labor

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

This May Day finds us at an important historic crossroads. Amidst a global pandemic, this year the streets will be eerily silent as people forgo the marches, rallies and riots that are the annual rituals of international workers day. But while the streets may be calm, the class war rages on. Wildcat strikes are popping off among ‘essential workers’ who two months ago were seen as some of the lowest, most precarious participants of the gig economy. Prison uprisings are breaking out around the world at an unprecedented rate.

May Day, or International Workers Day, is celebrated with marches and rallies every May 1 to lift up the working people and their demands for freedom, equality, and justice. That is the Red tradition of May Day. But there is also an older Green tradition in which cultures the world over celebrate as Spring arrives in temperate and arctic climates or the wet season arrives in tropical climates. This Green tradition of May Day celebrates all that is free and life-giving on the green Earth that is our commonwealth and heritage. These Red and Green May Day traditions are complementary.

Are we living surreal days? Hunkered down within four walls. Suspicious of every package at our door. Cleaning and cleaning some more. Gross monopolies mediating all our communication. And constant worry that the elders in our lives will die of COVID19.

John Lennon, prolific as a writer as much as a performer, wrote this:
Working Class Hero
As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be

Sanders as transforming the Democratic Party

Bernie Sanders, the Junior Democratic (nominally Independent) U.S. Senator from Vermont, is working with other progressives in Congress to come up with proposed emergency legislation that would pay all coronavirus medical costs throughout the coronavirus epidemic in America, and that would pay salaries of laid-off workers, so that the economy will not crash.
In a 7-minute video which was posted by The Hill,

Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks with Kevin Gustafson, an organizer with Democracy at Work and host of the Sensible…
The post Amazon on strike: what workers need to know about their rights appeared first on The Grayzone.

Madness engulfs the planet. Hundreds of millions of people are in lockdown in their homes, millions of people who work in essential jobs – or who cannot afford to stay home without state assistance – continue to go to work, thousands of people lie in intensive-care beds taken care of by tens of thousands of medical professionals and caregivers who face shortages of equipment and time. Narrow sections of the human population – the billionaires – believe that they can isolate themselves in their enclaves, but the virus knows no borders.