Militant labor leaders join with anti-war forces

International Workers Day becomes a reality on streets of New York.

This city is known around the world as the capital of high finance, the home of Wall Street and of thousands of giant banks and corporations whose glass-encased steel towers scrape the sky. Its stock exchanges are linked to investors across the globe through an intricate web of communications. Its mayor, Michael Bloomberg, became a billionaire selling financial reports through Bloomberg News.

But on May 1, another New York reached out to a different world.

For the first time in many years, leaders of working class struggles joined anti-war forces to reclaim May Day, the International Workers’ Day that is honored by millions of workers from Asia and Europe to the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Yet it had been effectively suppressed in the United States—even though it originated here with the struggle for the eight-hour day in 1886.

This year’s revived May Day started with a rally in Union Square—where huge worker demonstrations in the 1930s had shaken the capitalist bosses to the soles of their feet. After listening to a wide variety of speakers, 1,000 people of many different nationalities carrying bright banners and placards marched through a working class shopping district to the East Side. They paused at two hospitals threatened with closing while chanting, “The workers united will never be defeated” and “Money for health care, not for war.”

This and other U.S. demonstrations to revive May Day in this country were an outgrowth of last October’s Million Worker March in Washington, which called for militant working-class action independent of the big business political parties. The largely Black-led MWM Movement has teamed up in New York with the Troops Out Now Coalition, a group of community, labor and anti-war forces that met weekly for several months shaping and building the May Day event.

Almost until the last day, they had to wrestle with police and picket City Hall for the right to march. And when the sound permit for Union Square expired at 5 p.m. during the final wind-up rally, eight cops marched up one second later and rudely pulled the plug in the middle of remarks by Charles Jenkins, a Transit Workers Union activist and member of the MWMM.

MWMM leaders Clarence Thomas, Brenda Stokely and Chris Silvera had revved up the crowd earlier with strong speeches urging a revival of labor militancy in the U.S.

Thomas had flown in from San Fran cisco, where he is a well-known militant in the International Longshore and Ware house Union. His political roots, he proudly explained to the crowd, go back to the 1960s and the Black Panther Party. Thomas reviewed the glorious history of his union, which has many times walked off the docks in support of workers’ movements and liberation struggles in other countries—like the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. It was putting into action labor’s great slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” he explained.

Brenda Stokely represents thousands of New York City day care workers and is pre sident of AFSCME District Council 1707. She urged the union members present to organize to make their leaders fight, and if they won’t, “then change your leaders.” Going over the struggles of workers today for jobs, health care and other necessities of life that are becoming increasingly hard to get, she was optimistic. “We can win these things,” she said. “It’s not just in my imagination. Look at Cuba. They have won these rights and we can, too.”

Chris Silvera is chair of the Teamsters National Black Caucus and a leader of Teamsters Local 808 in the borough of Queens. Standing alongside placards reading “Stop attacks on workers’ rights” and “Union jobs and health care, not war,” he posed a list of challenging questions to the audience. “Why does a $400-billion war budget pass without debate while health care and education are stalled in Con gress?” he asked. “Why won’t the AFL-CIO organize a national strike to fight for them?”

The audience listened intently to workers from a wide range of struggles, both here in the U.S. and abroad.

Immigrant workers were represented by Casa Freehold in New Jersey, where day laborers, most of them Mexican, have waged a long battle for the right to muster each morning at a public location seek to jobs. A group of Dom inican workers was also in the march.

Two women trying to organize workers at the pricey Starbucks coffee house chain told how one of them had been fired just weeks earlier. But they are determined to continue to fight for a union there.

A group of maintenance workers from the Bromley Heath housing project in Boston told about their efforts to win a decent contract and stop cuts in public housing funds.

The rally moved seamlessly back and forth between domestic and international issues, showing that there really are no borders in the workers’ struggle.

Gerardo Cajamarca of the embattled Sinaltrainal food industry union in Colombia, whose members include Coca-Cola bottling plant workers, talked of the violence against unionists there that has spurred the union to launch its “Killer Coke” boycott.

The Filipino group Bayan had organized a feeder march to the rally. A member of the Damayan Migrant Workers Association described how Third World women “bear the brunt of exploitation by multinational corporations, the IMF-WTO and World Bank.”

A message was read from Ben Dupuy, whose National Popular Party in Haiti is fighting for workers’ rights and an end to the U.S.-imposed dictatorship there. Police have fired on peaceful protesters in Port-au-Prince in recent weeks.

A large Palestinian flag waved as Samia Halaby of Al-Awda urged support for the Palestinian people’s struggle to recover their homeland and for the right of those in the diaspora to return home.

Troops out now!

Leaders of the Troops Out Now Coalition (TONC)—Nellie Bailey of the Harlem Tenants Council, Larry Hol mes and Sara Flounders of the Inter na tional Action Center, and Dustin Langley of No Draft No Way—kept every one aware of the intimate connection between the attacks on workers’ rights and services here at home and the costly colonial occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Teresa Gutierrez explained the importance of the struggle to free the Cuban 5, who are held in U.S. jails for trying to protect their homeland from U.S.-sponsored terrorism.

LeiLani Dowell of Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST) spoke for young people who are demanding jobs and education instead of an economic draft that has forced so many youth into the military. An exuberant FIST contingent in the march was proof that the fighting spirit of the sixties generation is alive among young anti-imperialists today.

Every generation, however, has its own unique artistic expression. The Founda tion from Boston and Movement in Motion rapped out a political message with words that penetrated the crowd like a volley of bullets. Usavior of Artists and Activists for Peace called for support of those who dare criticize the monolithic corporate control of culture. Singer and activist Nana Soul moved the crowd to want to forge ahead with the struggles yet to come.

A taped message from political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal had opened the rally. His words on the significance of May Day still reverberated as MWMM and TONC leaders called on everyone to begin organizing now to make May Day 2006—the 120th anniversary of Haymarket in Chicago—a major event in the rebirth of independent working-class struggle in the United States.