Happy May Day! A little something on solidarity and our history...
Happy May Day! First, a retelling of a story; second, a bit of history. The story:
Twenty years ago, last March, Susan and I were in Paris. Specifically, we were in a bar in one of the outer arrondissements at a show by the Bassholes, Monsieur Jeffrey Evans, and Crash Normal, who had recently released an album on my record label. Music over, we rushed to the Metro stop to catch the last train to the 2nd arrondissement, where we were staying.
We caught the train to another station for a transfer. While waiting for our train home, some workmen cruised by on a small rail car, shouting “Gréve! Gréve! Gréve!” I ask Susan what they were saying. She replied that the workers shouted that they are on strike. So, we took the stairs to the street, walked a few blocks, and caught a cab. It’s Paris after midnight so any inconvenience we felt was dwarfed by the romanticism of the moment.
The next morning, we went to coffee. The newspaper said that starting midnight that morning and for the next 24-hours, Paris’ transit workers are on strike. President Nicolas Sarkozy was trying to get parliament to rise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the workers were not going to have it. So, on behalf of the people, the transit workers were showing their strength by shutting the city down, kinda. To accommodate workers, the strikers had two trains running (north-south, east-west) four times a day (twice in the morning, twice evening) to take workers to work and back.
We had a dinner date with friends and needed to take the Metro to get to our meeting place, so we queued up at the nearest station to catch one of the two evening commute trains. The crowd at the platform was thick enough where the space between us was inches. That was luxury compared to being on the train.
Train pulled up and we got on with a thousand other people, cramming into cars that are packed so tight that a Tokyo commuter would exclaim, “Excuse me! Can I speak to the manager!” I was wedged between Susan, a burly guy in a suit, the train wall, and a seat.
In the seat sat an old woman, who was staring calmly into space. There was no discomfort or irritation in her face. Instead, there was a sense that she’d been here before. I looked around and noticed a similar look on the faces of my fellow passengers. Occasionally, someone would shift or look at their watch; but, other than that, people were silent, still, and stoic.
The scene was very unAmerican and a bit unsettling, but then I figured it out: Everyone was “taking one for the team.” The transit workers were not striking for themselves, but for everyone in order to not just keep the retirement age from creeping up two years – something most Americans would accept with a shrug – and, more important, to preserve a hard-fought victory that the people had won for themselves.
The transit workers were striking in solidarity with the people and the people were doing their part in the strike by experiencing 30-minutes of squish with no complaints, no yelling at some poor worker, and no threats to call management or write a nasty review on Yelp. And it was all done so conservatives like Sarkozy wouldn’t take away all of the gains French workers had made, starting with a two-year hike in the retirement age (eventually it crept up to 64 years old, and that not until 2023). I had already liked the French people, but when I realized what I realized, I started to love them. As I wrote, in the US, we experience reversals of our wins, with a shrug. Even, when things get bad, like when DOGE throws people out of work, we are mostly passive.
People outside the US, especially Europeans, see our passivity and wonder whether we are collaborators, cult members, or suckers. They see our peoples’ history, especially our defiance; they take inspiration from our past, from the Civil Rights Movement, our early labor movement, the abolitionist movement, and even the American Revolution. They honor true American heroes that we've pushed to the margins of history, people like Thomas Paine and Robert Williams. They know our history, our true history much better than we do and that makes them wonder what the fuck is up with us?
The answer is simple: We do not know our own history. Our parents don’t know it. If our grandparent knew it, they didn’t speak it because they came up when the Red Scare/whitewash of the 1950s was in full effect and were scared to talk. Our media ignores it. Even the movie industry neglects hundreds of great exciting stories of rebellion. And it’s largely left out of school curriculum, especially without the telling of “the other side.” When we do get a whiff of our glorious past (the strikes, the rebellions, the protests, and the victories), it’s through independent historians like Howard Zinn and from teachers now being persecuted by anti-DEI directives designed to once again suppress our history.
We are ignorant because the people in power have kept our history from us and now punish those who try to teach us what really happened.
Did you know that May Day as International Workers Day started here in the United States? Yup, it wasn’t an import from Europe or Communist Russia. It is as American as baseball and atomic bombs.
On May 1, 1886, tens of thousands of American workers ditched work for a nationwide general strike. Boston, St Louis, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Chicago, and Pittsburgh were hit, as well as other major cities. The strike was organized by a bunch of small unions led by the Knights of Labor, one of our first general labor unions. The strike was an attempt to win the eight-hour work day.
In Chicago, on May 3, cops working on behalf of the bosses, opened fire on strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works, killing one. The next day, Chicago workers rallied in Haymarket Square to demand justice for the murdered worker and the institution of the eight-hour day. At the end of the rally, an agent provocateur threw a stick of dynamite at the police, who them opened fire on the crowd. Seven cops died, four workers were killed, and many more were injured.
The police immediately arrested eight anarchist leaders. They were charged with murder. Even though some of those on trial had not been present at the rally, all eight were convicted and sentenced to die. One committed suicide, four were hanged, and three escaped death. The massacre was a set-up, the arrests a scam, and the trial purely political…and, that’s what the workers and many citizens believed at the time, even though the mainstream press “reported” otherwise.
The workers knew the truth, and, vitally, the deepest reasons why they were striking to begin with: To assert the power of those who do the work over the power of those who own wealth. They used the massacre and the trial as a rallying point. May 1, from that day forward, would be International Workers Day – a day celebrated by workers throughout the world. Or at least that was the plan.
While the world’s workers did take up May Day, in 1894, just ten years after Haymarket, the US government subverted the workers’ militant celebration - one of marches, speeches, and rallies – by officially establishing Labor Day, the government-sanctioned workers’ holiday which featured a day off, picnics, and parades, a kind pat on the back from the bosses.
While May Day was being eased from the American calendar, much was done to keep Haymarket and the early labor movement from textbooks. By the time I made it to the K- 12 hustle, not a lick of labor history was being taught in schools. Yes, we had a little lesson about Labor Day, which shared a talk on Memorial, Flag, and Arbor days, but that was that. The Knights of Labor, International Workers of the World (Wobblies), and even the AFL-CIO, nothing, nothing at all. Certainly, no Haymarket or mention of “general strikes.” Not a word of anything that might suggest that we, the workers, have great power…if we chose to use it.
Even worse: The great victories won by American workers through strikes, sabotage, and, yes, riots, victories like the end of child labor, the institution of the eight-hour day, the revolution of the five-day workweek, paid vacation, pensions, healthcare, etc. have been claimed by big business and the government. Most Americans are totally unaware that it was workers organizing through unions as well as socialist and anarchist organizations that fought and died for these things.
It was workers who agitated for all the progressive advances that President Franklin Roosevelt coopted for the New Deal. It was workers who shut down their workplaces and hit the barricades, fighting with cops, private security firms, the National Guard, and the army, to secure the right to organize, which led to record memberships in unions. It was workers and their unions who created the conditions for the rapid growth of the post-war middle class and for what was for the time a more equitable sharing of the nation’s wealth.
Yes, some unions were corrupted as they became closer and closer to those in political and economic power. Workers became apathetic as corporate backlash wiped away many of their gains and some of their rights. And, yes, workers no longer looked at as an active threat by the powerful. All that is true; however, none of these things negates the history I just retold, erase the victories that workers achieved, invalidate the gains workers made for all of us, or renders it impossible for today’s workers to look to the past for inspiration in the fight that we are engaged in right now and for the future.
May Day is the workers’ day, the people’s day. May Day is our day. I hope you’ve had a good one.