The Internationale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JmFa2Q40lg#t=61
Charles Brown – Labor Notes
Take It Easy On May Day!
Posted on May 2, 2014
May Day approaches again. I have a dream of a 35 hour workweek with no cut in pay. Leisure is freedom! Hurray, Hurray for the Very First of May!
YET, today in the real world in Michigan, original location of big historical victories in industrial unionism, woe is the Laboring Class and its trade unions. Snake Snyder, the Governor, and his band of tea party pirates have humiliated the middle class enacting a work-for-Less (“right”- to -work) statute. It is archaic, conservative law based on the federal Taft-Hartley statute of 1948.
Taft-Hartley law, this old bourgeois ghost, hovers over all that labor does in politics in Michigan this Merry, Merry First of May 2014. Round the Maypole we’ll go anyway! “The anthropologist Mircea Eliade theorizes that the maypoles were simply a part of the general rejoicing at the return of summer, and the growth of new vegetation. In this way, they bore similarities with the May Day garlands which were also a common festival practice in Britain and Ireland.”
Hurray for May Day and the Haymarketeers, who protested in Chicago in 1886, seeking a shortening of the work-day. They were framed and martyred by the local business class. Let us remember their struggle for longer holidays and shorter work days; and stand on their shoulders this spring.
In Michigan, we will win again. Repeal “right”-to-work-FOR-LESS” law! Repeal Taft-Hartley! May Day will come again. The Cause of Labor is the Hope of the World Shorter Working Day, A Longer Life; Cooperation and Emulation, not Competition; Hope in Work and Joy in Leisure; Art and Enjoyment for All!.
Written by: Charles Brown Charles Brown is a decades long political activist, feminist and partisan of the working class in Detroit , Michigan. His favorite slogans are “We are the 99%” and “Yes we can !”.
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/04/httpsen_30.html
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