[Mb-civic] May Day

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/05/01/why_may_da
y.php

Why May Day?
Geov Parrish
May 01, 2006


Geov Parrish is a Seattle-based columnist and
reporter for Seattle Weekly, In These Times and Eat
the State! He writes the daily Straight Shot for
WorkingForChange . He can be reached by email at
geovlp at earthlink.net

For many older Americans, "May Day" brings to mind
images of phalanxes of Soviet soldiers, goose-
stepping through Red Square behind massive tanks,
while millions of onlookers obediently cheer. For
some, "May Day" is a pagan holiday, Beltane, known
more (and loved) for maypoles or other fertility
rituals than for political struggles. But May Day,
the political version, is an American holiday—one
celebrated for the last century everywhere in the
world except America, and one whose origins are well
worth remembering. Because May Day began as a strike
for basic workplace rights we're now in the process
of losing. And that strike was largely by immigrant
workers, which is exactly what America will see when
immigrants and their supporters strike, march and
rally across the country on a “National Day of Action
for Comprehensive Immigration Reform” on this coming
Monday—May Day.

Chicago, in 1886, was a rapidly growing city, a
polyglot of immigrant languages and cultures. On the
first May Day—May 1, 1886—"International Workers'
Day" began as a series of general strikes in Chicago
and other Midwestern cities for the eight- hour day.
Some 340,000 workers participated; it was a campaign
that had already been going on strong for quite some
time. But the strike took on particular significance
when, two days later, police attacked striking
workers at McCormick Reaper, on Chicago's south side.
Four workers were killed and over 200 injured. And at
a demonstration to protest the police riot on the
following day, May 4, a bomb went off at Chicago's
Haymarket Square—the infamous "Haymarket Massacre"
that killed eight police and wounded 60. The bombing
led to death sentences for eight leading anarchists,
including several German immigrants, convicted with
no evidence at all for conspiracy to commit murder.

Three of the anarchists were pardoned before their
deaths, the other five posthumously. But the public
and police hostility to organized labor that was
whipped up over Haymarket meant that, in turn, May
Day became an international labor rallying cry for
the right of workers to organize in general, and for
the eight-hour day in particular. By the end of the
decade, May Day was a holiday celebrated by workers
and workers' movements in every industrialized
country in the world.

It still is—now, in fact, it's observed globally.
Except, ironically, in the land of the holiday's
birth. The holiday's burgeoning popularity led
Congress, in 1894, to establish "Labor Day" in
September to honor American workers—a holiday
established, not by ordinary workers themselves as an
expression of empowerment, but by big business and
their Congressional apologists as a way to try to
dictate what workers were and weren't allowed to
celebrate. One day belonged to the workers; the other
365 to big business, and we were to work as many
hours of those days as business pleased.

The strategy failed, of course. Eventually. It took
another entire generation of struggle, but by 1912,
federal workers were granted the eight-hour day; and
in 1917, while America was desperate for the
cooperation of unions in the war effort, the Eight
Hour Act became law. And there, one would think, the
matter was settled.

Okay, quick: Do you actually work only eight hours in
a day? Only 40 hours in a week? Five days?

Not very many of us do, any longer. We stay longer in
the office, we take work home with us, we take work
everywhere with us, because at some level we fear
that if we don't, either the company will fail or it
will replace us with people who'll make those
sacrifices. Nor, in the land that gave birth to May
Day, do workers here get anywhere close to the
vacation or sick day benefits we get in other
industrialized countries. And let's not even talk
about health care coverage, which isn't even linked
to one's workplace in most of the industrialized
world—it's accepted as a universal need and right.
Here, our system has already rendered health care too
expensive to obtain without insurance. Now, it's
denying more and more of the workforce health
insurance that covers meaningful parts of the cost of
actually getting sick, or, for nearly 50 million of
us, any health insurance at all. Income for most
working families is not keeping up with inflation.
And for all of these effective losses in compensation
for our work, we're still working harder and longer
hours than our grandparents.

It's not too different now, really, from 1886. Then,
as now, big business was exploiting the desperation
and relative powerlessness of cheap immigrant labor,
and in the process trying to depress the wages and
establish exploitative precedents for all workers.
Then, as now, much of the rest of the public feared
and distrusted a part of the labor force that often
didn't even speak English. Then, as now, the
immigrants had finally had enough. And marched and
struck.

Today the largest yet wave of immigrant marches and
rallies will take place in scores of cities across
the United States. Their immediate focus is proposed
congressional reforms, the most prominent of which is
a ruthlessly exploitative “guest worker” proposal
backed by President George W. Bush that would leave
immigrants' legal standing wholly at the mercy of a
single employer. But the larger issue is America's
imposition of corporate-friendly trade policies that
have decimated economies in Mexico and elsewhere,
spurring economic emigration to America, while at the
same time exporting millions of better-paying jobs
from America itself.

The immigrants' struggle is not just legal, but
economic, and a matter of self-respect and self-
preservation; it is, in important ways, the leading
edge of a struggle all American workers are facing.
Today, find the immigrant march in your community.
Join it.

Happy May Day.


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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