How Spiritual Progressives Can Celebrate International Workers Day: Social Justice, Anarchists, and Stewart Acuff
by: Lita Kurth on April 28th, 2010 | 11 Comments »
Credit: FlickrCC/Chaz_Wags.
I once worked for a small greeting card company in Berkeley, piecework packing cards into plastic bags: $7 for a box filled with twelve-card bags. After a while, I became quite efficient and could fill almost two boxes in an hour. The owner, however, was outraged at what my hourly wage had become and moved to cut it.
Clearly she had earlier decided she could afford $7 a box, but now, apparently, the idea of a mere worker getting a decent wage was more than she could stand. Disgusted and furious, I left as soon as I could find another job.
Little injustices like that and far bigger ones are the reasons we have a labor movement. It has been a long, long, bitter struggle for workers to have a small share of democracy at work. Their rights are won and then eroded or circumvented.
Now, so many people work 12-hour shifts or wildly fluctuating hours; several part-time jobs or full- plus part-time jobs that the eight-hour day and forty-hour week, designed for rest, human development, and Sabbath, are moving out of range once more. It’s symptomatic that few American workers could tell you what May 1 is about.
May Day poster from Russia. Credit: FlickrCC/Chaz_ Wags.
However, from Argentina to Sri Lanka, from Belgium to Equatorial Guinea May 1 is an official holiday: International Workers Day. Pakistan has it. So does Jordan. Turkey celebrates it as Labour and Solidarity Day. Even Croatia celebrates workers on May 1. In other countries, unions and socialists take to the streets with red flags, or, in communist countries, official parades with military drills celebrating the (supposed) victory of the proletariat in the class war. (Chinese workers used to get the whole week off, the Golden Week, but in 2008 the “People’s” government repealed it.)
In the U.S., however — and in Indonesia — there are no official festivities. Why? Fearing to memorialize the Anarchists and their push for an eight-hour day, President Grover Cleveland only OK-ed Labor Day under pressure and put it far down the calendar in September, which luckily had some history as a labor day with the Knights of Labor.
Other countries have taken up what began here on May 1, 1886: a nationwide strike for the eight-hour day led by Anarchists, who gathered peacefully in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to promote the strike and protest the deaths of two workers killed by police while defending a picket line at McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. After hours of peaceful speeches, police arrived to bust up the gathering, and someone threw a pipe bomb which killed a policeman.
In the night-time confusion that followed, at least seven policemen and four workers were killed.[1] The disturbance offered an excuse to round up Anarchist leaders and rush them to trial. In the hysteria that followed, the eight-hour day was buried, not to resurrect until 1935.
A memorial to the Haymarket Riot of May 1886 in Chicago. Credit: FlickrCC/TRiver.
It seems that labor struggles have almost always contained an element of violence on both sides, yet there remains a connection between spirituality and worker rights. AFL-CIO leader Stewart Acuff — recently vilified by Glenn Beck and business groups for suggesting that if Congress rejected the worker rights in the Employee Free Choice Act (It did, by one new Republican vote) labor advocates should find another strategy — offered some wonderful thoughts in an oral history available through the Southern Labor Archives at Georgia State University:
I think the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition and Judeo-Christian theology is filled with the message of love and compassion but also the message of struggle against oppression. That is the message in the Old Testament, in my view, Isaiah and Jeremiah, expressed by the angry prophets. In the New Testament, that is the gospel….I think nothing is more central to the gospel than ‘that which you have done to the least of these, you have done also to me,’ (the Sermon on the Mount). [2]
Acuff worked first with ACORN in the South and then with the SEIU union. While organizing nursing home workers, he experienced threats from the Klan. Clearly he’s one of those dangerous “social justice” church-goers Glenn Beck warns us against.
It’s worth looking at that proposed law. In my view, its most important provisions are not the changed voting procedures for choosing a union, but protections against employer intimidation and some new baby teeth for enforcement, as follows (some details deleted for ease of reading):
(b) Any employer who willfully or repeatedly commits any unfair labor practice … while employees of the employer are seeking representation by a labor organization … shall, in addition to any make-whole remedy ordered, be subject to a civil penalty of not to exceed $20,000 for each violation.
