Jerry Brown, Barack Obama and Labor Day

California Gov. Jerry Brown's Labor Day proclamation from this year, 09/03/2012, offers yet another contrast between his basic Democratic, pro-labor vision and Obama's neoliberal one:

When government and business recognize the intrinsic right of workers to organize and bargain collectively, it is possible to maintain an orderly system of industrial relations, avoiding the chaos and bloodshed that often marked labor disputes in the past. The industrial growth that our nation enjoyed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came at a great human cost. While men, women and children suffered under brutal working conditions, their attempts to improve their situation were often met with violence by employers and the government. In response, many workers became radical or violent themselves, leading to a seemingly unbreakable cycle of destruction and terror.

There were countless instances of labor actions leading to tragedy during this period. One of the earliest and most infamous of these was the Haymarket Affair of 1886, a bombing and shooting incident during May Day rallies in Chicago that took the lives of seven police officers, four civilians and four anarchists that were hanged for plotting the attack—a sentence whose justness is still debated. In 1894, a nationwide wildcat strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company led to a disproportionate response from the federal government. Twelve thousand United States Army troops were deployed to break the strike, killing 13 workers and wounding dozens more.

Though unions and craft organizations had begun to hold Labor Day picnics as early as the 1870s, it was not until the aftermath of this tragedy that the observance became an official holiday for all Americans. In that year President Grover Cleveland established the national Labor Day as part of his efforts to heal the nation’s wounds. However, lacking an orderly system to address labor disputes, the country continued to suffer similar events for several decades after this symbolic act of reconciliation. During a textile workers’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, police clubbed women and children attempting to flee the embattled town. In San Francisco, on July 5, 1934, two men participating in a longshoremen’s strike were killed by police gunfire in an incident that came to be known as “Bloody Thursday.”

The following year, on July 5, 1935, President Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act—also known as the Wagner Act—the foundational law of our modern system of industrial relations. By legitimizing workers’ organizations as political entities and creating a legal framework for the resolution of workplace disputes, the Wagner Act effectively ended the decades of bloodshed and despair that attended our nation’s birth as an industrial giant. Today, disagreements between management and labor are typically worked out at the bargaining table with paper and pens, not in the streets with guns and bombs. For this we can all be thankful.

This year, as we enjoy traditions ranging from beach outings and barbecues to an annual change in the rules of high fashion, we should remember how much progress has allowed us to celebrate this Labor Day. I urge all Californians to take this opportunity to appreciate not only the vast contribution of labor to our economy, but also the privilege of living under a fair and well-regulated system of industrial relations. [my emphasis]

Obama commemorated the day in a campaign speech at Scott High School in Toledo OJ 09/12/2012. His message was more, unions achieved some nice goody-two-shoes stuff, now vote for me:

Now, we're on our way to our convention in Charlotte this week. (Applause.) But I wanted to stop here in Toledo to spend this day with you -- (applause) -- a day that belongs to the working men and women of America -- teachers and factory workers, construction workers and students and families and small business owners. And I know we’ve got some proud autoworkers in the house helping to bring Toledo back. (Applause.)

After all, it’s working folks like you who fought for jobs and opportunity for generations of American workers. It’s working people like you who helped to lay the cornerstones of middle-class security, things that people now sometimes take for granted, but weren't always there -- the 40-hour workweek, weekends, paid leave, pensions, the minimum wage, health care, Social Security, Medicare. Those things happened because working people organized and mobilized.

It is unions like yours that helped to forge the basic bargain of this country -- the bargain that built the greatest middle class and the most prosperous country and the most prosperous economy that the world has ever known. (Applause.)

And you know what that bargain is, because it's a simple one. It’s a bargain that says if you work hard, if you're responsible, then your work should be rewarded. (Applause.) That if you put in enough effort, you should be able to find a job that pays the bills. You should afford a home to call your own. That you'll have health care you can count on if you get sick. That you can put away enough to retire, maybe take a vacation once in a while -- nothing fancy, but you can enjoy your friends and your family. And, most importantly, that you can provide your children with an education to make sure that they do even better than you did. (Applause.)

