Local organizers reclaim May Day as worker holiday

Presenter: May Day is back as a day to celebrate workers, shut down businesses, give everyone the day off and let the city go quiet, the way it used to be on Sundays and on Christmas. From the Eugene Springfield Solidarity Network, Lonnie Douglas: 

Lonnie Douglas (Eugene Springfield Solidary Network): People really need to understand that, like, May Day and Labor Day are the two days of the year that really are for workers. They’re worker holidays, and I think we need to start taking—especially May Day—we need to start taking that day back as workers.

There’s been a call from PCUN and other organizations for this May Day to be no work, no shopping, no school. And, you know, we’ve discussed this and I think a lot of people think this—we need that to be a call every May Day,  the mindset that we try to get all workers to start feeling: ‘Yeah, this is our holiday as workers and we’re not going to go to work, we’re not going to go to school, we’re not going to engage and shop at these big corporate stores or online. If we are going to shop or give our money to somebody, it’s going to be a local small business.’

And start just taking that day off. I mean, it’s nice that on Labor Day some people get Labor Day off, but you know, it used to be when I was a little kid (like, really little), on Sunday you would go around town and nothing was open because it was Sunday. And same thing on Christmas. You would go around on Christmas Day and stores weren’t open on Christmas Day because it was Christmas Day.

Well, we should have that same way of thinking about May Day, about our workers, the day that is for us, the working class—the people who actually make this country work. 

And it’s time we start taking back our country, taking back our power as workers. I mean, we built this country and now a bunch of billionaires and crooked politicians, they basically are running things and we do all the work and they get all the benefit of it. So I think that’s what we need to take and remind people of on May Day, that it’s a day to show people that they matter as workers.

Presenter: This Friday, May 1 at the Wayne Morse Free Speech Plaza, the rally starts at noon. Lonnie Douglas:

Lonnie Douglas: We have some speakers from local organizations, some of our local unions. I’ll be representing ESSN / Jobs with Justice, so I’ll probably speak during the rally and then we’ll have community organizations like PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation). I think Indivisible is participating.

And it’ll be pretty much focused on what May Day is really supposed to be about, which is about workers, worker rights, and the labor struggle that we’ve had in our country.

It’ll be followed up with a march around that downtown area there. It won’t be a long march. It won’t be a super short march, but it won’t be a long march. So if people don’t want to walk too far, they can still participate.

Presenter: Lonnie said the rally and march will be followed with art, including music and spoken word performances. 

Lonnie Douglas: Some groups and organizers are going to organize some activities in the Park Blocks in line with the kind of Art Walk event that the city of Eugene also does. So if people want to bring any type of art there—especially if it’s labor-themed.

One of my local activist friends has a huge black-and-white painting he’s done of Joe Hill that he brings to some of the labor rallies or things like that. So it should be fun. It’s just to add a little bit of fun after the rally.

So people can do music if they want. They can do spoken word so if people want to get up and do poetry, or just do like they used to do in the old days: Put a soap box out and just get up and say what you’ve got to say.

Presenter: One of those speeches, ‘Take back May Day as an international worker’s holiday,’ seems to finally be breaking through. Lonnie Douglas:

Lonnie Douglas: There’s been a call for taking back May Day for decades. I mean, you’ve had that random IWW—that random Wobbly out there calling for a general strike on May 1 forever. 

What’s causing people to sit up and take notice more than anything else—and we have to be honest in our movement. It’s not the organizing that we’ve done as unions or as, you know, labor organizers outside of the unions. We don’t have a strong labor movement in America anymore. People want to say that we do, but we don’t.

But the good thing that I’m seeing is: That is changing and it’s not changing necessarily because of the same things that we’ve always been doing. 

It’s changing because we’ve reached a point where the people in charge, the billionaires and the politicians, are so blatant with their disrespect and their corruption and just the way that they treat regular working-class people, things have gotten so bad that people are now starting to say that they feel like they don’t have a choice but to get active and to get vocal.

And the people that have been holding down the fort for decades—those crazy Wobblies calling for a general strike on May 1 every year, and those union members who’ve been diehards, who’ve stuck with the union over the years— those are the people that now are able to help these new young working-class people that are starting to realize that they need a new labor movement, to help them to form that.

And so you’ve got the old guard and you’ve got this new guard of young people coming in that are like, ‘We can’t take this anymore. I can’t afford to pay rent. I can’t put food on the table. I can’t find a decent job. I have to work three jobs just to barely get by.’

And those old guard and those new, young labor activists that are being created, I think they’re going to turn things around. It’s inevitable. Tyrants always fall. And that’s where we are in this country and it’s not just Trump. 

Trump is a symptom of a bigger problem we have in this country. And people know that. They realize that. Whether they’re on the right or the left, they know that it’s not just one person or one party that’s messing things up for us.

It’s this class of billionaires and their lackies and people are starting to mobilize around that. It’s not just the people that have always been doing it. It’s a lot of new people that, finally, have reached their limit of stupid. They can’t take any more stupid from the people running things.

So I think that’s where we are, and I think that’s why May Day is really becoming a symbol for a lot of regular working-class people again.

Presenter: We asked Lonnie Douglas what we should be doing starting May 2. 

Lonnie Douglas: So I think the callout for people really needs to be twofold. I mean there’s two ways of thinking about this. 

