Tag: may-day

May Day is International Workers Day

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

This week’s Comment column for the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (29.4.25), needing to use the space to advertise our May Day march and rally, 12 midday at the Plymouth Guildhall Square, Armada Way, and trade union Rally at the Athenaeum Theatre, Derry’s Cross, in the city centre. We will march! Please bring banners. Workshops from 2.15 at the Athenaeum Theatre, on trade union struggle; standing up to racism and fascism; and opposing militarism – Welfare not Warfare! Afternoon free cinema showing the vital film documentary, “Censoring Palestine” at 3.15pm. Light refreshments available.

Please join us.

It might feel like it, but this is not the start of Summer. Meteorologically, Summer will be welcomed-in on Saturday 21st June. Nevertheless, we’ve always celebrated May Day as a turning point, the days expanding and the trees in leaf again. Phew!

Workers celebrate May 1st for a very different reason. May Day is a celebration of the collective and organised power of the working class. 

For most of us, on every continent since the very start of the system of Capitalism, workers have had little to celebrate, condemned to precarious employment, wage-slavery and gross exploitation.

From the fourteenth century, the rise of a new Capitalist class, mercantilists competing with and largely replacing the ruling Feudal Landlord class, cleared the lands of peasants and herded them, with enforced ethnic-cleansing, into their hurriedly constructed slums and their 14-hour day factories producing the global Industrial Revolution which continues today.

Workers were combined into the Proletariat, the label an acknowledgment of the cruelly stratified system of the ancient Roman Empire within which the proletarii owned little or no property. Proletarian struggle could overthrow imperial governments. That’s why workers’ organisations are continually challenged and forcefully put down by the Capitalist Class who know the history and recognise that we are the many and they are the few. 

The Capitalist class organises, by any means possible, to ensure that workers cannot gain economic, social or political control. Should workers win, the exploitation of Capitalism will be ended, the social conditions of individual competition for private gain at the expense of others finally ended.

On 1st May 1886, workers in the United States of America called a strike for the 8-hour day. Workers across the continent heeded the call, downing tools, refusing to work. The bosses put-down the disputes with great violence, imprisoning and even executing activists. This only produced more opposition and demands for a legislated maximum working day.

By 1890 the international organisation of workers proclaimed May Day as International Workers Day, adopting the workers’ anthem written by French member of the Paris commune, Eugene Pottier: The Internationale, sung every year since across five continents, beginning “Arise Ye Workers from Your Slumber, Arise Ye Prisoners of Want!”

We commemorate the struggles and gains made by the labour movement, with marches and rallies. Trade Unionists will be marching for May Day in London this Thursday, celebrating our proud heritage. On Saturday we will March in Plymouth and enjoy an afternoon of festival and campaigning at the Athenaeum Theatre, Derry’s Cross.

It is worth remembering our heritage, and all the struggles that have been fought at great cost for regulated working hours, health & safety, and decent pay rates. Today, the celebrations across the UK are muted by the effect of decades of direct attack by successive government on worker’s rights, the right to strike and more recent restrictions on the right to protest. 

Much of the gains made by collective trade union actions through the post-war period have been reversed, young people facing precarious employment, a low-wage economy, housing crisis and the return of long working hours and the prospect of never reaching pension-age. 

Most importantly, we support action today against vicious employers. We support the Birmingham “bin workers” striking against pay cuts of £8k a year. We support delivery workers organising for income security.

This week’s celebrations across the UK are muted by the direct attack of successive governments on worker’s rights, the right to strike, and more recent restrictions on the right to protest by Starmer’s Labour government.

Trade unions have been bureaucratised and the notion of collective struggle demonised as if now irrelevant or counter-productive. Yet the central dynamic of Capitalism requires the extraction of surplus value from our labours, into the pockets of employers. That exploitation will always produce fights for workers’ rights. As individuals we are rendered powerless in the workplace, and forced together to support each other’s common need for decent pay and conditions.

