May Day is the Real Labor Day
But honoring laborers shouldn’t be relegated to nostalgia
Today, May 1st, is May Day, also known in labor circles as International Workers Day. It’s the day when workers around the world traditionally rally to show solidarity and support for one another. It’s the real Labor Day. While our own Labor Day has become a holiday, a day of picnics and celebration, May Day is and always will be an international day of protest — a reminder of worker rights and worker dignity in a world gone mad with greed.
Labor in America has been under siege like nothing we’ve seen in this country since the 1930s. Whatever wage scales and rights and protections had been fought for and won over the years have slowly eroded away in this century’s bizarre, reckless version of takeover capitalism.
We used to be able to count our millionaires on two hands. Now we’ve lost count of our billionaires. At the same time, the minimum wage in the U.S. is still at a ridiculous $7.25 and the battles to raise it to a paltry $15 continue. The days of a union factory worker making upwards of $100,000 with overtime are long gone, but no matter how often we hear it it, the lies about the workers’ greed bringing about the end of a thriving middle class will never become truth. Those workers earned every penny. And their spending kept the economy…
