Summer Holidays
In the history of the labour movement, having holidays, like anything else, is associated with struggle and organization. Trade unions had to gain the right to have paid holidays. In Holland, in 1910 the diamond workers were the first to succeed when they acquired a one-week paid vacation. Trade unions and political parties in their earliest days organized holiday camps for the children of their members. Regardless of ideology - communist, freethinker, christian-socialist - all felt that a group holiday in the fresh air would contribute to health and well-being.
The intellectual elite within the labour movement preferred to travel individually, however. Those who were able to afford it followed the major tourist route of the bourgeoisie during the nineteenth and early twentieth century: down the Rhine towards Italy, culminating in places of classical antiquity.
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