And we have the people that are like, ‘You need to go out, you need to vote.’And then there are the people that, ‘You need to go out, go into the street and stop commerce.’ 

And the funny thing is that they, generally, both sides, think the other side is wacky and not really going to do anything. And the reality is you need to do both.

What we need is: We need poor working-class people to vote, not middle-class, not upper-middle-class people because those are the people who already vote. And I’m going to be harsh on middle-class and upper-middle-class people. 

I love a lot of my friends that are middle-class and upper-middle-class activists and organizers, but they’re the reason we’re in this situation. They vote for their own interest.

Poor working-class people do not vote. If you make less than $35,000 a year, you probably didn’t vote in the last election. There are exceptions to the rule, but for the most part, they don’t vote.

And they don’t vote because they’re disengaged or they’re stupid or they don’t care. They don’t vote because they actually are smart. They know that voting for one of the lesser of two evils isn’t going to change things for them.

They know that regardless of whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican, that their rent is not going to go down. Their cost of food is going to keep going up. They’re still going to have to work three or four jobs.

Didn’t matter when Biden was in, didn’t matter when Trump was in, didn’t matter when Obama was in. They are still in the same situation, no matter who they vote for. So they’re just like: Why bother voting? And they fall into that trap.

But the reality is, what I say to people, vote and just don’t vote for a Democrat or a Republican. There’s the Working Families Party, there’s the Green Party, there’s the Independent Party.

Don’t let people push you into voting, bullying you into participating in the system in the way that we always have because they’re afraid of Donald Trump or they’re afraid of the next Joe Biden.

Voting for the lesser of two evils is always voting for evil, and that’s why we’re here. You know, like I say, Donald Trump is a symptom of the bad choices that we’ve made as a nation, and those bad choices are on both the right and the left. Both sides are equally responsible for where we are.

Vote for somebody else. Let ’em know that your voice matters, and then vote for the ballot initiatives and the laws and the things that actually affect you in Oregon. You get to vote on those. Exercise your voice, but then when the call also comes out for things like no work, no school, no shopping, especially the no shopping, just exercise your right with your dollar.

You don’t have a lot of them if you’re poor. But guess what? All of us together, that’s a lot of money. So if we all say, Hey, we’re not going to go to Target or Walmart or do anything online on a certain day, that sends a very clear message and the two together exercising our power with our dollar and our work and exercising our power when we vote, that’s what will turn things around.

And then, you want to tell people to go out and get involved, join an organization. But the reality, if you’re poor or working poor, you don’t have time for that. You’re too busy working three, four jobs and watching your kids and stuff like that. But you can go to, like, once a year, you can go to a rally on May Day or maybe twice a year. 

The biggest thing you can do is just try to stay informed. Just know what’s happening, and not go with just one source. Go to people that you may disagree with and listen and then think about what they say and, and just have conversations with each other. I mean, that’s, I think, the biggest thing we can do.

The reality is the average conservative or liberal, the average working-class Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, they’re actually not bad people. They want us to think that our neighbors, just because they disagree with us on certain issues, are bad people.

And they’re not. They just don’t agree on certain things. But they want to polarize us. They want to make us hate each other, and then they want to make us again vote for the lesser of two evils. I mean, there was Democrats and Republicans both in the Epstein files.

And the reality is, they’re not that different from us. And they probably agree with us on 80% of the stuff out there. Conservatives and liberals making less than $30K a year, ask them: ‘Hey, have you ever had to work for a crappy boss?’ And every one of them is going to tell you yes.

‘Hey, do you want affordable rent?’ Every one of them is going to tell you yes. Do you want to be able to afford to buy food for your kids? Every one of them is going to tell you yes.

Now you ask them stuff like, ‘Do you believe in God?’ or ‘Do you believe in this,’ that identity-type politics issue. And then yeah, they’re going to disagree on a lot of that stuff. But on most of the things, the things that really affect most of our lives, those we’re going to agree on.

And it doesn’t mean that the other issues aren’t important, it just means let’s worry about those later. And right now let’s try to work on making sure that you can afford to buy food for your family and put a roof over your head.

Let’s make sure that we all have the right to go out and say what we want to online. You know, make sure that they’re not surveilling us all and watching us all, and taking away our rights. And those are all things I think we can all agree on.

Presenter: And bring back May Day as a worker’s holiday. Lonnie Douglas: 

Lonnie Douglas: I just want to remind people, May 1, down at the Park Blocks and Free Speech Plaza there, just turn out, show your support for workers and our struggle.

Another thing for people to remember is, if you’ve got problems at your workplace, if your workplace sucks, show up. If you have questions about, ‘How do I unionize my shop’ there’ll be union people there that’ll be more than willing to help you out and talk with you about it.

Less than 10% of workers in the United States have a union. That number needs to flip. If 90% of people had a union, we wouldn’t be in this situation. 

About the only way we’re really going to get more power back—the only way to beat the billionaires—is by having most of the workers behind it, because that’s where the real power is.

So if you come on down, if you want to organize your workplace, or you’re even just curious about it, curious about unions, we’ll talk to you about it, give you the info that you need. And, hopefully, eventually we’ll start to see things change for the better.

Presenter: Lonnie Douglas from Eugene Springfield Solidarity Network welcomes you to join the general strike events this Friday, May 1, in the Park Blocks downtown. 

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Public domain image of Joe Hill courtesy Wikimedia Commons and Utah Division of Archives and Records Service.