That seems minimal enough. In addition, unfair labor practices would go to the top of the National Labor Relations Board case list so justice wouldn’t take so long in coming (as it often did in the Reagan-Bush years) that workers have given up by the time their case gets heard.
Spiritual progressives might celebrate International Workers Day in a meaningful way and continue their support throughout the year by doing some of the following:
- Let your Congresspeople know that minimal justice still needs to happen in the workplace, and that the disproportionate suffering of unemployed blue-collar workers needs immediate remedy, not the leisurely focus it now receives.
- Support sharing in the form of taxes from those with grotesque excess to green job programs and other assistance to workers whose unemployment benefits have run out (and who can’t get aid to attend the public colleges their wages helped sustain), workers who now have to decide between rent and medicine, electricity and bus fare.
- Pay a fair wage to anyone you hire and give workers hours they can count on.
May Day protest in downtown Miami, 2005. Credit: FlickrCC/danny.hammontree.
Unlike some of the revolutionaries who fought for labor, I don’t believe in class warfare. The labor movement has always benefited from the support of enlightened people of privilege. Reading through archival testimony given to Congress in the late 1800s, I was touched by a letter from a manufacturer, William J. Crawford, owner of a Buffalo, NY stone-cutting business, who was preparing to institute the eight-hour day and went on record advocating it [3]. One class alone cannot accomplish justice.
Let me end with a final, small suggestion from people I know, two of my sisters who do housekeeping for a hotel that is part of a large chain. They each clean about forty rooms a day, but the vast majority of customers at this fairly classy hotel leave no tip whatsoever for the maids.
How about the next time you stay in a hotel, you leave a dollar for the housekeeping staff? Multiply that by ten customers (We’ll never have universal virtue in this life) and multiply that by six days a week, and you have sixty dollars, a significant and appreciated amount in the life of a hotel maid.
Happy International Workers Day, everyone!
Workers and their supporters rally at Rite Aid for the right to join a union on May 1, 2007. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
International Workers Day in Galicia, Spain, 2009. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
May Day celebration in Stockholm, Sweden, 2008. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
A supermarket worker yells a slogan in a workers event for unofficial May Day demonstrations in Jakarta, Indonesia, 2008. Credit: FlickrCC/henri_ismail.
[1] Accounts vary: one or two strikers killed, seven or eight police killed.
[2] Special Collections Department & Archives, Georgia State University Library, Southern Labor Archives
[3] From a 1913 set of Senate documents at Harvard Law Library digitized by Google
thanks for reminding us of the importance of May1st.
I think people forget to realize one simple question – The diff between Occupation and immigration???
I think it’s wonderful that May Day combines the political with the spiritual (May pole). I didn’t know some of Joe Hill’s ashes are close to my home. I want to visit the grave site on Saturday. As a resident of Colorado I am aware of the major labor struggles here. I have been to Ludlow.
Capitalism may be the most evil form of slavery yet. It’s impressive how many of us buy into it (no pun intended) despite the evidence against it.
Keep dreaming the dream, folks!
Thank you, everyone, for your comments. Philippe, hope you have a meaningful day tomorrow. Cliff, thanks. There is certainly a great deal of labor powerlessness right now, but I remind myself of Jean Jaures’s words, that it’s “a battle never won and never lost.”
Jim, I love that idea of visiting the gravesite of Joe Hill on May 1st. What a great way to be in touch with spiritual-political ancestors!
Does anyone know of a significant labor spot in San Jose?
I am in complete agreement with fair and just labor practices. I do not, however, understand how America can improve the lot of its own workers when we have an immigration policy that does not appear to work in the interests of the U.S. worker. Millions of Americans are unemployed; yet, we are to find the resources for millions more who are here illegally? How? Unfortunately, we live in a finite country with finite resources, and we cannot provide for every person who wants to come here. It is simply impossible. Yet I subject myself to name calling when I take this position.