Today the global proletariat number more than half of the entire human population. Strikes are happening every day across the world, and often winning. On an international scale, that’s a powerful force if ever brought together. Here in the UK, it’s time to build such collective resistance once again. 

If the debate isn’t based upon Class, it is Fatally Flawed

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly article for May Day in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (30.4.24), identifying the continuing bosses’ offensive against workers, locally and globally. I would like to openly attack and expose the role of the trade union bureaucracy in Britain and across the world, continually protecting Capitalism from open challenge, separating economics from politics in order to curb the anger and action of organised workers. But the column is offered on behalf of the Plymouth TUC, and I therefore fall upon my own sword, a victim of the contradictions inherent in fighting for Peace with Social Justice from inside the System.

It is almost as if we are not supposed to speak about class anymore. Yet, whatever social concern is being discussed has to sit within the context of class.

We live in a society and a human world based upon social class. The class we are born into determines most of our life chances and is where we will stay – there has been almost no social mobility over the last 50 years in Britain.

The working class is by far the largest. More than half the world’s population is now reliant upon the income from gainful employment. We are the people required to work for a weekly or monthly or precarious dribs-and-drabs wage. Rather than being forced to work as a slave, we are forced to sell our abilities and hope someone will give us a job as a wage-slave.

Low wages often force us to hold down number of jobs at once, all juggled between domestic care responsibilities and patchy sleep.

In the West, wages for the majority have fallen in terms of real-spending power since 2008, while corporate profits have soared. In the southern states of the USA, wage rates have fallen so far that Chinese companies are moving businesses there to exploit the working classes now cheaper than Chinese workers at home. 

Britain, racing to be the USA’s 51st State is following suit, our social infrastructure betrayed by privatisation is catching-up with the ghetto conditions and collapsed bridges of America.

In challenging all this, trade unions continue to struggle to organise workplaces against exploitation, for decent wages and conditions, workers’ health and safety, and social justice in our communities.

Unions are hated by many. Middle Class property owners despise the notion of human rights that demands responsibilities and liabilities of those with towards those without. Shareholders and corporate executives want to tame or smash unions as every penny extra won for the worker is a penny less for their private profits. And successive governments have created laws limiting trade union activities to a minimum.

Tomorrow, more than one billion workers across the globe will actively celebrate International Workers Day, 1st May.

We will be celebrating the organisations of workers on every continent, combining to prevent unscrupulous employers from gross exploitation, expropriation of our skills and knowledge, profiteering from our hard labour, and oppressing us with unbridled bullying and domination.

Unionised workplaces have better workers’ rights. Unions challenge all forms of discrimination, organise against racism and sexism, for Trans Rights, for the rights of the disabled, and for peace not war. 

We negotiate to protect workers from the threats to life from the deepening climate emergency caused by the careless chaos of capitalist production at the expense of all life on earth.

There has been a backlash that we call a “bosses offensive”, driving down expectations and beating back work-life balance, our younger generations suffering a new intensity of “wage-slavery” and precarious employment, ever fearful of subsistence on treadmill of Universal Credit.

Trade unions here have fought back, and continue to do so with the support of the majority of the population, despite any and every inconvenience caused. 

There is a very crying, painful need for a working class assault against the greed and avarice of the employing class – the real ruling class of this country, pillaging all the essential services. A reunification of shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity across all industries and nations. 

A worker in Britain today has more in common with a worker in Mumbai or Beijing than with any of the politicians in Parliament, the millionaire TV celebrities or the corporate billionaires. 

We celebrate International Workers Day, and organise for peace with social justice.

Plymouth Trades Union Council is celebrating May Day with a festival on Saturday 4th May, marching with banners at midday in the city centre and rallying at the Athenaeum Theatre in the afternoon, with campaign stalls and the free showing of the Ken Loach film, “The Old Oak”.

And every day thereafter, union representatives will be there, organising with and for you. Join a Union!