Let’s reclaim May Day glory

By: Pallavi Sharma

IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) songwriter Joe Hill wrote in one of his most powerful songs:

Workers of the world, awaken! Rise in all your splendid might Take the wealth that you are making, It belongs to you by right. No one will for bread be crying We`ll have freedom, love and health, When the grand red flag is flying In the Workers` Commonwealth. May 1st, International Workers` Day, commemorates the historic struggle of working people throughout the world, and is recognised in every country. The holiday began in the 1880s in United States, with the fight for an eight-hour workday.

There were various benefits of shorter working hours and other benefits the working class had won through heroic struggles and the supreme sacrifice of the heroes of Hay Market episode of May 1, 1886. The capitalist class is seeking to idealise longer working hours and inhuman conditions of work as normal and generally necessary.

In the first volume of his most celebrated work, ‘The Capital’, Karl Marx investigated what constitutes a normal working day, and clearly brought out the nature of the direct clash between the economic and social interests of the owning class and those of the working class in settling the issue.

The workers’ struggle for reducing working hours actually means their resistance against this unlimited greed of the capitalists for extracting maximum surplus value out of the labour power of their workers. “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an even cheaper commodity than the commodity he produces. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things, the object which labour produces --- labour’s product --- confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer,” Marx had said.

The capitalist mindset has come to stay, more so in the phase of globalisation. That is why they think there is nothing to object to in the ongoing lengthening of the working day for workers, severe curtailment of their rights and the end or drastic reduction of their social security benefits including pension, as this is all in the interest of development. But the workers are able to form trade unions to voice their demands and work for better working conditions. Companies are known to take these demands seriously as well. In many countries including India, there are corporates who have shown the way in philantrophy and there are several companies like Tatas, Infosys and Wipro among others which have set examples of an ideal working culture. But still the formidable dimensions of unemployment of workers, whether in India or worldwide, confirm the fast growing misery of the workers and the poor, if we go by the statistics of organizations like the OECD, World Bank, IMF, UNDP, and ILO reports.

On the occasion of May Day 2007 therefore we must repeat the same revolutionary call to the working class of India and the entire world --- Reclaim May Day, its glorious heritage, its achievements.