On a spring Saturday on May 1, 1886, workers at 13,000 businesses across America took a stand against dangerous work and low wages, and for an eight-hour workday. An estimated 300,000 to a half million workers, many of them immigrants, rallied and paraded through city centers in a general strike to demand an end to unsafe factory jobs with high death rates and little pay while corporations raked in booming profits. They also were encouraged by the growing labor movement and populist politics sweeping the nation as immigrants poured into the U.S.