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May Day: Fight for Workers’ Values |
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Today as we celebrate May Day and the birthday of legendary labor advocate Mother Jones, workers and other progressives must think about how we use our values to build a struggle for human sustainability, including a sustainable environment, sustainable jobs, sustainable health and a sustainable economy.
Speaking today before a forum on quality green jobs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Stewart Acuff, an assistant to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, says that to successfully accomplish that goal, we must bury forever the falsehood that greed is good and every person is on his or her own.
See, while they told us you are on your own, they did all they could to make it so. While they ignored climate change and global warming and more and more kids with asthma and more and more cancer cases, they were busting our unions, outsourcing and contracting out and privatizing our work, Wal-Marting our economy, telling us we have to compete in a global economy that sends 13-year-old girls to factories and factory dorms and the whims of supervisors in the Caribbean Basin, that murders trade unionists in Colombia, that sends 9- and 10-year-olds to work in Vietnam and Pakistan and uses slave labor in China.
Instead, we need a series of actions to make the global economy work for every person, Acuff says, including:
- Tapping renewable sources of energy. But to tap this energy requires skilled crafts people to build the windmills and turbines and build and install the turbines that can be turned by the tides of the sea.
- Creating good green jobs that help save the environment and provide a decent living. Sustainable jobs that help preserve a sustainable environment.
- Providing universal health care.
- Renewing the freedom to join unions by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.
Click here to read Acuff’s speech.
Acuff’s call for an economy that works for all receives a big “amen” from the global union movement. In its May Day declaration, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) called for an end to poverty and inequality.
Trade unions demand far-reaching, urgent and coordinated action to pull the world out of recession. Governments must act to keep people in work and create new jobs, to avoid an even deeper and longer-lasting crisis. These actions are essential, but alone they are not sufficient.
We demand nothing less than a full-scale transformation of the world economy. A new global economy is required, which is built on social justice.
Click here to view a video of ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder’s May Day message.
In other May Day actions:
- Workers in Milwaukee and Madison, Wis., will rally in support of rights and protections for immigrant workers. They will call for a path to citizenship, strengthening worker protection laws and passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.
- In Los Angeles, thousands are expected to join seven marches to push for immigration reform. Also in LA, supporters will rally to save the UCLA Labor Center from budget cuts.
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May Day: Fight for Workers’ Values
May Day - the Real Labor Day
http://efcanow.blogspot.com/
May 1st, International Workers’ Day, commemorates the historic struggle of working people throughout the world, and is recognized in every country except the United States, Canada, and South Africa. This despite the fact that the holiday began in the 1880s in the United States, with the fight for an eight-hour work day.
In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions passed a resolution stating that eight hours would constitute a legal day’s work from and after May 1, 1886. The resolution called for a general strike to achieve the goal, since legislative methods had already failed. With workers being forced to work ten, twelve, and fourteen hours a day, rank-and-file support for the eight-hour movement grew rapidly, despite the indifference and hostility of many union leaders. By April 1886, 250,000 workers were involved in the May Day movement.
The heart of the movement was in Chicago, organized primarily by the anarchist International Working People’s Association. Businesses and the state were terrified by the increasingly revolutionary character of the movement and prepared accordingly. The police and militia were increased in size and received new and powerful weapons financed by local business leaders. Chicago’s Commercial Club purchased a $2000 machine gun for the Illinois National Guard to be used against strikers. Nevertheless, by May 1st, the movement had already won gains for many Chicago clothing cutters, shoemakers, and packing-house workers. But on May 3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works Factory, killing four and wounding many. Anarchists called for a mass meeting the next day in Haymarket Square to protest the brutality.
The meeting proceeded without incident, and by the time the last speaker was on the platform, the rainy gathering was already breaking up, with only a few hundred people remaining. It was then that 180 cops marched into the square and ordered the meeting to disperse. As the speakers climbed down from the platform, a bomb was thrown at the police, killing one and injuring seventy. Police responded by firing into the crowd, killing one worker and injuring many others.
Although it was never determined who threw the bomb, the incident was used as an excuse to attack the entire Left and labor movement. Police ransacked the homes and offices of suspected radicals, and hundreds were arrested without charge. Anarchists in particular were harassed, and eight of Chicago’s most active were charged with conspiracy to murder in connection with the Haymarket bombing. A kangaroo court found all eight guilty, despite a lack of evidence connecting any of them to the bomb-thrower (only one was even present at the meeting, and he was on the speakers’ platform), and they were sentenced to die. Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolf Fischer, and George Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887. Louis Lingg committed suicide in prison, The remaining three were finally pardoned in 1893.
