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May
Day: The struggle to get a life
From
Workers World,
May 1, 2003
May Day originated with the struggle in the
United States for an eight-hour day. The Knights of Labor called national
strikes in both the U.S. and Canada on May 1, 1886. In Chicago, police fired
on the striking workers, killing six. This and the fierce struggle that
followed led the International Working Men's Association, meeting three years
later in Paris, to declare May 1 an international workers' holiday. Today, it
is celebrated more in the rest of the world than here. The U.S. bosses never
want workers to act together with their sisters and brothers in other
countries.
Think about it: an eight-hour day. Workers at
that time often put in 12 or more hours a day, six days a week, at
back-breaking and dangerous jobs. They could only dream about having the
energy to do more with their lives than work, sleep and prepare to go back
to the job.
While the first millionaires were amassing
fortunes and outfitting their mansions with gold spittoons, these workers
got paid just enough to keep body and soul together, so that the working
class would be there for the bosses to exploit. The demand for an eight-hour
day inflamed their imaginations, for it meant being paid the same amount for
eight hours that they were getting for 12 or more.
The bosses cried that an eight-hour day would
destroy their profits and drive them into bankruptcy. It would lead to
anarchy, they said. It couldn't be done.
Many workers died in that struggle. The most
famous were the four who became known as the Haymarket Martyrs: Albert
Parsons, August Spies, George Engle and Adolph Fischer, anarchist workers
who were framed up and executed for a fatal bombing in Haymarket Square in
Chicago during a demonstration protesting the police killing of six other
workers.
Eventually, however, the eight-hour day was
won in union contract after union contract, until it became the law of the
land.
Or did it? How many workers do you know who
have to put in overtime or get a second job to make it? Maybe you're in that
category yourself. Wages in this country have been steadily eroding in
relation to prices for over 35 years. Immigrant workers, especially, who are
threatened with deportation if they organize and struggle, put in atrocious
hours because their hourly rate is often illegally below the barest minimum
wage needed to survive.
Even workers in more skilled categories are
starting to find that self-employment and other "nonconventional"
forms of work can be a fast track to the salt mines as the distinction
between leisure time and work time is blurred by constantly ringing cell
phones, emails and instant messaging.
And "downtime," which used to give
workers in fast-paced jobs a little breather once in a while, has now been
almost eliminated in jobs like trucking, deliveries, retail sales, food
service and banking. When was the last time that you as a customer didnhave
to wait on a long line at a bank or store, or count the minutes waiting for
a real human to pick up the phone? Then think of the worker on the other
end, who never gets more than a short - and very monitored - break.
Eight hours to work, eight hours to sleep,
eight hours to live. It isn't happening. The majority of workers in this
country are officially sleep-deprived. They're spending the time they should
have for their lives either working or commuting or taking care of the house
or all three.
After over a century of phenomenal
technological progress, when millionaires have morphed into billionaires,
the bosses have no excuse for paying crap and squeezing out every drop of
labor. Every reason they give for it is a lie. May Day needs to be revived
here, and with it the mighty international solidarity of the workers on a
new and higher level that can sweep away this vicious system of capitalist
exploitation. Let's get a life!
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