BY NICK EVERETT
On May Day (May 1), the ABC's Sally Loane interviewed NSW Labor Council secretary John Robertson. When asked about M1, he objected strongly to M1 activists "taking over" May Day, declaring it was a day for "workers' struggles" not a day for "other issues".
Robertson's comments gained little attention from the mainstream media. Envious of the attention received by the M1 protests around the country, the Labor Council's Workers Online web site ran an comment by its editor, Peter Lewis, on May 3 entitled "The hijacking of May Day" (reproduced below).
"These were not 'May Day protesters' as portrayed in the media", wrote Lewis, but "a couple of hundred political extremists... thumbing their noses to the history of the Australian working class."
But who has really hijacked May Day?
On May 1, 1886, a massive strike wave erupted in the US in support of an eight-hour working day. (Australian building workers were the first to win this demand in 1856.) The capitalists struck back against the striking workers using police to attack demonstrations. In Chicago an exploding bomb was used as a pretext by police to open fire on workers, killing five. Seven organisers of a mass meeting of striking workers, known as the "Haymarket martyrs", were later sentenced to death by hanging.
The eight-hour day campaign in the US gave rise to a decision by representatives of revolutionary socialist parties, at a conference in Paris in 1889, to declare May 1 an international day of strikes and street demonstrations in solidarity with the struggle for the eight-hour work day.
The Labor Council-supported annual Sunday afternoon "May Day" parades are a far cry from the origins of May Day. Dubbed "funeral marches" by many militant workers, these "May Day" parades have served only to commemorate past struggles, not to advance the present-day struggles of the working class.
Lewis claims that M1 protesters made "life hell for ordinary workers — be they the bank workers forced to get to work at 5am or the police officers facing physical danger from juvenile tactics".
At the May 1 blockade of the building which houses Australasian Correction Management (and a branch of Westpac), I personally spoke with one bank worker who had been given the day off by Westpac as a result of the blockade. Standing across the road observing the M1 Alliance-organised blockade, he was horrified by the unprovoked, violent police attack on peaceful protesters. "The only people who are angry with you are the owners of the building", he said to me. "The workers are all on your side."
As for the police, none of those I observed wrestling with protesters, or knocking down a 90-year-old man, seemed to be in any physical danger. On the contrary, the orders of their boss, Commander Dick Adams, and his boss — police minister and former Labor Council secretary Michael Costa — put large numbers of protesters and observers in immediate physical danger.
Lewis complains that M1 protesters "have 365 days to choose from, why take our's?" Neither Lewis nor the rest of his Labour Council mates proposed that anyone take any protest action on May 1, yet they claim this date as their exclusive property!
In Melbourne on May 1, tens of thousands of members of the militant Victorian branches of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, demonstrated alongside M1 activists blockading the immigration department offices. Does Lewis think all these unionists were "hijacking May Day"?
The truth is the movement for global justice has given new expression to the genuinely radical tradition of May Day, taking back a day that belongs to militant workers.
The brave actions of those who blockaded the Sydney headquarters of corporate giant Australasian Correctional Management — the company contracted to run Australia's refugee detention centres — were rightly given prominence in the international media alongside mass May Day mobilisations from Buenos Aires to Paris, Havana to Rome.
Why? Not because they "induced media attention on the threat of violence", as Lewis claims, but because they tapped into the best traditions of the Australian working class and workers the world over. They tapped into a sentiment of international workers' solidarity — solidarity with workers who have had to flee from persecution and economic misery and are detained behind behind razor wire in Australia, solidarity with Palestinian workers struggling to force colonial army out of their homeland and solidarity with the workers of the Third World, who are made to toil for a pittance to fatten the profits of the Australian and other Western corporations.
This may not be the "mainstream message" that Lewis would like the Packer and Murdoch families to hear from unionists, but it is far more in line with the real tradition that May Day has around the world than the Labor Council's politically tame, annual Sunday ritual.
[Nick Everett is a member of the Sydney M1 Alliance and the Democratic Socialist Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 8, 2002.
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