It is not surprising that the state, business leaders, mainstream union officials, and the media would want to hide the true history of May Day, portraying it as a holiday celebrated only in Moscow’s Red Square. In its attempt to erase the history and significance of May Day, the United States government declared May 1st to be “Law Day”, and gave us instead Labor Day - a holiday devoid of any historical significance other than its importance as a day to swill beer and sit in traffic jams.
Nevertheless, rather than suppressing labor and radical movements, the events of 1886and the execution of the Chicago anarchists actually mobilized many generations of radicals. Emma Goldman, a young immigrant at the time, later pointed to the Haymarket affair as her political birth. Lucy Parsons, widow of Albert Parsons, called upon the poor to direct their anger toward those responsible - the rich. Instead of disappearing, the anarchist movement only grew in the wake of Haymarket, spawning other radical movements and organizations, including the Industrial Workers of the World.
By covering up the history of May Day, the state, business, mainstream unions and the media have covered up an entire legacy of dissent in this country. They are terrified of what a similarly militant and organized movement could accomplish today, and they suppress the seeds of such organization whenever and wherever they can. As workers, we must recognize and commemorate May Day not only for it’s historical significance, but also as a time to organize around issues of vital importance to working-class people today.
As IWW songwriter Joe Hill wrote in one of his most powerful songs:
Workers of the world, awaken!
Rise in all your splendid might
Take the wealth that you are making,
It belongs to you by right.
No one will for bread be crying
We’ll have freedom, love and health,
When the grand red flag is flying
In the Workers’ Commonwealth.
Tags: AFL-CIO, Employee Free Choice Act, EFCA, global economy, Guy Ryder, health care, health care reform, immigrant workers, International Trade Union Confederation, ITUC, labor, May Day, Stewart Acuff, union, union blogs, unions
The AFL-CIO are against American born legal workers.
If Illegaly you are breaking the LAW.
E-Verify is the answer.
Sweeney needs to be voted out!
Mayday my rear end it is only another way to tout how great the illegal immigrant is.In the United States this day is officially National law Day.The illegal immigrant has no respect for the American Citizen or our laws.They are thumbing their nose’s at us and the AFL-CIO and the US Chamber of Commerce are leading the way.Legal citizens and legal immigrants be wary you might just get what these people want 20 million or more paths to citizenship and your job.
This May Day, with millions now unemployed, with the auto workers decimated, it is perhaps time to take stock of WHAT has happened, WHY we are being destroyed, and what is to be done about it. The “status quo” has collapsed and there is no going back to the “good old days” (if there ever was such a thing!).
A couple of critical articles worth reading:
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The Chrysler bankruptcy
2 May 2009
Tom Eley and Barry Grey
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/may2009/pers-m02.shtml
On Thursday, President Obama told a news conference that Chrysler, the third largest US automaker, would enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Obama said that this step would “save jobs” and that the process would be quick and painless.
Within hours, these words were exposed as lies. All Chrysler plants will be closed for the duration of the bankruptcy proceedings, and at least six of these will never reopen. Meanwhile, analysts say the Chrysler bankruptcy may well bog down in court and the company could face liquidation. Many Chrysler workers will never set foot in their plants again.
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(This story with interviews and photos)
As Chrysler shutters its factories
Workers denounce UAW concessions
By Andre Damon
2 May 2009
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/may2009/chry-m02.shtml
Chrysler employees arrived at their factories to find production stopped and cars covered in plastic on Friday, less than two days after a concessions contract pushed through by the United Auto Workers.
Chrysler began bankruptcy proceedings on Thursday. After initially announcing that production would stop next week, Chrysler moved to suspend production indefinitely at all its facilities in the US and Canada pending judicial hearings.
Chrysler announced on Friday that it would permanently close five active plants—two in the Detroit area (Sterling Heights Assembly and Conner Assembly); an engine plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin; an assembly plant in St. Louis, Missouri; and a stamping plant in Twinsburg, Ohio—by the end of 2010 and possibly much earlier. It will also close three plants that are already idled.
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Video: Chrysler workers speak on concessions vote
1 May 2009
http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/05/01/may-day-fight-for-workers-values/#comments
The World Socialist Web Site spoke to workers in Warren and Detroit, Michigan on Wednesday, as they went to vote on contract revisions. The revisions, pushed by Chrysler and the United Auto Workers, include massive concessions across the board. Workers were given a day to review the revisions before the vote was scheduled.
Once again the mostly wealthy controlled media likes to blame the American Union member for the decline, when report after report has easily shown that it was management greed and mistakes that contributed to it much more than the unionized worker.