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Lately I've been using Elvis Costello's line as an email signature: "What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?"
It's a rhetorical question, of course. Yet these three crucial elements of happiness continue to elude us.
The Unified Platform puts Peace first, but without Love and Understanding, Peace will remain just a plank in a platform, an unrealized dream with no real plan for achievement. Until each of us is daily fostering Understanding and Love between all peoples, no matter how divergent our cultures, wants or dreams may be, Peace will remain an unattained ideal.
But divergent as we are, one thing unifies us all: Work.
 | | First May Day in Japan, 1920 |
Each of us does it. Whether we are on someone's payroll, trying to be, or are putting food on our tables by dropping a line in the water or seeds in the ground, each of us works for our livings.
On May First, people around the world - though notably far fewer, per capita, here in the supposed "land of opportunity" - celebrate working people, their power, their contributions, and their rights.
May Day has been officially - and quite wrongheadedly - reviled in the United States for its trumped-up connection to Communism. In 1921, four years after the Russian Revolution, the shell-shocked fear-mongerers also known as the Veterans of Foreign Wars promoted May 1 as "Americanization Day" (catchy name, huh? Just rolls off the tongue...) a bald-faced statement that any country putting the concerns of working people first was not one they cared to defend.
Then, in 1958, at the height of the Cold War, Congress made May 1 a national holiday entitled "Loyalty Day," and president Dwight D. Eisenhower went double or nothing, declaring it also "Law Day." That's right. In two fell swoops, the legislative and executive branches inferred that celebrating workers was both disloyal and maybe something other than lawful.
But May Day as a celebration of workers and worker rights is making a comeback in the United States, and we're glad to see it.
Beginning with the May 1, 2006 Great American Boycott, a general strike organized by undocumented immigrant workers, awareness of May 1 as it is known pretty much everywhere else on the planet - International Workers' Day - is growing stateside. This is happening with (or more accurately, in spite of) the support of major (corrupt-at-the-top, in-thrall-to-Democrats) unions, almost all of which are in need of an overhaul as badly as our government itself.
But rather than join in this international celebration of worker solidarity coinciding with the hope and rebirth of spring, we're still getting "Labor Day" - that crushingly depressing reminder that playtime is over for another year, winter is coming, and we'd best hunker
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| | May Day clashes in Istanbul, earlier this month |
down and make peace with the fact that 60 other nations give workers more vacation time than we do (scroll to the bottom of this page for the list). And no complaints either, please, about our broken child-care system, where kids learn at an early age that mommy or daddy is whichever underpaid, untrained, no-benefits worker is assigned to them on any given day. And that's in the better babysitting operations.
I won't trot out that tired old cliche, "America can do better." That's a given. The truth is, America won't do better - because the same union-busting, worker-abusing conglomerates which own our government think America is doing just fine, provided they get to keep writing our labor laws.
Just as Peace will remain elusive until Love and Understanding become top priorities, the key role we workers play in society will not be evident until we join as one and insist on it.
This is going to have to happen largely outside of unions, whose ineffectiveness is as clear as their dwindling numbers, now a paltry 7 percent of private-sector workers. And while the percentage for public sector employees is better at around 35, this much is clear:
 | | A May Day march in Mumbai |
Anyone who seriously believes American workers, broadly, have flexed their collective muscles and reminded their bosses of who is actually running things anytime in the past 40 years is living in an alternate universe.
Real Progressivism, whose priorities include community, the environment, public health, peace, and transparent government, also honors workers. That can be hard to remember in an age of ersatz progressivism in which our President, his party hacks, and that party's multitude of foundation-funded, status-quo enabling non-profits (MoveOn, "Progressive" Democrats of America, and the Sierra Club, to name a few) pay only lip service to these issues, never making real, line-in-the-sand attempts to resolve them.
As the NPA continues to grow we will endeavor to remind Americans of the centrality of work and workers to every aspect of their lives. Through our State Liaisons and on-the-ground volunteers, we will reach out to workers of every political stripe, unifying them in order to reawaken the captains of industry to a vital truth, one even they can't legislate away:
Without workers, you got nothing.
Anthony Noel
Communications Director
New Progressive Alliance
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