The U.S. presently has the most generous immigration policy in the world, allowing one million legal immigrants to settle in this country every year. If, every twenty years or so, amnesty is granted to illegal immigrants as well, why not just admit to having an open borders policy and drop the pretense of border control, employer checks, and a managed immigration policy that would work for the benefit of America and not amnesty groups. The U.S. government could do a better job of controlling illegal immigration but is not enforcing present regulations (or at least not consistently).
Most liberals are environmentalists as well. We do not aspire to an overpopulated country and all its adverse impacts such as loss of open space, loss of habitat for wildlife, terrible pollution, depletion of the most basic resources, such as drinking water, or groundwater withdrawals that far exceed recharge rates and, in turn, impact streams, fisheries and aquatic life and threaten to reduce the ability of streams to assimilate natural and man-made pollutants. I do not aspire to the overpopulated living conditions of China and India. It is not the world I want for my grandchildren.,
In my opinion, we are on the path to unsustainable population growth, (in fact, it applies to the world) but in the U.S., it is mostly as a result of immigration policies. To say this, however, labels me, among certain groups, as a person who just hates foreigners.
Elaine, I wanted to give a thoughtful reply to your thoughtful post. I think you’re talking about a dilemma that many worry about, if not voice, and to put it in broad terms, it might be this: how can I do what’s humanly right and not suffer because of it? Very few people want to be martyrs; the majority want a good life. If it helps, looking at these issues historically, I am certain that good people who were not racist, not evil, were nonetheless worried about how they would not experience terrible things if, for example, the eight-hour day or the minimum wage were enacted, or even votes for women, child labor laws, and the end of slavery. It was reasonable to ask before each of these changes, “How is this going to work?” And the interesting fact is that the defenders of these changes had their answers, but the actuality turned out to be something new. (In a few cases, the worst fears were realized: women got the vote, and sure enough, they voted in Prohibition. But then later Prohibition was voted out again.) I think it takes courage and faith to institute justice; it takes courage and faith to stop making war. One very sad example I think of is Mark Twain’s father who had promised his slave his freedom upon Twain’s father’s death. But Twain’s father took ill younger than he thought he would and he took back his promise because he could not see depriving his wife and child of such an expensive piece of property. Did the possession of that slave really save Twain’s family from suffering or was it only fear–which is so often behind injustice? I think sometimes that the Tea Partyers nowadays are of this very type, very fearful that if we do something significant for those who are suffering, we’ll lose too much. Thanks for your post.
I.a. Kurth, Thank you for your reply. Are we comparing apples with apples, however? Have you ever read any of Paul Ehrlich’s books such as “The Population Bomb” or “How to be a Survivor?” Both had to do with overpopulation of the planet. They were written awhile ago but still make a lot of sense. Let me quote some of the passages from his second book:
“If you want to improve the standard of living of mankind, you basically have two choices: make the Earth larger or make the population smaller. No matter how you slice it, the resources of the planet are finite.”
“…the stability of ecological systems depends in large part on their complexity. Every time a population or species is driven into extinction, every time prairie is cleared and planted with a single crop, every time an area is paved, the complexity of the Earth’s ecosystem is reduced, and the danger of large scale malfunctions of the life-support systems of the planet is increased.”
I believe many of the conflicts we have today, especially in the Middle East, have to do with conflicts over resources for, as Erlich says, “..as the population grows each person’s “share” of those resources decreases. We are exploiting and overtaxing this planet everywhere–on land and sea– in an effort to meet the energy needs of too many people.
I predict (as others have) that the next scarce resource will be water. There won’t be enough potable, drinking water for everyone on this planet and, in fact, we are already seeing it in parts of the U.S. and on a much larger scale in other parts of the world.
In short, we are already witnessing the environmental deterioration of this planet. Perhaps we will all have to learn to live a much, much simpler lifestyle.
“End Human Bankruptcy”an idea whose time has come.
You`re right
Thank you! It’s so nice to see that these blogs have an afterlife!