Remarks of Tom Cronin

May Day is a day to celebrate solidarity and the great traditions of the workers’ movement.  Having said that, it is important to point out that the last ten or twenty years haven’t been great ones for working people or for Unions.  Not in the United States.

We are split into rival Federations.

Our numbers and influence have eroded.

Strike activity is at a historic low.

Laws give bosses a free hand to intimidate employees and thwart organizing campaigns.

The fact that a company like Wal-Mart remains unorganized is outrageous.  It tells you what employers are getting way with in America.

So, with a liberal President, Democratic majorities in both houses the question is, has our time arrived?

The Patriot Act still stands.  The President says he is committed to sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.  Plans to construct a “missile shield” in Eastern Europe continue to go forward.  The banks are handed 700 billion dollars, tax dollars, which they sit on, and with no regulations to prevent them from engaging in the same practices that brought the economy to its knees.  And now it turns out the Administration has no stomach for investigating torture.

So, you tell me.

If our time arrived it seems to have gone away rather quickly. Instead of euphoria and relief we find ourselves in a period that is confusing, difficult and scary.  It is a period many people compare to the 30s.  And that is a valid comparison.

Words like crash, panic and depression are as much about how people feel and they are about numbers.  After the stock market crashed in 1929 this country experienced something like a historical anxiety attack. Consumer spending contracted by 10% in 1930.  By the summer of 1932 one out of every four workers were jobless.

Then something happened.  People got tired of being pushed around. They got sick of watching their friends and neighbors get fired, evicted or stand in bread lines.  Their fear hardened into anger.  Between 1926 and 1939 Union membership more than doubled.  Rank and File militants organized one industry after another and compelled the most notorious open shop employers to negotiate contracts.  And while that was going on, the Federal Government created the National Labor Relations Board, set maximum hours and minimum wage standards, created the WPA and passed Social Security.

In essence the Roosevelt Administration went along for the CIO ride.

Today we ask the Democrats to pass a law to help workers and then we sit back and wait, and wait and wait. 

Compare that with what happens in Europe.  Right now, for instance, there are employers in American who are totally profitable and still cutting jobs.  One, to keep their dividends up, and two, because they can get away with it.

At Caterpillar, a 51 billion dollar company, management last year announced it was laying off 20,000 people.  Its’ President makes 280,000 dollars per week.  Some of those layoffs were at the Caterpillar plant in France. 

Do you what they did in France?

Several hundred workers held four Caterpillar managers hostage until the police came to release them.  In America you have a hard time getting members to a meeting on their own contract, let alone mobilize hundreds for a job action.  European workers understand themselves to be a class whose political interests are separate from and opposed to those of the class that owns and manages.

In America, we choose to see ourselves as individuals and consumers until the morning we are escorted to the door, pink slip in hand.

Every other industrial country offers its’ citizens some of national health insurance.  We offer you fleets, missile shields and control of Afghanistan. 

What a con job.

Millions can no longer retire and tens of millions live one medical mishap away from financial catastrophe.  None of this is going to change because the Democrats control Congress or because the President holds progressive positions on certain policy questions.  What counts is whether or not the people get organized to take back control of their jobs and their lives.  We have been going backward.  We need to move forward and to do that we have to move together.

That is the message on May Day 2009.

Last December workers in a window factory in Chicago were told on a Tuesday that Friday was their last day.  No severance, no nothing, blatantly illegal. They occupied the plant and successfully negotiated for the two months severance and health insurance required under law.  Rank and File UE militants lead that action.  What that tells me is that there are already a lot of people in this country who feel they have nothing left to lose by taking on this system.

Labor will move again.

Union membership is up for the first time in years.

And as we move, as we gather strength, we need to make it clear to the Administration that we have an agenda. Our agenda is not wall street’s agenda.  It is not the Pentagon’s agenda.  Our agenda is about single payer health insurance for every person in this country.  It is about the right organize and bargain collectively.  It is about an end to imperialist wars and pouring trillions down the rat hole of military expenditure.  It is about using our country’s wealth to ensure a life with dignity and decency for everyone.

My friends, we can rely on one but ourselves to make that agenda a reality.

Thank you.