As a child
of the Cold War and Erskine College alumni…May first had two main images for
me.
When my
daddy was in college and seminary at Erskine, I can remember going to the May pole
dance as a little girl. Beautifully
dressed young women taking ribbons and ducking and bobbing - very gracefully,
of course - around the May pole. This
dance came from the European times of the fertility rituals.
The second
most vivid image was the “scary, bad communists” showing off their military
might. In the early 1900s Socialists in
Europe piggybacked on the already celebrated May First of past fertility rites and pushed for that day to be instead the Day of the Worker in recognition of the Haymarket affair that happened on 4 May 1886 in Chicago.
The Soviet Union quickly embraced May 1st as the Day of the Worker and in my
childhood it was a day to show their might.
May 1st
is recognized round the world as the Day of the Worker with national holidays,
parades, demonstrations, and even today in a few countries a show of military
might. Many of us from the U.S. have no
idea what Day of the Worker means…because our own Labor Day has come to mean
barbeques, parades, a day of rest, and the end of summer.
The Haymarket demonstration started as a peaceful demonstration protesting the police killing demonstrators who had marched previously on May 1st. That day had seen massive demonstrations in many industrial cities in the U.S. demanding the 8 hour work day with no cut in pay instead of the work day being 10 hours paying $1.50.
Most of us have forgotten that many of the
rights of workers around the world came as a result of our own labor history,
our labor movements, and our labor unions…we have forgotten the blood that was
shed.
We forget
that much of the progress for workers originated in the United States by
workers demanding rights…minimum wage, safe work environments, limited hours,
child labor laws, vacation time, etc. We
have ignored our history and though other countries like Nicaragua have taken
on the call for fair labor laws, our workers are losing ground.
In Nicaragua
there is a minimum wage that rises with inflation (still very low), workers
have a month’s vacation, receive an extra month's wages at the end of the year, women have 3 months of full-pay maternity leave, workers have paid
sick leave and an employer cannot fire an employee while they are sick. And if an employer lets go of an employee, the employer is required to provide a severance package.
After
the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979,
After the
Sandinistas were voted out of office and Nicaragua went through a period of
neo-liberalism that almost broke the nation, one of the presidents…a former Somoza
youth, Arnoldo Alemán...commissioned another statue to the workers' right across the
street from the first. As you can see
these workers are bent, beaten and broken.
I fear that
this second statue is a better representation of the today’s workers in the
United States…the country that in the 1800s led in workers demanding fair compensation
for their blood, sweat and toil. It
breaks my heart.
-Kathleen
