated itself, with local variations, everywhere industrialization spread — in the mill towns of New England, the steel works of Pittsburgh, the textile factories of Bombay, and the coal fields of the Ruhr. Different countries reached the same basic conditions on different timelines, but the underlying arithmetic was consistent: labor was treated as a cost to be minimized, not a human life to be protected, and there was no legal architecture in place requiring anything different.

Why Workers Started Organizing

Given all this, the more interesting historical question isn't why workers eventually organized — it's why it took as long as it did, and why it was so dangerous when they finally did.

Early industrial workers had few legal tools available to them. In much of Europe and North America through the mid-nineteenth century, combining together to bargain collectively was treated, at various points, as a criminal conspiracy under common law — the exact framing Indian courts would later apply against early Indian trade unionists in the 1921 Buckingham and Carnatic Mills case, decades after Britain itself had moved past it. Strikes could be broken by force, either by private security hired by factory owners or by the state itself. Organizers risked losing their jobs, being blacklisted from an entire industry, facing imprisonment, or in some documented cases, being killed in clashes with police or private militias.

What eventually forced change wasn't employer goodwill. It was the accumulation of sustained pressure from multiple directions at once: the sheer scale of industrial workforces, concentrated in cities and factory towns, that made coordinated action possible in a way it hadn't been under earlier, more dispersed agrarian labor; the emergence of a free and increasingly literate press that could publicize conditions inside factories and mines to a wider public; and the rise of organized political movements — trade unions, socialist parties, and reform-minded liberals — that gave scattered grievances a coherent set of demands and the organizational capacity to pursue them over years rather than in isolated, easily crushed outbursts.

The Ideological Coalition Behind Labour Reform

It would be a distortion of the historical record to credit any single political tradition with winning modern labour rights. The reality is a genuinely mixed coalition that varied by country and by era.

Socialist and social democratic parties were central to the fight in much of continental Europe — Germany's Social Democratic Party, founded in 1875, built one of the most disciplined labour movements in the world and pushed for the social insurance systems that Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, no socialist himself, ultimately enacted in the 1880s partly as a strategy to undercut socialist support by delivering some of its demands through the existing state. Communist parties and unions played a significant organizing role in specific contexts — notably in interwar and postwar France and Italy, and in the early Indian trade union movement — though their broader political project extended well beyond labour reform and remains, understandably, one of the most contested chapters of twentieth-century history. Trade unions themselves, often formally independent of any single party, did much of the day-to-day organizing, striking, and negotiating that produced concrete legislative wins regardless of which party ultimately carried the bill.

Crucially, these movements did not act alone. Liberal reformers in nineteenth-century Britain — figures like Lord Shaftesbury, a Tory evangelical rather than a radical — championed early factory acts limiting child labor and working hours on explicitly moral and religious grounds. Christian democratic movements across Catholic Europe, drawing on papal social teaching such as Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, argued for fair wages and workers' associations as a matter of social doctrine, distinct from and often opposed to socialist framing. In the United States, Progressive-era reformers of varying political stripes — some explicitly anti-socialist — pushed through factory safety laws and child labor restrictions state by state, often in direct response to specific disasters that made continued inaction politically indefensible.

The point is not that any one tradition deserves sole credit, nor that these movements were free of internal contradiction or fully consistent in what they fought for. It is that labour rights emerged from a genuinely broad and often uneasy coalition, forged under pressure, across the ideological spectrum — and that pretending otherwise, in either direction, misrepresents the historical record.

Haymarket, and the Fight for Eight Hours

If one single event captures how dangerous it was to simply ask for a shorter workday, it is the Haymarket Affair.

By 1886, American workers were widely putting in ten- to twelve-hour days, six days a week, and a national campaign — led by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, a precursor to the American Federation of Labor — had settled on May 1 as the date for a coordinated nationwide push for an eight-hour day. In Chicago, one of the campaign's key centers, roughly 40,000 workers went on strike, and reportedly 80,000 marched up Michigan Avenue on May 1 itself. Two days later, a confrontation between striking workers and strikebreakers at Chicago's McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant left at least two workers dead when police fired into the crowd. Labour organizers called a rally the following evening, May 4, at Haymarket Square to protest the killings — a peaceful meeting, by most contemporary accounts, until police moved in to disperse it and someone in the crowd threw a dynamite bomb, killing several officers in the blast and the retaliatory gunfire that followed. Seven police officers and at least four civilians ultimately died.

