***From The May Day Organizing 2012 Organizing
Archives –May Day 2013 Needs The Same Efforts
All Out For May
1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Why Working
People Need To Show Their Power On May Day 2012
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises,
unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of
poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a
result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. I will stop there
although I could go on and on. Sounds familiar though, sounds like your
situation or that of someone you know, right?
Words, or words like them, are taken daily from today’s
global headlines.
But these were also similar to the conditions our
forebears faced in America back in the 1880s when this same vicious ruling
class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one
of their kind, Jay Gould, stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the
working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury
in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back,
fought back long and hard, starting with the fight connected with the heroic
Haymarket Martyrs in 1886 for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May
Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This
May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate
grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber
barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades
but now it is just more public and right in our face) American working people
have taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Start
off with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing
sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low
wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers like at General
Electric or the auto plants). Move on to paying for the seemingly never-ending
bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to
fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases
(since the rich refuse to pay, in some cases literally paying nothing, we pay).
And finish up with mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern
necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a life-time
deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the
harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing
immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and many women and the grievances
voiced long ago in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining.
In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and,
apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for
the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great
Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, for some of us,
great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some
lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like hell, against the
ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle
like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and
Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of
working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling
class of that day by their front-man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut
the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take
(and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks
(up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to
eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits.
Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can
help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed,
homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from
under. All Out On May Day 2012.
I have listed some of the problems we face now to some of
our demand that should be raised every day, not just May Day. See if you agree
and if you do take to the streets on May Day with us. We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! No More Wisconsins! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works
projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and
water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of
Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here
no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage
increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher
education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No
transportation worker lay-offs! For free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1,
2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective
participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal
workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day strike around some,
or all, of the above-mentioned demands.
*We will be organizing at workplaces where a strike is
not possible for workers to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a
coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to
graduate school and the off-hand left-wing think tank to walk-out of their
schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, and to
rally at a central location.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass
consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to
make purchases on that day.
All out on May Day 2012.
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