Home ›› 01 May 2023 ›› Editorial
The historic May Day is being observed today throughout the country and elsewhere in the world as a mark of respect to workers, who shed their blood for the establishment of the rights of the working class in 1886. On this day 131 years ago, the workers of the Hay Market of Chicago City, U.S.A sacrificed their lives for ensuring eight hour working day for them. Since then, the day is observed all over the world as the day of solidarity with working people. If you see a history of May Day in the newspapers this year, it is most likely to recount the mystical, medieval origins of a pagan fertility festival.
And though you may never have seen a maypole in your life, you will be assured that a ribboned piece of birchwood is the sign and sanction of May Day. Yet this has little to do with the reason that 1 May is celebrated in Britain, or why it is an international holiday, or why the Occupy movement is planning global disruption today. May Day is international workers day. As such, it is in the words of Eric Hobsbawm the only unquestionable dent made by a secular movement in the Christian or any other official calendar. And its past is more rowdy than is suggested by the imagery of Morris dancers serenely waving hankies and bells around. The origin of our present holiday lies in the fight for an eight-hour working day, in which cause the leaders of the socialist Second International called for an international day of protest to be held at the beginning of May 1890. They did so just as the American Federation of Labour was planning its own demonstration on the same date. Initially, May Day was intended to be a one-off protest, and in some ways quite a solemn affair.
But it persisted amid a flourishing of trade unionism. The symbolism of the workers Easter, of rebirth and renewal, dramatised this experience of revival. And it developed a carnivalesque aspect. May Day did not merely enact internationalism and working class solidarity. The leaderships of Europe's growing socialist parties were often worried by the threat of repression coming from governments and businesses, and attempted to avoid excessively confrontational demonstrations. But such domesticating tendencies were counteracted by the severity of the social crisis sweeping Europe and the upheavals it produced. Even during the first world war, when protest was punishable by imprisonment and hard labour, May Day demonstrations were often flashpoints of anti-war struggle. European governments alternately preferred repression or co-option of May Day after the first world war. The traditional parties of the right tended to prefer repression, or the threat of repression. For them, regarding the jubilant May Days in revolutionary Russia with unease, the whole thing stank of treason. Fascist parties had a more ambivalent attitude, largely because unlike the traditional right they needed the support of a layer of workers. The Third Reich declared 1 May a national workers day in 1933. But the original meaning of May Day reappeared at the darkest moments of the Nazi era, as when it was celebrated in the Warsaw ghetto which launched an uprising against the regime. Fascist Italy abolished May Day, expunging the radical working class traditions it embodied, but it also introduced a labour holiday on 21 April. Franco, who arguably waged the most vicious military struggle against the left in Spain, and who wiped out 200,000 in executions and concentration camps in the five years after his victory, simply outlawed May Day.
It was not celebrated again until his downfall in 1975. May Day returned as a militant, if convivial, protest in the UK in 2000, due to the convergence of a broad coalition of activists under the rubric of anticapitalism. The combination of seriousness with playful exuberance was arguably in the best traditions of May Day, even if some statues were briefly defiled. The response of police, which was to develop and refine the technique of kettling over a number of years, was traditional in a less august sense.This impression on the international calendar was made by workers without the blessing of governments, and the evidence of history suggests that it can survive far worse interdictions. The fact that Occupy has now selected 1 May as the moment for another offensive attests to the enduring relevance of May Day as international workers day. The workers of this 20 billion dollar industry are responsible for 80 percent of our foreign reserves every year. With a meagre salary of 5,300 taka or US 67 dollars, our workers have ensured that the name of Bangladesh is recognised all over the world. It's the workers who attract customers and traders of the international market to Bangladesh; it's the clothes sewn by them that are worn by consumers in America and Europe; it's their labour that is recognised as cheap all over the world. And yet, despite 100 years after the founding of May Day, these workers are forced to work for up to 12 to 14 hours a day. They have to depend on overtime to sustain their livelihood. Most of the time, they do not even get to enjoy weekends or national holidays. With the advent and development of this new industry, women workers have emerged as a new workforce. But their woes continue.
Now they are being exploited both at home and outside. They do not have access to maternity leave and maternal care. These women workers often fall victim to sexual harassment. They also suffer from malnutrition and disease due to the unhealthy work conditions of most of the factories.
The ILO was established in 1919 to promote social justice for working class everywhere. It formulates international policies and programmes to help improve working and living condition, creates international labour standards to serve as guidelines for national authorities in putting those policies in action. The problems of labour and consciousness about labour rights did not come over night. In fact, the history is as old as civilization. At the beginning, everyone worked with one's own hands. The society came to divide between the rich and poor representing the exploiter and the exploited. The exploited humanity gradually turned into slaves.They were put to hard labour and labour looked down upon. At one stage slavery was formally abolished, but vestiges remain. The dignity of labour is yet to be fully restored.
The labour movement has a proud heritage in Bangladesh. The country is a signatory to the ILO convention and has a number of legislations for labour welfare. The government is also keen on improving lot of working class and their concern extends even to spheres, where the labour is not organized. Self-styled labour leaders particularly after the emergence of Bangladesh have sprung up only for the lip service of the labour force. Last year tens of thousands of others took to the streets elsewhere across the country too, drawing attention to a wide range of issues dominated by the war in Ukraine, the rising cost of living, workers rights, rental controls and plans to invest heavily in the German military.
While most of these have been achieved in the more advanced economies of the world, our workers hopes to those very rights remain unrealised. Unfortunately, workers in the biggest segment of our economy, the readymade garments are still struggling for the right to unionise so that they may press home their right to work in a safe environment free of harassment and unlawful termination, and the right to due wage and festival bonuses. We look at the millions of our expatriate workers who brave seemingly insurmountable odds to reach foreign labour markets, only to find that they have been cheated out of a fair wage and face terrible human rights violations. Closer to home, the Domestic Workers Protection Welfare Policy 2015 was supposed to end domestic violence against household help but that has not happened. This is more or less representative of other sectors, both formal and informal. Until we learn to respect workers as human beings who toil in our factories and our homes, there can be no meaningful change.
The writer is a researcher based in the UK. He can be contacted at raihan567@yahoo.com
