In Honor Of May Day 2014-From The American Left History Blog Archives-All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- An Open Letter To The Working People Of Boston From A Fellow Worker

 

 

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.

************

 

Rain beating down, rain-beaten, as downcast as the weather a sock-soaked, rain jacket-soaked, pants-soaked Frank Jackman around    10:00 AM gathered up the small remnant of materials at hand. Those that he had actually decided to carry from the underground parking facility a few blocks from where he stood just then at the corner of Franklin and Congress Streets in downtown Boston when he realized that the thousand or so protestors were not going to materialize that day. The reason that Frank had been in the downtown area, not one of his usual haunts, was to participant in the May Day 2012 protest actions at the State Street Bank. Frank had been helping to organize the actions all spring ever since a call came out from Occupy Wall Street in January to build for a General Strike on May Day. Although Frank, and some of the other organizers, had not been naïve enough to believe that they could bring off a General Strike in Boston that year he, and they, believed that a serious mass action closing down one big symbol of Wall Street’s and the financial markets catastrophic effect on the American and world economy could be planned and be successful as a first effort. And gather important media coverage as well.

 

So the May Day organizing committee made up of mainly younger radicals and student supporters with a sprinkling of old-timers like Frank had planned, had planned not in the old-fashioned way by counting heads but by responses to a social networking campaign.       

As May Day approached the committee, Frank included, began to think that upwards of one thousand people might show up at the bank and that they could effectively close it down for several hours, with or with arrests, but with good media coverage. The reason for that wide-spread belief was that the Facebook event page that they had created had posted several thousand “likes” and “will comes.” Moreover many committee members were being deluged with requests for information and for flyers (although Frank as active as anybody on the networking sites did not see a “spike”). In any case Frank, who had volunteered to show up at the meeting point early and bring all the necessary materials for the action in his car was also carried away by the prospects of a successful action.

 

In the event Frank did not even bring a quarter of the material that he had transported in his car from Cambridge and most of that as he now realized had not needed  to be transported either. That many thousand “likes” turned out to be about fifty bedraggled protestors who to avoid freezing in the rain walked around shouting slogans to crowd-less streets. Crowd-less and media-less since the several well-known media vans that had gathered expecting to see a reportable melee had left by 8:00 AM looking for as one reporter snidely remarked on camera “real news”. Sure Frank was disappointed, sure he was crest-fallen, sure his was a little angry that some of the younger committee members thought that the vague social-networking streams that they lived and died by would come through like this was Cairo or someplace like that. But mainly he realized the very severe limits of cyberspace organizing when the deal went down. He hoped, as he wiped some raindrops off his face, that not a few of those “likes” were at least out of bed by then.