Eight anarchist labour organizers were arrested and tried for the bombing, despite prosecutors being unable to identify who had actually thrown it, and despite several of the defendants not even being present at the rally when it happened. Seven were sentenced to death. Four were hanged in November 1887; one died by an apparent suicide in his cell the night before his scheduled execution; two had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment after sustained public pressure. Illinois's governor pardoned the remaining defendants in 1893, citing an unfair trial. The event triggered what historians describe as the country's first major "red scare," setting the American movement for shorter hours back by years even as it made Haymarket, and May 1, into an enduring international symbol of the labour struggle — which is why May Day is still observed as International Workers' Day in much of the world today, a designation the Second International formally adopted in 1889 specifically in memory of Haymarket.

The eight-hour day itself did not arrive in the United States as federal law until 1938, when the Great Depression's mass unemployment revived the argument that shorter hours could spread available work across more people, and Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act establishing the eight-hour day and forty-hour week as national policy — more than half a century after the Haymarket workers first marched for it.

Building an International Floor: The ILO

The eight-hour campaign was never confined to one country, and by the early twentieth century it was clear that no single nation's labor laws could hold if competitors could simply undercut them by working people harder for less. That recognition led, in 1919, to one of the more unusual outcomes of the Treaty of Versailles: the creation of the International Labour Organization.

The ILO was written into Part XIII of the treaty that formally ended the First World War, founded on the explicit conviction that lasting peace required social justice, and that labour "should not be regarded merely as a commodity or article of commerce." Its drafting commission, chaired by American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, drew heavily on a detailed British proposal. What made it structurally unusual — and still does — is its tripartite design: unlike every other body created at Versailles, ILO decision-making formally includes not just government delegates but organized representatives of both employers and workers, each with an equal vote. Its founders were also candid about a second motive alongside peace: containing the spread of Bolshevism by channeling labor's growing assertiveness into institutional reform rather than revolutionary upheaval. The ILO began with 44 member states in 1919; it has since grown to 187, became the first specialized agency of the United Nations in 1946, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969. Between 1919 and 1946 alone, it adopted conventions establishing an eight-hour day and 48-hour week, banning night work for women and young people, and setting minimum ages for child labor — conventions that gave reformers in individual countries an international benchmark to organize around, even where domestic politics moved slowly.

How the Struggle Reshaped Labour Law Across the World

The eight-hour campaign and the ILO's founding were part of a broader wave of legislative change that swept through industrialized and industrializing economies over the following century, arriving at different speeds and through different political routes.

In Europe, Germany moved first and from an unlikely direction: Bismarck's government introduced health insurance in 1883, accident insurance in 1884, and old-age and disability pensions in 1889 — the world's first modern social insurance system, built by a conservative chancellor specifically to blunt the appeal of the Social Democratic Party he had spent years trying to suppress. Britain's series of nineteenth-century Factory Acts progressively restricted child labor and working hours, driven by a coalition of evangelical reformers, trade unionists, and public outrage following parliamentary investigations into mine and mill conditions. France built one of the world's most extensive labour codes over the twentieth century, a product of repeated waves of union militancy including the mass strikes of 1936 that won paid annual leave and the forty-hour week under the Popular Front government.

In North America, beyond the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in New York — in which 146 garment workers, most of them young immigrant women, died after being trapped behind locked exit doors — became the catalyst for a wave of state-level fire safety and factory inspection laws.

In Latin America, labour codes in countries like Argentina, Chile, and Mexico emerged largely in the early-to-mid twentieth century through populist and socialist political movements intertwined with broader nationalist politics, producing protections that were in some cases more generous on paper than those in wealthier economies of the same period.

In Asia, Japan's postwar labour framework, including the right to unionize, was substantially shaped during the American occupation after 1945. South Korea and Taiwan built their labour protections later still, often in tension with authoritarian, export-oriented industrial policy through the 1960s–80s, with genuine collective bargaining rights arriving only after democratization in the late 1980s.