It’s an American promise that says no matter who you are, no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, no matter what your last name is, no matter who you love, you can make it here if you try. (Applause.) And that’s what we’re fighting for, Toledo. That’s what’s at stake in this election. And that’s why I’m running for a second term as President of the United States of America. (Applause.) [my emphasis]

I must admit I'm tired of moralistic formulations from Obama like, "It’s a bargain that says if you work hard, if you're responsible, then your work should be rewarded. (Applause.) That if you put in enough effort, you should be able to find a job that pays the bills."

The President is in a position to actually do something about jobs. And to support union rights. We need to hear what he's doing in those areas, not platitudes barely distinguishable from spoiled frat boys shouting at beggars, "Get a job!" Ann O'Leary wrote two years ago in The Power to Act The American Prospect 09/01/2010 about various ways that the President can use his authority over federal contract to increase wages and promote unionizing. In fact, that issue of The American Prospect carried a number of articles on ways the President can act on behalf of workers even with an obstructionist Republicans Congress. But this Democratic President has shown little interest in pursuing them.

It's not part of the neoliberal prescription to strengthen unions or the labor movement for the long term. To be clear, one of the most substantial and clear accomplishments of the Obama Administration was the saving of General Motors, which the Republicans would have cheerfully allowed to do under and disappear. This was very important to organized labor because of the number of jobs involved, because the United Auto Workers (UAW) is still one of the most powerful unions but would have been severely weakened by the Republican alternative, and because it preserved an important part of the US manufacturing base. It was a defensive rather than offensive move on behalf of labor, but the Obama Administration does deserve credit for this very important achievement.

I'm also getting pretty tired of the neoliberal pablum about "provide your children with an education to make sure that they do even better than you did." Education is critically important, but education is no magic bullet guaranteeing individual or collective prosperity. As Lawrence Mishel puts it, "To hear leaders of the financial sector talk, the underlying problem with the economy has not been a runaway financial sector but an unqualified workforce." (The Overselling of Education The American Prospect 02/07/2011) We also need trade agreements that don't fit the neoliberal model that Obama has followed on international trade that seeks more and more agreements designed to let American and international capital take maximum advantage of poor wages and working conditions abroad and in the US. The idea that education is ultimately the solution to all economic problems is, in Mishel's words, "very comfortable reasoning for the very comfortable class."

It's no substitution for substantive action to create jobs and reduce inequality - and yes, that means limiting the ability of the One Percent to dominate democratic elections with money and distort the results through lobbying and various forms of legal and illegal bribery.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, jerry brown, labor movement

Obama at the United Auto Workers

President Obama spoke to the United Auto Workers (UAW) union on 02/28/2012, and was in full Democratic campaign mode. He was celebrating one of his genuine progressive accomplishments, the bankruptcy and reorganization of General Motors.



The White House transcript is here.

Obama did hit at his Republican critics. He quoted Willard Romney (without naming him) saying, "let Detroit go bankrupt." And he sounded like a real Democrat when he said:

Let me tell you, I keep on hearing these same folks talk about values all the time. You want to talk about values? Hard work -- that’s a value. (Applause.) Looking out for one another -- that’s a value. The idea that we're all in it together, and I'm my brother's keeper and sister's keeper -- that’s a value. (Applause.)

They're out there talking about you like you're some special interest that needs to be beaten down. Since when are hardworking men and women who are putting in a hard day's work every day -- since when are they special interests? Since when is the idea that we look out for one another a bad thing?

I remember my old friend, Ted Kennedy -- he used to say, what is it about working men and women they find so offensive? (Laughter.) This notion that we should have let the auto industry die, that we should pursue anti-worker policies in the hopes that unions like yours will buckle and unravel -– that’s part of that same old "you are on your own" philosophy that says we should just leave everybody to fend for themselves; let the most powerful do whatever they please. They think the best way to boost the economy is to roll back the reforms we put into place to prevent another crisis, to let Wall Street write the rules again.

