On April 30, 1983, a group of Dutch radicals based in Amsterdam’s Pijp-quarter undertook preparations for their country’s yearly May Day — or Labor Day, as it’s called in the Netherlands. As the Pentecost of the global workers’ movement, the date is the only bank holiday without pagan or Christian precedents, standing out as the proud achievement of a century of hard-won class struggle. In 1884, Samuel Gompers’ Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions called for a demonstration for an eight-hour working day on May 1, 1886; four years later, after a violent day of strikebreaking that killed five , Gompers urged the founding congress of the Second International in Paris to adopt the first of May as its “official” holiday.

In 1983, however, the group in question thought the name “Labor Day” rather obsolete. Although the Dutch government had never accepted the validity of the day — mainly due to its overlap with the earlier Queen’s Day (April 27) – it remained a landmark for left-wing parties, with large demonstrations and fairs held in Dutch cities. The group proposed rebaptizing May 1 as the “Day Against the Work Ethic” (Dag tegen het arbeidsethos), celebrating the advent of a world in which humanity would be exempt from the “duty to labor” altogether. Earlier that year, members had gathered in the Amsterdam cinema Rialto to found a consortium representing the “conscientiously unemployed” (bewust werklozen) under the name “Dutch Council Against the Work Ethic” (Nederlandse Bond Tegen het Arbeidsethos). Soon, journalists showed interest, while “angry” members of the Dutch Labor Party (the PvdA) and trade unions voiced their discontent. Although the organization was officially a union of the “jobless,” figures within the mainstream labor movement expressed disagreement with the group’s intention to halt the re-integration of the Dutch army of unemployed into the labor market. Work was to remain central, the laborites claimed, and the Council was playing a dangerous game.

Opposition from the established Left, however, did little to temper the Council’s ambitions. Over the course of the 1980s, the organization grew up to be one of the most vocal components of the anti-work Left, with its monthly magazine Luie Donder (Lazybones), joining a growing chorus of leftists who believed that “the society of work” had reached its endpoint.