Organize for May Day

It’s time to organize for May Day. Time to get your organization to endorse the demands and the events and to get the word out to your members.

This year there’ll be a picnic in Brittingham Park, followed by a march to the Capitol and the City-County Building.

The event is being organized as a “united front,” by an ad hoc May Day Committee, which came up with the demands and the agenda.

The principle is that everyone is invited (challenged?) to endorse the list of demands. Any organization that endorses gets their name on the organizing materials and they get a speaker at the event. And, of course, endorsers are free to raise additional demands, in their own name.

The May Day demands address many of the cutting edge issues facing the US working class today. They are:
-- Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act
-- Universal health care now
-- Mandatory paid sick leave
-- A living wage
-- Halt foreclosures and evictions
-- Increased funding for Section 8 housing
-- Free university tuition for low-income students
-- No increase in bus fares
-- A living wage for W-2 workers
-- Real funding for public schools
-- Immigrant access to identification and drivers licenses
-- Amnesty for immigrant workers
-- Stop sheriff notification to ICE
-- No firings for Social Security no match letters

The schedule is, Friday, May 1,
10:30 a.m. Gathering at Brittingham Park
12:45 p.m. Depart Park to the Capitol
1:15 p.m. Capitol event, to state and federal demands
1:45 p.m. Depart Capitol to City-County Building
1:50 p.m. City-County event, to address city and county demands

In recent years, Madison’s May Day was organized largely by activists in the immigrant workers movement. The largely white, native-born union members around here largely ignored it. That’s gotta change if we’re going to build a real labor movement in this town.

So, take the list of demands to your next meeting. Move for an endorsement. Ask for a show of hands and take names if you have to. If it helps, you might let people know that, so far, it’s been endorsed by a number of Madison-area unions, including AFSCME Local 171 and the South Central Federation of Labor.

If you’re union or other organization votes not to endorse, endorse as an individual. Or, better yet, put together a caucus or slate in your union and endorse in that name.

Then, get to work to bring people to the picnic and march on May 1. We’ve had enough of “paper endorsements,” where a handful of people in a room vote for something and then make sure that rank and file members never find out about it. We need to turn May Day into something real: a class consciousness-raising event and a leadership-building opportunity. Get the word out to the rank and file members of your organization and get as many of them as you can to May Day.

For more information, contact the Madison May Day Committee at maydayinmadison.org