But search that transcript for the word "Republican". It's not there. And it's notable that Obama praises the UAW for ... accepting cuts:

Or you've got folks saying, well, the real problem is -- what we really disagreed with was the workers, they all made out like bandits -- that saving the auto industry was just about paying back the unions. Really? (Laughter.) I mean, even by the standards of this town, that’s a load of you know what. (Laughter.)

About 700,000 retirees had to make sacrifices on their health care benefits that they had earned. A lot of you saw hours reduced, or pay or wages scaled back. You gave up some of your rights as workers. Promises were made to you over the years that you gave up for the sake and survival of this industry -- its workers, their families. You want to talk about sacrifice? You made sacrifices. (Applause.) This wasn't an easy thing to do.

He also spent a lot of time defending his neoliberal trade agreements.

Still, it's a good speech, defending one of his Administration's best and most obviously successful actions, and even - yes - praising the labor movement. That's all good.

But to build credibility for the progressive vision, he needs to hammer these themes home. He needs to "name and shame" the Republicans for opposing constructive policies. Unfortunately, his pattern as President has been to make the occasional good speech like this, but then not follow it up immediately with similar presentations. Then before you know it, the Republicans are punking him on something again.

The UAW understandably backed President Obama in his support for the US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement that takes effect March 15. Simply letting General Motors die as a company would have been a severe blow to the UAW and its members. Hoping to reduce the power of the UAW was probably the main reason the Republicans opposed the federal government rehabilitating GM. The UAW may have also calculated that their industry was actually likely to benefit. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) also supposed the agreement, though other unions opposed it. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka opposed it, predicting it would cost the United States 159,000 jobs, some of those presumably in the domestic textile industry. (Zachary Goldfarb and Lori Montgomery, Obama gets win as Congress passes free-trade agreements Washington Post)

Free trade deals, which in the last two decades have had the effect of encouraging the export of capital investment out of the US, are part of the neoliberal/Free Market faith.

So, in other words, even in a progressive, pro-labor speech celebrating a genuinely progressive accomplishment (saving GM) on which the Republicans clearing opposed him, Obama devoted much of the speech to promoting the neoliberal doctrine of "free trade" and praising the UAW for their sacrifices. "You gave up some of your rights as workers," he told them. And presented that as a good thing.

As the late John Kenneth Galbraith once observed, Old Man Bush isn't the only President whose lips need to be read carefully.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, labor movement

Republicans, Party of the proletariat?

That's what David "Bobo" Brooks would have us think, anyway. And someday I'm going to find out how the word "proletariat" leaked into English to mean "working class" when "working class" is a perfectly good English version. I know who transitioned it from French into German (conservative Catholic social theorist Franz von Baader), but not how it made it into English.

In any case, Charlie Pierce in This Is Why Mitt Romney Is Unemployable Esquire Politics Blog 01/09/2012 explains that the depression has brought overt class factors more to the front of American politics, despite Rick Santorum's bizarre claim that America is a classless society and therefore it's a sin for a Republican to use the phrase "middle class". Pierce:

It's becoming abundantly clear that, all Santorum aside, this election is fundamentally going to be about class. The Republicans already have talked about blue-collar jobs and middle-class anxiety more in this cycle than they have in the previous two or three combined. And, even if the Republicans had given the whole business a good leaving-alone, the White House is going to force the issue anyway. Unemployment is not going to drop below eight percent before the election. The income gap is not going to go away, either. The basic inequities forced on the country by the looting of the economy in the first decade of the century are alive and well. They are going to bite hard at both parties. But only one candidate is so uniquely vulnerable to their political effects.

He also notes with a jab at the punditocracy, "I suspect, though, it just might have a little something to do with the Occupy people who, as we all know, have no coherent agenda that anyone can identify."

