Happy International Workers’ Day, May Day, and Labour Day.
Take some time to relax, enjoy family and friends, be proud of your contributions, and be thankful for organized labor, who have fought with their very lives to bring us weekends, benefits, retirement, labor rights and so much more. Please share any local events or actions as you wish.
Before calling for united action, here is some history about International Workers’ Day.
International Workers' Day, also known as Labour Day in most countries and often referred to as May Day, is a celebration of labourers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labour movement and occurs every year on May Day (1 May).
While it may belong to a tradition of spring festivals, the date was chosen in 1889 for political reasons by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris and established the Second International as a successor to the earlier International Workingmen's Association. They adopted a resolution for a "great international demonstration" in support of working-class demands for the eight-hour day. The date had been chosen by the American Federation of Labor to continue an earlier campaign for the eight-hour day in the United States, which had been the cause of a general strike beginning on 1 May 1886, and culminated in the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago four days later. May Day subsequently became an annual event. The 1904 Sixth Conference of the Second International, called on "all Social Democratic Party organisations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the eight-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace".
Workers started IWD, because we had to fight back against ownership abuse and exploitation. So many have been killed or hurt in unsafe work. We also memorialize our fallen coworkers in International Workers’ Memorial Day on April 28th.
In a relevant personal aside, organizing is also necessary in more highly trained crafts, such as science, engineering and technology. Owners are constantly seeking ways to exploit scientific and technological advances for greedy gains. They won’t apply advances equally unless workers force them to.
Moreover, strongman politicians seek to control information and knowledge with little regard for reality. Finance and politics are elevated over physics, climatology, biology, agriculture, and environmental science. Business and political leaders will keep using selective facts, propaganda and outright lies to maintain power. Scientists and technologists are under intense pressure to support selfish leader power interests. Not even science and technology workers can stand alone in their home countries. We must stand up, organize, get involved, and support each other worldwide.
Many countries recognize May 1 as a day to celebrate labor, and labor groups organize events on this date, including in gatherings across California, Miami and Orlando, FL, DC and NY, and Princeton, NJ, where
Many migrant families are settling in Princeton: Latino, Haitian, Jamaican communities. She (Ana Pazmino, director of Unidad Latina en Acción New Jersey) said they are the day laborers, the housekeepers and au pairs going into residents’ homes; they are the restaurant workers, factory workers — the list goes on.
On the national level, the most we get are statements from individual Democrats, such as an IWD statement from Senator Murray (WA).
today, we take a moment to honor all workers—and keep up the fight to protect workers’ rights and create a fairer, more inclusive economy that benefits everyone—not just the very wealthiest and giant corporations.
While the United States does not yet recognize IWD as a formal holiday, we nonetheless rise to salute fellow workers of the world.
Tens of thousands marked May Day – the international day of workers – with rallies in South Korea, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Serbia, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Greece, France and Cyprus, among others.
The United States favors owners over workers. Labor has been attacked from the beginning, and unions have been systematically weakened by agents of ownership in positions of power. Under these circumstances, let us take a moment to recognize and applaud successful labor organizing efforts at Amazon and Starbucks.
The historic union victories at Amazon and Starbucks have shattered any illusions that corporate giants are invincible to labor organizing. Let's make Amazon and Starbucks the start of a massive wave of unionization.
The power owners have is what they take from workers. They profit from exploiting, nature, labor and ideas. They push us to exploit ever more for profit. Few owners have any actual good ideas. they just chase money around all day in investment gambling. A few hit the jackpot and are considered brilliant business men. They are not. It was workers who came up with the ideas and put them into production. Gambling with people’s lives and blowing off worker mistreatment is not simply just business. It is all deeply personal. It is exploitation, and will continue to be exploitation until we figure out how to sustainably function as a civilization.
Now, after so much exploitation, we stand on the verge of needing more than sustainability. We are risking our one and only home world to profit ever more over marginal gains in convenience and extra choices. Soon, we might need to regenerate air, water and land through technology in order to even live on Earth. Make no mistake, when that day comes, it will be workers doing the regenerating. Owners will seek to profit. They will fight over ownership of regenerative tech and oversell utility for profit. They will still value finance over science, image over impact, and brand over lives, except their own. They will continue to kill and say it’s only business. It’s not. It’s all deeply personal. Workers know it through their aching muscles, broken joints, stress, headaches, hunger, financial pain, helpless anger and stifled dreams. It’s not just business, and it doesn’t have to continue.
It’s not going to be easy. Owners have all the power they could buy off with wealth they gained from workers. We gave it to them under false promises of owner superiority and trickle down prosperity. They won’t give it back on their own. They won’t see that we need equality to survive. They want to continue the delusional fable of magically superior owners, and they’ll use every marketing, public safety and divisive scapegoating trick they can think of to keep us under the ownership thumb.
Don’t fall for it. Prepare. We do the work. We keep society running. And, we have numbers that owners can never overcome. It’s our bodies and our lives we are fighting over. They want to exploit us and cast us aside. Don’t go down like that. Hold the line and fight back. Together, we make civilization work and together they can’t beat us. Together we can leave a world to be proud of.
Today is our day, workers of the world. Relax and celebrate today, if possible. Tomorrow the fight continues. Together, no owner or banker can stop us. They fear 10% declines in revenue. Together, we can reach any owner we want. They will listen when we act together to consistently hit their profits. Stand together, all races, genders, classes, nationalities and faiths. Inform each other, communicate openly and lend support against ownership division and attacks. Together, we overcome and move forward. Together we survive and thrive. United, we will win.