PL’er Champions May Day: ‘The conscience of the union…’

“Why can’t we set up a May Day Committee in the union? We can then start to hold May Day, the international working class holiday each year.  Our union has designated May as Labor Month. That’s because of the struggle for the 8-hour day that led to May Day.”

The question hung in the air…..  It was not answered, so the PL’er continued. “After all, we just sang the song Solidarity Forever for the union’s fiftieth anniversary, today being that day. And it finishes with the lines: “greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold.” He then sang out, “We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, for the union makes us strong.”

There were about 400-500 workers in attendance at the union’s retiree meeting. The two PL’ers present wanted to bring the message of the May Day March and its importance. The meeting was long and much of it praised five previous union figures who had helped organize the union and win benefits that are important to union members. But there was little mention of the great mass of the membership who stood up strong to win those battles, even though the new President of the union, who spoke first, said this should be for the broad membership. 

We had got out a few CHALLENGES at the beginning of the meeting and looked forward to discussing the militant mass struggle that May Day represents, but the meeting went on and on and on. When we were ten minutes from the scheduled end there was suddenly a little bit of question time allowed based on a report given by a local Assistant District Attorney discussing elder abuse. With just ten minutes to go it was clear that it was unlikely we would get the opportunity to raise the idea of May Day, even as a general question. 

One of the PL’ers quickly put his hand up. “Is this period one in which we will only discuss questions dealing with elder abuse?” he asked. The chairman (knowing the PL’er uses diverse tactics to get the floor) said, “Nice try.” And then he tried to go on with the elder-abuse questions. But there was a stirring on the floor. Even though the elder-abuse discussion was interesting for most of the attendees, their curiosity was raised, especially since three quarters of the meeting had been spent on self-praise. The chairman, being sensitive to the feeling in the hall, conceded and said, “We’ll have one question. It will be yours.”

After the question (and song) at the top of this account there was some applause, and a great deal of energetic support, if only for the diversion. The chair would not answer the question, and the meeting was ended. Afterwards a number of people came over to praise the two PL’ers. “That was great. We need some more militancy in this union.”

A politically conservative woman who had been sitting next to one of the PL’ers said, “You always raise very interesting points. Even though we don’t see eye-to-eye, I think they’re very good and important for the union.” Another person said, “You speak for the conscience of the union.” There were a number of other positive remarks.

We are still lacking in setting up a study group or another way to engage retirees on a deeper, individual level.  One of us started working to join a retiree group that always puts out literature not tied directly to the union. Also, we need to become active in the union committees where we offered to work and have more social meetings with the workers there we know very well.

With deeper personal and political ties we can struggle to change the focus of the retiree meetings away from just praising the limited reform gains that were won by trade union struggles that didn’t identify capitalism as the real problem. These limited victories have been drowned under the mass unemployment and union-busting wage-cuts of the current economic crisis.  We can then put the revolutionary anti-capitalist ideas of May Day front and center