Our Pod Pundits, and more generally the hermetically isolated group we still call our political press corps, are notorious for adopting "scripts" about candidates, as Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby elaborated well in the years before he fell in love with the Tea Party. As soon as Rick Santorum began to look like a serious candidate for the Republican nomination, they settled on a script for him in which he is the "working class" candidate.

Bobo flogged the idea in two columns last week. Ron Brownstein, another thoroughly conventional pundit, took it up in Santorum's Appeal National Journal 01/05/2012. Like Bobo, he wants to describe the evolving demagoguery of the Republican Party without reference to the decades-long Southern strategy that now has Republican Presidential candidates making undisguised racial appeals to their white base:

The first sign of the populists’ growing influence was in the presidential runs of conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan in 1992 and 1996. Buchanan, a brilliant if often intemperate political packager, offered a combustible mix of social conservatism, protectionism, isolationism, nativism, and populist attacks on elites that all embodied the embattled sense of decline among many blue-collar Americans. After shocking Bob Dole in the 1996 New Hampshire primary, Buchanan’s “peasants-with-pitchforks” crusade fizzled in South Carolina. But he demonstrated that there was an audience within the GOP for an edgy collection of views that unnerved the party’s traditional business-oriented leadership. [my emphasis]

It's part of the conceit among the Beltway Village that they are really in touch with Real Americans, aka the "white working class" in Bobo's formulation. And because they know the Real Americans so well they know that what appeals to them is that "combustible mix of social conservatism, protectionism, isolationism, nativism, and populist attacks on elites." Pat Buchanan's appeal in the Republican primaries in the 1990s turned out to be limited, as Brownstein notes there. But why let inconvenient facts spoil a good script?

This is an interesting glimpse at the Village outlook:

With equal passion, Santorum pledges both to end abortion and revive American manufacturing (albeit through tax cuts, not the trade barriers Buchanan favored). Within minutes at the same appearance, he can alternately sound like Pat Robertson and Dick Gephardt.

In 2008, the GOP primary electorate was split almost in half between voters with and without a college education, the line that generally divides the managers and the populists. Romney is a comfortable choice for all but the most ideological managers. Santorum will become a serious threat to Romney only if he can unite the populists.

In his views, style, and background, Santorum should be a much easier fit for those voters than Romney. But it’s not clear that Santorum, any more than the rest of the Republican field, has fully contemplated the implications of an electoral coalition that now relies so heavily on blue-collar and older whites. While most of those voters passionately oppose government spending they view as transfer payments to the undeserving, they are equally determined to protect the programs they believe most benefit them - Social Security and Medicare. [my emphasis]

It's an article of faith among even Village pundits (like Mark Shields) who must surely know better that it's absolutely essential that Social Security and Medicare ("entitlements") have to be slashed or done away with entirely. But here Ron Brownstein displays at least momentary awareness that these programs are very popular.

Brownstein's eliding of the Republican base into "blue-collar" Real Americans is a bit more sophisticated than Bobo's. But it's essentially the same trick. They are coming from the same assumption: the  Real Americans are uneducated and bigoted and they support the Republicans for unworthy reasons. Unlike Establishment pundits who admire Republicans for wanting to slash "entitlements" and let Grandma eat catfood.

Using college education as a dividing line between "working class" and others is common among our Pod Pundits. I haven't dug into the voting statistics recently to see just how that assumption is wrong. But it's a lazy and misleading assumption even on its face. If we use any half-reasonable definition of working class, it would include both factory and office workers in non-management roles. And a large portion of that group has some college education or a college degree. On the other side of the definition, some considerable portion of non-college educated people work as contractors, store owners, or as other kinds of small businesspeople, forming a considerable portion of the classic "lower middle class".

The advantage to Republicans of having an image around election time of being the Party for working people is obvious. Why our Big Pundits accept it so lazily is another question.

Ben Adler at The Nation does a good takedown of this notion in Rick Santorum Is Not a 'Working-Class Candidate' 01/05/2012. Will his policies really appeal to working-class voters generally? Adler writes, "The totality of Santorum’s domestic policy agenda is to cut spending. This shouldn’t even pass for conservative economic populism."

