On May 1, much of the world celebrates International Workers’ Day, or May Day, honouring workers’ rights and the history of the labour movement. A public holiday in many countries, May Day has traditionally been stifled in the United States, a nation that has never been big on either international labour solidarity or workers’ rights.
The US and its tagalong to the north, Canada, instead celebrate their own exclusive Labour Day in September. But the origins of May Day lie in the US itself, where, on the first of May in the year 1886, mass strikes on behalf of an eight-hour workday broke out and were quickly met with deadly police repression.
Nowadays, workers’ rights are under fire from another direction: artificial intelligence (AI), which threatens the very right of workers to, well, work.
In January, Amazon – the second-largest employer in the US after Walmart – moved to lay off 16,000 employees, the latest round of sweeping layoffs on account of AI. In October 2025, The New York Times reported that the company had plans “to replace more than half a million jobs with robots”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.