May
Day: Under A New Cloud Of Fear
By Sharat G. Lin
01 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
As millions of immigrant workers
with their families and supporters pour into the streets across the
United States on May Day, they do so under a new cloud of fear. In 2006,
the fear that drove people into the streets on May 1 and the preceding
two months was the threat that the “Sensenbrenner” Illegal
Immigration Control Act (HR 4437), passed by the House of Representatives
on 16 December 2005, would criminalize undocumented immigrants. The
May Day marches of 2006 effectively stopped HR 4437 in its tracks.
This year in 2007, the fear
is surprise raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that
are terrorizing hard-working undocumented immigrants who have no criminal
history. The ICE raids have broken up families, and too often have inadvertently
turned children who were born in this country into orphans. The raids
have equally terrorized family members who are undocumented immigrants,
legal residents, or U.S. citizens.
Another fear they have in
2007 is that the new immigration reform laws being introduced in Congress
will create a legal underclass of workers on temporary visas, so-called
“guest workers.” One new bill being offered as a carrot
to the more than 12 million undocumented workers in the United States
is the STRIVE Act (Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant
Economy Act – HR 1645) introduced by Congressmen Luis Gutiérrez
and Jeff Flake. Unlike HR 4437, HR 1645 would provide path to citizenship,
albeit a very long and tortuous one involving four stages – a
two-year security waiting period, a six-year wait on a temporary work
visa, a minimum five-year wait as a permanent resident before applying
for citizenship, and finally the processing queue for citizenship. Most
importantly, the STRIVE Act continues to stress border security over
immigrant worker security. The temporary work visas for low-skilled
jobs would make “guest workers” vulnerable to abuse by employers,
a pattern that is widespread among temporary foreign workers in the
oil-exporting Arabian Gulf countries.
Thus, importance of May Day
2007 for immigrant communities in the U.S. is not only of demanding
fundamental constitutional rights for immigrants, but for economic rights
as immigrant workers. It was chosen because May Day is a living tradition
in the Latin American countries from which most of the undocumented
immigrants in the U.S. come. May Day is also an international day of
labour solidarity.
May Day itself was born,
in part, out of fear of police raids on immigrant workers. In 1884 the
Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, predecessor of the
American Federation of Labor (AFL), called for an eight-hour workday.
When implementation appeared unlikely, a general strike was called in
Chicago on 1 May 1886. On that day, some 80,000 workers marched down
Chicago’s Michigan Avenue in what is generally recognized as the
first May Day parade. In the succeeding days, supporting strikes broke
out in other cities, such as Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and New York City.
On 3 May, four striking workers
were killed by police at the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago. At an
evening rally on 4 May in Haymarket Square, called to protest the killings,
police moved in to disperse the crowd when a bomb went off, killing
seven policemen. Police retaliated by firing into the crowd of workers,
killing and wounding an unknown number of civilians.
Determined to crush the labour
agitations, police interrogations and arrests went on through the night
and the ensuing days. Homes of workers, most of whom were immigrants
from Europe, were raided in the middle of the night. Hundreds of immigrants
were rounded up without charges. A police rein of terror descended on
the organized workers of Chicago and their families.
Eight people, including 5 German immigrants, were eventually charged
and convicted for the deaths of the policemen, even though no evidence
was ever presented directly linking them to the bombing in Haymarket
Square. Four of the defendants were publicly hanged in 1887.
In Paris in 1889, the International
Workingmen’s Association (Second International) called for worldwide
demonstrations on 1 May 1890, commemorating the struggle of Chicago
workers. The international tradition of May Day was born.
It took another three decades
for workers to incrementally win the eight-hour working day through
struggles with individual companies. Finally, the Adamson Act was passed
by Congress in 1916, establishing a statutory eight-hour working day
for railway workers with additional pay for overtime work.
Today May Day is traditionally
celebrated in most industrialized and developing countries around the
world as International Workers’ Day. Among major nations, the
United States is the only one to have successive governments and the
trade union bureaucracy consistently resisting recognition of May Day,
fearing the connection with labour movements around the world. Seeking
an alternative date, Labor Day was created to recognize the contribution
of American workers on 5 September 1882 in New York City. In 1884, the
first Monday in September was selected as a holiday from labour. However,
it was not until 1894 that Congress made Labor Day a national holiday.
But without the heritage of strikes and labour struggle, Labor Day emerged
and remained a completely depoliticized day.
In contrast, May Day, because
of its deep roots in U.S. working class struggle, is richly symbolic
of labour activism. Contrary to popular myth in the U.S., May Day did
not originate abroad, but rather from the very U.S. trade union movement
that brought about the basic eight-hour working day that is taken so
much for granted today. From the struggle against a guest worker program
that would create a stratum of second class workers to opposing the
ICE police raids, the immigrant workers’ rights movement of today
is following in the footsteps of the heroic Chicago workers who gave
birth to May Day. May Day is a true American immigrant worker tradition.
Now being revived after 70 years of dormancy, it is gradually regaining
support among established labour unions that a slowly coming around
to back the movement for immigrant workers’ rights.
Sharat G. Lin
writes on migrant labour, global political economy, the Middle East,
India, public health, and the environment.
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.
Click
here to comment
on this article