In another column, Republican Candidates Attack Labor 01/09/2012, Adler comments on the fact that the current crop of Republican Presidential candidates are overtly hostile to organized labor. There was a time, not so long ago, that Republicans in a Presidential race would at least pretend to have some kind of tolerant attitude toward unions. Adler writes, "Gearing up for their January 21 primary in the notoriously anti-union state of South Carolina, Republican presidential candidates have recently begun demonizing organized labor."

Tags: labor movement, santorum, republican party

Which side is David "Bobo" Brooks on?

On the side of the bosses and the reactionaries, as he always is.

The Wisconsin union fight has become a real "Which side are you on?" moment. Sleepy Mark Shields can be awfully weak as a political analyst. But he's at least on the democratic side of this issue. Bobo is doing his usual schtick, in this case promoting the most reactionary, anti-union position with a calm voice to make it "reasonable" by the degraded, completely unreasonable standards of the Beltway Village. Bobo sometimes has reasonable things to say. This isn't one of them. This is the PBS Newshour Political Wrap of 02/25/2011:



This PBS Newshour clip from the same day has a mediocre this-side-says-the-other-side-says chat about reactionary union-busting. But the first part of this clip shows Democratic members of the Wisconsin lower house dressed in union solidarity shirts chanting "Shame, shame" at the Republicans who had just voted to deny the basic right of union organizing to Wisconsin public employees. To hell with the Beltway Village version of "civility", whether it's the Bobo version or the Jon Stewart version. This is how representatives who get elected with the votes of working people should be acting:



Tags: david brooks, labor movement, mark shields

One Nation rally

This photo is one of those being posted at the AFL-CIO's Flickr page of today's One Nation rally in Washington DC:


Tags: labor movement

Labor Day 2010: Labor in the US today

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, No holiday for labor unions Washington Post 08/31/2010, looks at the state of union on this Labor Day in the US:

Unions are in trouble. They represent less than 13 percent of the workforce and less than 8 percent of private workers. Union workers still receive higher wages and are more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, pensions and paid sick leave than non-union workers. But when unions represented over 33 percent of all private workers in the 1940s, they drove wage increases for everyone -- non-union firms had to compete for good workers. Now, unions struggle just to defend their members' wages and benefits. Over the past decade before the Great Recession, productivity soared, profits rose and CEO pay skyrocketed, but most workers lost ground.

Unions face constant attacks from corporations and conservatives. The most recent campaign -- designed as always to divide workers from one another -- assails the pay and particularly the pensions of public employees. Why should they have pensions, when many workers have lost theirs and get, at best, a retirement savings plan at work? In fact, in a civilized society, we would ask the reverse question. How do we create pensions -- beyond Social Security -- for workers across the economy, leveling up, rather than down?

She doesn't use the term "neoliberalism," aka, the Washington Consensus, the main ideology of economic "globalization." But she reminds us about how organized labor how so often been right in its criticism of such policies on international trade, economic inequality and deregulation. On the latter, she writes:

On government regulation, labor fought a pitched battle against privatization and deregulation that Reagan conservatives and New Democrats made fashionable. Now in one area after another, privatization has been revealed as a source of waste, fraud and abuse -- from Halliburton to Blackwater. Deregulation contributed directly to the corporate and financial debauch that brought the economy down, with the human costs apparent from the Gulf of Mexico to Appalachia to the eggs we eat.

And she reminds us that it is not anti-union reactionaries who the heirs of the civil rights movement:

Last Saturday in Washington, Glenn Beck tried to lay claim to the civil rights movement. That same day in Detroit, we saw the real thing: The UAW, SEIU and AFSCME joining with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the NAACP, the Urban League, ministers and civil rights activists to march for jobs and justice. Union support was vital to the Rev. Martin Luther King's march on Washington 47 years ago. And union support is vital to civil rights movements -- from immigration reform to equal pay for women to the fight for jobs -- today.

