Labor Day, May Day 2008

It’s Labor Day again. Every culture in the Northern Hemisphere has a fall harvest festival of some kind. Time to kick back and feast on the fruits of our labor. If we’ve been lucky, the larder is fairly full and it’s time to be satisfied with ourselves. Either way, it’s also a time to make the mental adjustment, to hunker down for the long freeze that’s about to come.

On the opposite side of the calendar is May Day, also a day for traditional working class celebration. Spring festivals in the North celebrate a time of planting, hope, regeneration, rebirth and renewal. A pagan pregnant time. A time to anticipate a new beginning.

Again this year, Labor Day will be celebrated by the unions of the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win Coalition out at the Labor Temple on Park Street. It’s all pretty ritualized by now: Italian sausage, beer, Paul Cebar, face painting, the roll call and Ruth leading Solidarity Forever. Literature tables, staffed by familiar but older faces, overflowing with often false hope and promises. This being an election year, politicians will be out as thick as fleas on a hound.

If you were at the May Day march this past spring you’ll recall that it was conducted largely in Spanish. High school kids had made artful silkscreened signs. As we marched up West Washington, construction workers came out to wave in solidarity and a semi went past and the driver blew his horn to the rhythm of “Si, se puede.” The people in the street were young and the music was rhythmic and sexy.

The demands of the May Day marchers included health care for all and an end to the war. But the people at May Day also demanded that Sheriff Mahoney (that same Sheriff Mahoney who was heavily backed in his last election by local unions) stop harassing undocumented workers. Members of the Workers International League, Industrial Workers of the World, International Socialist Organization and assorted unaffiliated socialists marched. There was no official AFL-CIO presence at May Day.

The local labor movement (sic) has few things to celebrate this Labor Day. We almost completed the mural in the hallway of the Labor Temple. Our real estate holdings on Park Street increased in value. And we hired a full-time organizer--not to help organize unions, but to help elect Democrats. Then, on the other side of the ledger, there was Woodman’s, Superior Linen and CleanPower.

Some at Labor Day grumble that our country is being taken over by illegal immigrants from Latin America. Those who know me don’t express their bigotry to my face. But, being an old white guy, people who don’t know me assume that I share their perspective and spout off freely. “It could be worse,” I tell them. “A hundred years ago we were facing hoards of Irishmen!”

So, it’s harvest time again. If you’re one of the 10 percent of the U.S. workforce that is lucky enough to have a unionized job, chances are the larder is at least partially full, so maybe you won’t have to eat the seed before spring. If you’re among the other 90 percent, there’s May Day.

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