May 1st, the rights and consciousness of the working class.

May 1st, International Workers' Day, will be celebrated virtually in our country this year, without street demonstrations and with shows and speeches held and broadcast via the internet due to the coronavirus pandemic, which is advancing and requires stricter social isolation.

The date originated under the sign of class struggle in 1889. It was an initiative of the Second Socialist International, an organization founded by the German philosopher Friedrich Engels, partner of Karl Marx, with labor leaders from different countries. Its objective was to unite workers worldwide in the common struggle against capitalist exploitation, for labor rights, and for a new, solidarity-based, and socialist society.

Chicago Martyrs

The choice of the day was a tribute to the strike launched by workers in Chicago, USA, on May 1, 1886. The strike spread throughout the country, involving hundreds of thousands of workers. In response, by order of the government, the police carried out a massacre against the strikers, killing, wounding, and arresting them en masse. 

This memorable battle of the working class has since earned a privileged place in the annals of universal history and in popular memory, in a reverence of social conscience for its strength and the bravery and heroism of its main leaders, the martyrs of Chicago, arrested, condemned and hanged by the bourgeois state. 

It is a glorious milestone in the fight for dignity and human rights.

The main demand of the strikers was a reduction in the work week to 8 hours. In the early days of capitalism, and in the US at the time, people worked more than 15 hours a day. This grueling and unhealthy work schedule sparked worker revolts worldwide, but capitalists never peacefully accepted the reduction in working hours desired by the working class.

Reduction of working hours

The Chicago workers did not achieve their goals immediately after the strike, but their struggle was not in vain; it illuminated the path, raised worker consciousness, and inspired new battles and great achievements. The ideal of the 8-hour workday became a global reality throughout the 20th century. 

The first treaty adopted by the International Labour Organization (ILO), in the year of its founding in 1919, already stipulated a limit of eight hours per day and 48 hours per week for work in industry. In Brazil, the 8-hour workday was established in 1932, and the 1988 Constitution limited the weekly working hours to 44. The labor movement is currently fighting for a 40-hour workweek.  

Initially restricted to a few countries, mostly European, May 1st gradually consolidated itself as a day of struggle for the 8-hour workday and celebration of social achievements, with demonstrations around the world. The exception is the USA, significantly the homeland of the Chicago martyrs, where the ruling classes never admitted the official recognition of the date as Labor Day, certainly with the futile intention of erasing from social memory the infamous conduct they displayed in the massacre.

In Brazil, the date was first celebrated in Santos in 1895. In 1925, May 1st was declared a holiday by President Artur Bernardes. 

Labour anda Employment

From the battles of the working class, fueled by May 1st throughout the history of capitalism, have sprung precious achievements for people all over the world and, especially, for Brazilians: regulation of working hours, paid weekly rest, vacations, 13th-month salary, profit-sharing, maternity leave, and many others. 

It was the class struggle that gave shape and content to Labor Law, in our case embodied in the Constitution and the CLT (Consolidation of Labor Laws). The labor and production relations regulated by legislation constitute, as many jurists note, a civilizational advance, restricting exploitation and injustices underlying the relationships between human beings in the capitalist production process and minimizing the effects of asymmetries between capital and labor.

Capitalism – whose miserable foundation, as Marx said, is the theft of other people's labor, surplus value – has always been hostile to labor legislation since the first workers' demonstrations for the regulation of working hours in England. This legislation was forged, despite the hysterical reaction of the bourgeoisie, in the heat of the class struggle of wage earners and generally written in less adverse political scenarios, with a correlation of forces and economic conditions more favorable to workers. 

Crisis of capitalism

Today the world is immersed in a general crisis of the global capitalist order led by the USA. Neoliberalism, which gained strength in the late 1970s in the face of the crisis of the so-called Welfare State, has been the financial bourgeoisie's response to the crisis. It is a policy aimed at destroying labor law, public pensions, welfare, and social security; an offensive against the working class that has no parallel in history.

Anti-worker policies are associated with the appropriation and use of new technologies by capitalists in order to circumvent legislation, so far with the complicity of the Judiciary in Brazil, and to maximize the exploitation of workers. 

This is the case for drivers and delivery workers for Uber and other apps, who work unhealthy hours exceeding 15 hours a day and are outside the rights and guarantees enshrined in the CLT (Brazilian Labor Law) and the Constitution. In these situations, labor law no longer exists, and production relations regress to the era when the capitalist system was taking its first steps.

According to IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), the number of workers subjected to these abject conditions in Brazil rose to 13,7 million at the end of last year. Business owners in this sector, increasingly prosperous, recruit this mass of semi-slaves, whom they exploit with extreme cruelty, from the formidable army of unemployed and underemployed people amplified by the neoliberal fundamentalism of Bolsonaro and Paulo Guedes.    

Ideological war

While advancing in its undertaking to destroy labor law, the ruling class unleashes a veritable ideological war aimed at obscuring workers' consciousness and confusing class identity, relying on the services of its loyal and insidious bourgeois media. 

Instead of employees (a word that reveals the worker's subjugation to the boss), the slaves of capital are now called partners, collaborators, or entrepreneurs (like drivers and delivery workers exploited by app owners). But bourgeois ideology, however strong, cannot replace reality and will not indefinitely prevent the awakening of class consciousness.

On this May 1st, workers in Brazil and throughout the world have extraordinary reasons to keep the powerful flame of class struggle burning, to spread the values ​​of solidarity, to halt the ongoing regression and preserve civilizational progress, to strengthen their unions, to remember and pay homage to the Chicago workers, to demand a reduction in working hours, and to temper their spirits for the centuries-old struggle that gave rise to this date in defense of labor rights, against capitalist exploitation, and for socialism.

In this time of pandemic and economic crisis, May 1st in Brazil is also a resounding cry in defense of life, health, the value of work, national sovereignty, and democracy, summarized in one slogan: Bolsonaro Out.