By Belén Fernández
Publication Date: 2026-05-01 09:54:00
On May 1, much of the world celebrates International Workers’ Day, or May Day, to honor workers’ rights and the history of the labor movement. May Day is a public holiday in many countries and has traditionally been suppressed in the United States, a country where neither international labor solidarity nor workers’ rights have been valued.
The USA and its northern neighbor Canada instead celebrate their own exclusive Labor Day in September. However, the origins of May Day lie in the United States itself, where mass strikes for an eight-hour workday broke out on May 1st in 1886, quickly resulting in deadly police repression.
Today, workers’ rights are under attack from another direction: artificial intelligence (AI), which threatens workers’ right to work.
In January, Amazon — the second-largest employer in the U.S. after Walmart — laid off 16,000 employees, the latest round of widespread layoffs due to AI. In October 2025…