May Day conjures up a host of historical images: European peasant children dancing around a May Pole; working men and women fighting for the 8 hour day in late 19th century Chicago; annual marches for worker justice held in cities and towns throughout the world as an international day of worker solidarity; columns of soldiers and tanks filing past the reviewing stands crowed with the officials and generals of repressive regimes. Take your pick; each is an authentic representation of what May Day has been over the past 116 years since the holiday was declared by the Second International to commemorate the Chicago general strike of 1886 and the fight for the 8 hour day.
Today immigrants and their supporters are re-claiming May Day as a time to protest for basic rights and standards. In actions across the US, some are striking, some are protesting on the job, some staying out of stores, and many are participating in demonstrations to demand a new approach to immigration rights and laws in today’s global economy. In doing so they are enriching US society and civic life that have become all too passive.
Here in Massachusetts, immigrant and labor activists organized by Centro Presente, the American Friends Service Committee, and others have rallied around the following set of demands which we support.
MAY DAY call:
• Legalization for all undocumented workers
• Family reunification, and the immediate addressing of backlog petitions
• Full worker rights, and no guest worker programs
• Full civil rights and due process for all immigrants
• End the raids, round-ups, mass detentions & deportations
• End the militarization of the border(s)
• Stop Free Trade Agreements and Structural Readjustment Policies
May Day was the first international working class attempt to establish some basic standards for workers all over the world. It became an international workers holiday at the end of the 19th as part of a global fight for the 8-hour day and minimum labor rights and standards. Its guiding idea was that workers in each country, using the means that they had available, would unite in common struggle for similar basic standards.
It’s still a good model. The 8-hour demand cut across national, economic, and craft boundaries. It demanded this standard as a basic social minimum and as a fundamental human right. Today, a new global standards approach may be essential if labor and its allies are to successfully respond to corporate led globalization and develop worker friendly alternatives.
M.O.
(Cick on migration on the menu to the left for more blogs on immigration.)
Elegant, essential and promising project. But one Uruguayan does not a global site make! Are you folks interested in globalising it - and making it THE site for discussion on strategy? If so, I would be happy to help.
To start with, would you be interested in posting my Global Labour Charter Movement project?
Peter
Posted by: peter waterman | June 04, 2006 at 03:48 AM