May Day

One of the ironies about May Day is that it is commemorated around the world as the International Worker’s Day to mark the Haymarket Affair in Chicago – that is, in most countries except the US, which considered the holiday for labourers part of a push by the Communists. This day was chosen to commemorate the contribution of workers by the Second International in 1889 and to this day is marked as at least a token appreciation of the contribution of workers to economies around the world. The US, devoted to its staunch capitalist system, observes a separate Labour Day in September. Now, more than ever before, the value of labourers needs to be recognised. As the world buys into the neo-liberal ideology where entrepreneurs are celebrated while those who actually build goods that build an economy are denigrated, May Day should serve as a vital reminder of those who have been left behind by the modern economy. Governance at a multinational level is geared towards denying workers rights and if in any country pro-labour moves are undertaken, international institutions try to undermine them. We saw this in Greece where the European Union was aghast that a government may actually try to pay its workers the pensions they were promised and see them as the engines of growth rather than following a course where they would be laid off en masse in a misguided attempt to impose austerity.

In Pakistan the governments have remained devoted to the needs of capital and have been eagerly following an IMF-imposed agenda where state-run enterprises are sold to the highest bidder. The result of this, as we have seen all too often during the drive for privatisation from Zia’s era and onwards, is to lay off thousands of workers to make industry profitable without caring that institutions like PIA exist to provide an essential service and employment to many people even if it needs subsidies. In the private sector, labour unions – the only check on the rapaciousness of capitalist workers – have been decimated to the point where they barely matter. Unions still have some power in the public sector but the process of privatisation – combined with the media’s tendency to portray every strike as an affront to consumers’ need to get every service immediately – has led to their weakening. On this May Day, we all need to think long and hard about how workers have built the country we live in and how we need to reward them for their relentless hard work.