For the Democratic Party and the immediate future of progressive politics in the US, one of the greatest missed opportunities of the Obama administration is its failure to even attempt to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give union organizing the protection it needs in today's conditions. And stronger union movement would mean stronger progressive politics and a stronger Democratic Party. But with a Democratic President appointing a Catfood Commission stacked to recommend the next step in the phase-out of Social Security, you really have to wonder whether today's Democratic Party will ever be capable of fighting for the interest of working people effectively. They will have to be forced to do so. And unions are a key group with a strong incentive to do so.

Robert Reich in How to End the Great Recession New York Times 09/02/2010 looks at inequality and its role in causing economic crises. He observes:

The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income. ...

Policies that generate more widely shared prosperity lead to stronger and more sustainable economic growth — and that's good for everyone. The rich are better off with a smaller percentage of a fast-growing economy than a larger share of an economy that’s barely moving. That's the Labor Day lesson we learned decades ago; until we remember it again, we'll be stuck in the Great Recession.

labor day, labor movement

Labor Day 2010: Origins of Labor Day

The US Department of Labor (DOL) provides a saccharine The History of Labor Day. Here's the goody-two-shoes version of the day's history:

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.

In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a "workingmen's holiday" on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.

Through the years the nation gave increasing emphasis to Labor Day. The first governmental recognition came through municipal ordinances passed during 1885 and 1886. From them developed the movement to secure state legislation. The first state bill was introduced into the New York legislature, but the first to become law was passed by Oregon on February 21, 1887. During the year four more states — Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York — created the Labor Day holiday by legislative enactment. By the end of the decade Connecticut, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania had followed suit. By 1894, 23 other states had adopted the holiday in honor of workers, and on June 28 of that year, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.

The word "Haymarket" does not appear in the DOL account. It does appear in the BBC's article How May Day Became a Workers' Holiday 10/04/2001.

The May Day of the title refers to May 1, celebrated around the world as International Workers Day. But for the most part, not in the US. What's the connection between "Haymarket", Labor Day and International Workers Day? The BBC article explains what the DOL version does not, that a number of labor unions established May 1, 1886, as a day on which general strikes should be held to highlight the demand for the eight-hour day:

National or local officials of the three main labour organisations present in the United States at the time, the FOTLU [Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada], the Knights of Labor and the [anarchist] International Working People's Association (IWPA) began preparing for a general strike to be held on that date. The national office of the Knights of Labor, the most conservative of these three organisations, opposed the strike. Local offices ignored Grand Master Workman Terence Powderly's letter of 13 March, 1886, forbidding members of the Knights to strike. The FOTLU and the IWPA organised aggressively. In particular, Albert Parsons and August Spies spoke to gatherings of working people in Chicago at every opportunity.

Parsons was a printer in Chicago who had been an Abolitionist prior to the Civil War, a Radical Republican (which meant something entirely different then than it does today!) who by 1886 was a socialist and active supporter of the union movement. Spies was a German immigrant who became an anarchist and the editor of the Arbeiter Zeitung.

The May 1 general strike went off successfully and peacefully in Chicago. But, two days later:

Some 65,000 workers were on strike in Chicago, including employees of the McCormick Harvester Works. About a quarter of a mile (0.16 km) away, August Spies was addressing a group of striking lumber workers at a rally. A group of the lumber workers decided to join the striking McCormick Harvester Works employees in confronting strike-breaking workers at the end of the work day.

At closing time, police officers charged the waiting strikers, with revolvers drawn. It was reported by one witness that, as the strikers retreated, the police 'opened fire into their backs. Boys and men were killed as they ran'. Most sources state that six strikers were killed, although some put the number of fatalities at four. Many more were injured.

In those days and through the 1930s in the US, gun thugs, cops and National Guards deployed on behalf of employers were commonly used against strikers and labor organizers. The workers organized a rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square for the next day to protest the police violence and killing.

