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Over 60 nations now celebrate May 1st as a worker’s holiday. Major countries observing Labor Day on May 1 include China, France, Germany, Russia, Brazil, India, Italy, Spain, and Mexico. Even the Catholic Church (under Pius XII) dedicated May 1st as the day to honor Jesus’s dad, “Saint Joseph the Worker.”
May Day emerged from labor activism of the 1880s. The 1889 International Workers Congress selected May 1st to honor a general strike, staged May 1, 1886, leading to the Haymarket riots on May the 4th (be with you). In 1904, the Workers Congress called on “all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May” to promote various labor causes.
— A Wall Street Journal editorial by Burton Swaim (April 18, 2026)
In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial on the fading work ethic, Barton Swaim says the COVID-inspired onset of distanced work, mostly at home, was a form of “quiet quitting – in which employees simply stop doing the jobs they were contracted to do.” He cites complaints from young (mostly Gen-Z) adults seeking a premature (rather than earned) “work-life balance,” which maligns work as the enemy of “life” rather than an essential part of a purpose-filled life.
A few days later, the Journal printed some letters in response to this editorial. The first letter came from a dairy farmer in Wisconsin, echoing a complaint of many local contractors or business owners. This dairy farmer advertised for help. He said four new workers applied and were hired but failed in this simple job over the last two years: One lost his girlfriend and was depressed. “The second thought explicit directions were a mere suggestion … The third thought his cell phone was part of his anatomical makeup. The fourth seemed to think work is an inconvenience to his time off.” (WSJ Letters, April 23, 2026).
Swaim also cited the fact that about one in seven Gen-Z cohorts (now age 18 to 24) are not in school, nor at work, nor looking for work, according to a recent Rand study. Key takeaways of this 2025 Rand study:
Beyond our natural human inclination toward sloth, Swaim cites, “The ease with which undeserving applicants may receive benefits.” It is shocking to see how many well-off employed people also receive government stimulus checks and regular Food Stamps from federal Santas – in a mirror image of the 1996 drive to “end welfare as we know it,” requiring the able to work.
Swain says, “No one has chronicled this story more incisively than Nicholas Eberstadt,” as in these books:
In the 1950s, male breadwinners were typically the only workers in a nuclear family – a working father, a homemaker, and two to six little rug-rats at home. Over the next half-century, though, the U.S. absorbed three major new armies of workers: (1) former housewives entering the official labor force, (2) a massive wave of new immigrant labor, and (3) the entry of some 80 million baby boomers into the labor force, 1962 to 1985. As of 2017, over 40 million Baby Boomers were still in the labor force, most still working.
These three new armies of workers contributed somewhat to millions of men going “on strike” in recent decades, but there’s more to this dilemma than aging Baby Boomers. When not burdened with being the sole breadwinner, papa has often retired from his “traditional” (Fiddler on the Roof) role as breadwinner:
“Who, day and night, must scramble for a living,Feed a wife and children, say his daily prayers?And who has the right, as master of the house,To have the final word at home?The Papa, the Papa! … Tradition!”
— From the first chorus of “Tradition,” the opening song in “Fiddler on the Roof”
If Golde, Tevye’s wife, gets an office job and their daughters sling hash at diners, Tevye sells less cheese.
Even more men went on strike during and after the COVID-era diaspora from office-centered work:
Reading these two charts, top to bottom and left to right, American males fell from 87% (7 of 8) showing up in the U.S. Labor Force in 1950, to just two out of three (67%) in 2022 – a quiet national work strike.