May Day is an occasion to celebrate the toiling labor and also to remember the sacrifices made by the workers to earn the dignity and a fair wage for their labor. As we grow into a more complex economy and society, we need to appreciate the fact that it is human labor and more precisely collective human labor which has won the earth for the human civilization and which has made this progress possible. Celebrated in memory of the Chicago Workers Movement for an eight hour working day in 1886, and institutionalized by the second internationale in 1889, it has been a day of solidarity with the workers and their struggles. As the workers united for their rights against the industrial capital in the last century, their hard earned yet limited successes are threatened by the neoliberal states and markets over the past 50 years. Attacking unions and the concept of collective bargaining, reducing public goods and welfare, and decreasing democratic control over governments due to corporatizing and internationalizing of capital have been the hallmarks of the period. What started as the Reagan- thatcher shift from the new deal has now been established across the globe by the world bank and imf through the structural adjustment programs and we in India have been subjected to it. The current government has gone further in diluting labor laws, and the discourse is toying 70 and 80 hours weeks. Health, education, water, electricity have been corporatized. Universities have been delinked from the workforce and even movements like the recent farmers movement could not come to the center of national discourse. May Day is a time to sensitize the masses and the society towards the vulnerability of workers rights and the future of our youth.
May Day is solidarity day
