May Day in a Sinking Economy
We have come a long way since 1886 when police in Chicago’s Haymarket Square fired on people demonstrating in support of striking workers who were demanding eight-hour workdays. Many years have passed, and people around the world still commemorate May 1 as a day on which we celebrate the right of people to work and to do so with basic rights. But what does it mean to celebrate May Day in 2009? What does it mean to celebrate May Day during a deep recession or depression? What does it mean to celebrate May Day when so many people are losing their jobs?
According to the United States Department of Labor, the unemployment rate for the month of March is 8.5%, which is 3.4% higher than it was in March 2008. This is not just a trend pointing toward people losing their jobs: This is a hecatomb. 694,000 people losing their jobs in March and 13.2 million people unemployed are appalling numbers, and these numbers do not take into account undocumented and underemployed people—often those hit hardest by crises. So what do those numbers represent? They represent 694,000 families that will struggle, they represent 13.2 million people who are on the verge of becoming homeless, and they represent 8.5% of the workforce of this country that isn’t working.
So what will the future hold for all these families? We don’t know, but twice as many families become homeless in San Francisco every day, many more move into single-room occupancy hotels, many of these families are homeless for the very first times.
What, if any, of the stimulus package that all the politicians have been talking about will these families see? We don’t know, but the Mayor of San Francisco is still considering spending the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage money from the stimulus package—funds intended by the President to save endangered poor people’s social and health service programs—to offset less critical program cuts or for one-time expenditures.
How many more services that serve vulnerable populations in these dire times will we see disappear? We don’t know, but with a projected deficit for the City and County of San Francisco of $438 million, and massive cuts coming from the departments that fund most of the services that help vulnerable populations—the Human Services Agency and the Department of Public Health—the situation is gloomy at best.
But back to where we started: What does it mean, today, to celebrate the struggle of workers for basic rights? What does it mean when there is no work? What does it mean when a lot of the jobs we do are not recognized as real jobs? We are a generation, a people, a country of invisible workers, undocumented, underemployed, forgotten by statistics. But we can reclaim May Day as a day on which we want our voices to be heard, we want our people to be seen, we want our basic right to work to be respected.
Many of us will be marching on May 1, remembering the struggles of those who came before us. Many of us will march with and as immigrant workers to demand justice and legalization. Many of us will continue to fight for work to be a right of everybody. And when May 1, ends we will continue to fight and struggle.
Happy May Day! It still makes sense!
MatthiasMormino