India's Own Long Struggle

India's labour movement followed this same basic pattern — conditions creating grievance, grievance producing organization, organization eventually forcing legislative change — but on its own timeline, entangled with the fight against colonial rule.

Early industrial employment in colonial India, concentrated in textile mills in Bombay and Ahmedabad, jute mills in Bengal, and the railways, replicated the worst features of early European industrialization: long hours, widespread child labor, and unsafe conditions, with almost no legal protection. The first legislative response, the Factories Act of 1881, was a modest colonial measure regulating child labor and working hours in textile mills, later strengthened in 1891 — decades before organized Indian trade unionism existed in any recognizable form. Sporadic strikes in Bombay and Madras through the 1880s and 1890s taught workers the basic power of collective refusal even without formal unions, and small associations like the Bombay Mill-Hands Association, formed in 1890 by N.M. Lokhande, represented early, still-informal attempts at organization.

Modern Indian trade unionism took shape around the First World War, driven by wartime inflation, harsh factory conditions, and the ideological ferment of the period — the Russian Revolution, the founding of the ILO, and the rising nationalist movement all fed into it. B.P. Wadia founded the Madras Labour Union in 1918, generally regarded as India's first modern trade union in the organized sense. In Ahmedabad, Mahatma Gandhi personally led a textile workers' strike in 1918 that he deliberately framed as a satyagraha, and the unions involved federated in 1920 into the Textile Labour Association under Anasuya Sarabhai, a pioneering figure in India's women's labour organizing. That same year, the All India Trade Union Congress was founded in Bombay — India's first national trade union federation, with Lala Lajpat Rai as its first president and founding figures including N.M. Joshi, Joseph Baptista, and Diwan Chaman Lal, formed partly so Indian labour could send its own representatives to the newly created ILO.

Legal recognition followed only after further struggle. The 1921 Buckingham and Carnatic Mills dispute exposed how vulnerable organizers still were, with union leaders prosecuted essentially for the act of organizing, since no law yet protected the right to unionize as such. N.M. Joshi's sustained advocacy afterward helped push through the Trade Unions Act of 1926, which finally gave Indian unions legal registration and protection, followed by the Trade Disputes Act of 1929. After independence, the Constitution embedded labour protection into the Directive Principles of State Policy — provisions on living wages, humane working conditions, and workers' participation in industry — while a wave of 1948 legislation delivered much of the framework Indian workers still rely on today: the Factories Act, the Employees' State Insurance Act, and the Minimum Wages Act, followed in 1947 by the Industrial Disputes Act and in 1952 by the Employees' Provident Fund Act. The labour movement itself splintered along political lines after independence — the Congress-aligned INTUC in 1947, the socialist Hind Mazdoor Sabha in 1948, the RSS-aligned Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh in 1955, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-aligned Centre of Indian Trade Unions in 1970 — but each of these federations, across a genuinely wide ideological range, contributed at different points to building and defending the statutory protections Indian workers hold today.

The Rights Being Renegotiated Today

None of this history is safely finished business. Across very different political and economic systems, the core protections described above are being actively debated, diluted, or in some cases directly rolled back — and the arguments on both sides deserve to be taken seriously rather than dismissed.

The United States offers the clearest long-run data on what happens to bargaining power once legal protection for unions weakens. Union membership in the American private sector has fallen from around 35% in 1954 to roughly 6% today, a decline set in motion by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which authorized states to pass "right-to-work" laws letting workers benefit from union contracts without paying dues — weakening union finances through a textbook free-rider problem. Twenty-seven states have since adopted such laws. Economic research on their effects is fairly consistent: studies using state-level data find right-to-work laws reduce unionization rates by roughly 1 to 4 percentage points within several years of passage, alongside measurable wage declines even for non-union workers in affected states, since union density affects the bargaining leverage of an entire regional labor market, not just card-carrying members. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the broader decline in collective bargaining since 1979 has cost the median full-time American worker roughly $3,900 a year in foregone wages.

