Join the Struggle: May Day Events Across Australia 2025

Graphic poster titled 'MAY DAY EVENTS 2025' on a black background with crinkled texture.

For over one-hundred years May 1^st has been a day of struggle and international solidarity. 2020 saw calls for an anti-imperialist May Day. On May 1^st 2024, organisations from around the world mobilised for the liberation of Palestine. These contexts should continue to inform this year’s May Day, but, in Australia, we have also seen calls to rebuild the workers movement in this country.

Occasionally it is remembered that May Day began in Australia as part of the struggle for an eight-hour work day—as Rosa Luxemburg reminds us:

“The inspired thought of introducing a proletarian holiday as a means of obtaining the eight-hour working day first originated in Australia. As early as 1856, the workers there resolved to call for one day of complete work stoppage; the day to be spent in meetings and entertainment instead as a demonstration for the eight-hour day.”

Equally important to remember is that the Victorian Stonemasons who Luxemburg reminds us of here downed their tools during the construction of the University of Melbourne, an institution that continues to participate in the military-industrial-academic complex and the U.S. led imperial order, and is therefore complicit in the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.

As we organise in celebration of worker’s power this May 1^st, we remember that anti-imperialism and the working class movement go hand in hand—one cannot succeed without the other.