The first speaker was August Spies, who took the police department to task as murderers. Then Albert Parsons spoke. Near the beginning of his speech, he made it clear that he was not calling on anybody to take any action that night, but was planning on simply stating the facts of the previous day's events. The Mayor made his way out of the crowd and told the police captain that the rally was peaceful and that the mobilised police officers should be put back onto regular duty. After Spies and Parsons had spoken, other, less charismatic, speakers took the platform. It was now about 10 o'clock at night. While Samuel Fielden was speaking, the 180 police officers, with clubs drawn and in military formation, closed in on the remaining participants of the rally. The police captain commanded that the rally 'immediately and peaceably disperse'.

As Fielden was protesting that the rally was peaceful, a bomb exploded in the ranks of the assembled police officers, killing one immediately and wounding 65 others, seven of whom later died of their injuries. The remaining police officers drew their revolvers and fired into the crowd, wounding 200 and killing an unknown number.

The BBC article describes the subsequent trials against anarchists who were railroaded by the courts. The bombing has never been fully clarified, though it is entirely possible that a Rudolph Schnaubelt, who was named by multiple witneses as the bomb-thrower, may have been "an agent provocateur hired by either the police department or the industrialists of Chicago." The BBC article continues:

In 1889, at the Marxist International Socialist Congress in Paris, a resolution was passed calling for a 'great international demonstration' for the eight hour day to take place on 1 May, 1890. On that date, there were May Day demonstrations in the United States and many European countries, as well as in Chile, Peru and Cuba.

In 1891, May Day was celebrated in Russia, Brazil and Ireland. China first celebrated May Day in 1920. In 1927, the holiday had spread to India, where there were demonstrations in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay.

As May Day was becoming a worldwide holiday, with the date having been chosen to commemorate the union fight for the eight-hour work day in the United States, within the United States itself the mainstream labour movement, now represented by the American Federation of Labor [AFL], was becoming more conservative. That organisation chose to support the first Monday in September as Labor Day. In 1894, federal legislation designating the September Labor Day holiday was passed and signed into law by the then-United States President, Grover Cleveland.

The date celebrated as International Workers Day all over the world was established to commemorate the disgrace of the Haymarket trials and the anti-labor violence connected with the celebration of May 1 in Chicago by a general strike to demand the eight-hour day. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland in cooperation with the politically conservative AFL established Labor Day in the US as an alternative to International Workers Day.

While Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Frederick Engels (1820-1895) were very influential figures in the social-democratic movement in Europe. To what extent the Social Democratic Parties in the Socialist International of 1889 could be called "Marxist" is less clear-cut, although that's probably quibbling as far how we understand the terms we use today. But the leading Social Democratic Party in Europe, one with which Marx and Engels were closely associated, was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). In 1889, the SPD was still operating under the Gotha Program of 1875, about which Marx had expressed his differences in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, first published in part in 1890-91.

The SPD adopted a new program in 1891, when Marx had been dead several years. But his close collaborator Engels wrote A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891 (1891) indicating his differences with the official text. Brief English excerpts of both programs are availabe from the Hanover Historical Texts Project. The orginal German texts of both Das Gothaer Programm and Das Erfurter Programm are available online; both are short.

Tags: international workers day, labor day, labor movement

Andrew Jacksonianism, 2009

Via Glenn Greewald, this is great! An American politician, in this case Mayor Virg Bernero of Lansing MI, getting all Jacksonian about the unholy alliance between Wall Street and Washington against the vital interests of working people:



See, Democrats, it can be done! He wasn't struck down by a thunderbolt from heaven when he attacked Wall Street bonuses and defended union pay and benefits for auto workers. Amazing!

And not only that. He was willing to get in a reporter's face for blatantly shilling for the bosses. Let's have much more of this. If we could get Harry Reid acting like this, the Republican Party might just disappear altogether after a couple more elections.

And I bet he won't be showing up at this ridiculous "fiscal responsibility summit" next Monday demanding that Social Security be wrecked, either.

Tags: labor movement, us economyv, virg bernero