MAY DAY 2020

Today is May Day – Day of International Working-Class Unity and Struggle.
This year May Day will be different in the way in which workers celebrate it. But its significance is not diminished.
Celebrations in the form a mass gatherings, marches and rallies are suspended by the global pandemic threat created by the COVID-19 virus with deadly effect and the responses to it.
However, the effects of those measures on the livelihood of huge numbers of workers and working people by job losses, non-payment of salaries and wages and other onslaught on their living conditions, demonstrate the necessity for their solidarity and organisation in their fight to protect and advance their interests.
The representatives of big business interests are also seizing the opportunity to advance demands to roll back the gains won by the workers in their struggle for political, economic, trade union, social and other rights.
Recently, in T&T, under the guise of protecting individual rights, business spokesmen have renewed their call to curtail trade union rights won by huge sacrifices since the days of 1937 Butler Riots.
Imagine those, who routinely dismiss minimum wage workers at the first hint of their interest in organising for union membership, piously claiming to respect and defend workers’ Constitutional freedom of association.
They claim that compensation awards to workers by the Industrial Court are ‘crippling businesses’ but say nothing about the savagery of their attacks on the workers which drive them to seek redress in the first place.
Now, those who continue to collect huge contract fees and rents from the state and even are awarded new contracts while workers suffer loss of jobs and incomes, hypocritically demand protection from ‘retrospective profiteering’ by workers and their unions out of the lockdown and measures like lay-offs without even payment of wages already earned.
Hiding behind false concerns for the “community and national interests” this minority which extracts maximum profit from the exploitation of the workers’ labour that their businesses are being “crippled by excessive” awards to workers for harsh and oppressive industrial relations abuses.
They claim pious conversion to concern for individual Constitutional Rights of workers, while being the minority who benefit most from their ownership and control of the economic resources of society. Conveniently, they also ignore the words of the very Constitution which purports respect for social justice and that the economic system that should result in the “material resources” being used to “subserve the common good”.
Their real demand is for Private Right of the 1% monopoly interests over the Public Right of the majority of the society.
The workers all over the world must remain vigilant and resolute in the fight for their historical role to create the genuine New in which they decide the direction of the economy, guarantee the rights of all, protect and improve the natural and social environments and determine a future in favour of public right versus private right, in favour of peace and not war and in favour of freedom and not exploitation and oppression.
Emerging out of the COVID response, the workers must step up their efforts to unite, organise and engage in actions to defend and advance their Rights and to advance the aims of May Day.

Clyde Weatherhead
A Citizen Fighting for
Democratic Renewal
of Our Society
1 May 2020
 
 

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