The United Kingdom's Trade Union Act 2016 raised the participation and approval thresholds required for legal strike action, particularly in sectors like healthcare and transport, over union objections that the thresholds were designed to make lawful strikes practically difficult to organize rather than to ensure genuine mandate.

France illustrates a similar pattern pursued from the political center, with governments arguing labour flexibility was necessary for competitiveness against high, persistent unemployment. The 2016 El Khomri law and Emmanuel Macron's 2017 executive-order overhaul of the labour code both eased restrictions on layoffs and gave employers greater latitude to negotiate pay and conditions directly with workers rather than through sector-wide agreements, provoking large but ultimately unsuccessful union mobilizations; despite France's reputation for worker protection, only around 8% of its workforce is now unionized, dropping to roughly 5% in the private sector.

Argentina shows how quickly change can move when a government is determined. In February 2026, President Javier Milei's labour reform passed the Senate 42–30, permitting a legal working day of up to twelve hours and reducing employer social security contributions, over large public protests and warnings from opposition leaders that decades of hard-won protections — severance pay, overtime, vacation entitlements — were being placed at direct risk.

South Korea offers a case where public and generational pushback actually reversed course. Having cut its legal maximum workweek from 68 to 52 hours in 2018 — a reform aimed squarely at the country's culture of extreme overwork and its documented cases of death from overwork, known as gwarosa — the government proposed in 2023 to raise the cap to 69 hours, arguing it would give workers more flexibility to bank overtime as future time off. The proposal collapsed under sustained opposition from younger workers and unions, and a scaled-back version was formally rejected by the end of that year.

India's own four labour codes, passed between 2019 and 2020 and consolidating 24 older labour laws, are argued by the government to modernize an outdated and fragmented system and ease compliance costs for employers; trade unions across the political spectrum have instead argued they weaken job security, dilute the practical right to strike, and extend legal working hours, and have organized repeated national strikes — one in February drew participation estimated at 300 million workers — demanding their withdrawal.

Across all of these cases, the underlying debate is largely the same. Supporters of deregulation argue that rigid labour protections raise the cost of hiring, discourage investment, and ultimately reduce the number of jobs available, particularly in economies with high structural unemployment — a genuine and, in some specific instances, empirically supported concern. Critics respond that the empirical record on union decline, wage stagnation, and rising inequality in exactly the countries that have deregulated most aggressively suggests these reforms have functioned less as engines of broad-based job creation and more as a redistribution of bargaining power away from workers and toward employers and shareholders. Layered on top of this formal debate is a structural shift that makes the old legal categories harder to apply at all: the global growth of the gig economy and independent-contractor classification has moved tens of millions of workers outside the reach of traditional labor law entirely, since platform work is frequently not legally recognized as employment in the first place, leaving those workers without minimum wage guarantees, collective bargaining rights, or social insurance regardless of what the underlying statute says. Both sides of this argument rest on real evidence and real trade-offs; neither is simply propaganda, and a fair reading of the history suggests the honest answer is that the balance struck in any given country, at any given time, has always been a political choice rather than a fixed economic law.

Why the History Still Matters

None of this requires agreeing with socialism, communism, social democracy, or any other specific ideology that took part in this history. It requires only recognizing a simple, well-documented fact: the eight-hour day, the weekend, the minimum wage, paid leave, workplace safety inspections, maternity protection, pensions, and the legal right to organize did not appear because industrialists calculated they were good for business, nor because governments decided unprompted that workers deserved better. They appeared because workers organized, went on strike, endured imprisonment, and in a considerable number of documented cases, died — in Haymarket Square, on the floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, on picket lines across a dozen countries and two centuries — and because that pressure was eventually absorbed into law by governments and movements spanning liberals, socialists, communists, Christian democrats, and pragmatic conservatives alike, each for their own reasons.

That history is worth knowing regardless of where anyone sits politically today, for one plain reason: nothing about these rights is permanent. They were built, gradually and at real human cost, and they can be worn away the same way — not usually through a single dramatic repeal, but through years of declining union density, expanding informal and gig employment, quiet regulatory dilution, and a public that has simply stopped remembering why any of it was fought for in the first place. A society that forgets the cost of what it has is poorly positioned to notice when it starts losing it.

Search This Blog

The Sensible Arya