The past couple of weeks have been something of a roller-coaster for National Nurses United and it all culminates this Friday morning with the first major march and rally in what is expected to be a weekend of protest in Chicago. But it was a fight to get even there. Last Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his administration announced that the National Nurses United (NNU) protest against austerity measures that benefit NATO, the G8, and other elites would not be allowed to end its May 18 rally in Daley Plaza. The anti-NATO-G8 protest—billed as “a rally to tax Wall Street and heal America” — will likely draw thousands into the Loop on a workday afternoon and, as such, was threatened to be marginalized to Grant Park’s Butler field, according to NNU organizers.

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Have the Haymarket Martyrs gotten their due?

May Day has now come and gone. The big marches and the spontaneous protests and the insurrections of “Real Labor Day” are more than a week old now. But that does not mean that the struggles of working people are over… not in the least.

What began as a day to remember an American tragedy and travesty morphed into an international day of action largely ignored in the United States. Until recently, May Day was marked mostly by old Marxists. Latino immigrant rights groups took it up in recent years, turning May Day into a rallying day for the Dream Act, an end to repression and deportations, equal treatment under the law, labor rights and recognition, and other causes. This year, Latinos were joined by the Occupy movement and organized labor in a major way around the country. It looks like May Day is back in a real and powerful way.

During my first year at Hampshire College, Professor Eqbal Ahmad told his story of coming from Pakistan to the United States as a young man and searching all over Chicago for the memorial to the people killed at Haymarket Square in 1886.

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"The Scream" on auction at Sotheby's, via The Fiscal Times.

Amidst a crowd of protesters and oversized signs, Pat Walsh shouted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting?”

At a glance, Walsh, a woman with well-kept gray hair and an open smile, didn’t strike one as the usual angry protester. But that night, Walsh was fighting.

“My husband, John, has been locked out from Sotheby’s,” says Walsh. “He’s been a worker for 30 years. I’m here to fight for him.” Currently, the couple lives on the money and benefits from her part-time job at Hunter College.

On July 29 of last year, 42 art handlers at Sotheby’s Auction House were locked out after the expiration of a three-year contract. The art handlers, members of Local 814 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, have been without jobs, paychecks or benefits for almost nine months.

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There are over 200,000 migrant domestic workers living in Lebanon today — a large number when you considered that Lebanon’s population is only a little over 4 million. Most migrant workers live with their Lebanese employers, cleaning their houses, washing their clothes, cooking their food and looking after their children. Yet these workers are not included under Lebanon’s labor laws — they are not entitled to basic rights such as minimum wages, maximum working hours, and holiday or sick pay. Many never get a day off. Those that do are often not even allowed to leave their employers’ houses.

The suicide last month of Ethiopian domestic worker and mother of two Alem Dechasa, who was publicly beaten in front of the Ethiopian embassy she had been trying to escape to for help, caused a wave of outrage around the globe after a film of the beating was circulated. But hers is by no means an isolated case.
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From StrikeEverywhere.net's "Efforts of the General Strike Public Redecoration Committee."

“So are we in solidarity with each other, or are we united?”

This question came up yet again on Monday night, at the final coalition meeting for May Day that included people from organized labor, immigrants’ groups and Occupy Wall Street. It came in the midst of a debate about whether or not we should designate separate zones for various coalition partners during our joint evening march. Trying to mash everyone into one giant group might create a sense of unity, but then the groups’ individual needs might not be met. Occupiers whispered to each other about how the lack of a defined OWS zone would mean the unions would end up marshalling our contingent. In the end, everyone agreed that separate zones were most appropriate; true solidarity with one another meant recognizing our diverse methods of organizing and tactics for resistance.

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• Tens of thousands of Czechs staged one of the biggest protests since the fall of Communism on Saturday, marching in Prague against spending cuts, tax rises and corruption, and calling for the end of a center-right government already close to collapse.

• On Sunday, 150 Palestinian prisoners joined with 1,200 others being held in Israeli jails who started an open-ended hunger strike on Tuesday to protest the conditions in which they are being held.

• In Montreal, 89 people were arrested Saturday after trying to disrupt the second day of a conference on the development of northern Quebec.

• Tens of thousands of Egyptians demanded on Friday that their military rulers stick to a pledge to hand over power by mid-year after a row over who can run in the presidential election raised doubts about the army’s commitment to democracy.

• In Bahrain, tens of thousands people marched along a motorway from Budaiya, an area to the west of the capital, Manama, on Friday to demand an end to the crackdown on dissent, ahead of the Formula 1 Grand Prix on Sunday.

• Thousands demonstrated in the Rome on Friday to protest government plans to introduce legislation that will make it easier for companies to sack employees.

• Less than 24 hours after their release, University of Texas students arrested after staging a sit-in at President Powers’ office gathered with supporters Thursday on the steps of the UT Tower to continue in their campaign against sweatshop labor.

• Tens of thousands of teachers, doctors, police officers and other public workers went on strike on Wednesday in Slovenia over proposed pay cuts under austerity measures to rein in the euro-zone member’s budget deficit.

The manager of a Hot and Crusty bakery on New York’s Upper East Side watched through the window as a handful of workers speaking broken English passed out fliers to customers inside. Across the street, a private detective in a shiny black SUV surveyed the scene as potential customers and well-dressed women scanned the quarter-sheets detailing the chain restaurant’s abuses: below-minimum-wage paychecks, threats of cutting hours, refusal to negotiate with the workers for safer conditions. (Other violations were left off, including multiple accounts of sexual harassment.) One of the workers exiting the restaurant flashed those flyering a discrete thumbs-up.

The workers were from another branch of the chain bakery 20 blocks south, where they launched a successful organizing campaign with the help of the Laundry Workers Center. Now, as they continued to push for negotiations, the team was expanding to other restaurants to put pressure on the owners.

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Poster by Nina Montenegro, via Occuprint.

An Occupy Wall Street organizer I know — one of the original ones, from the planning meetings before the occupation began last September 17 — has a striking banner atop his Facebook Timeline. It’s from the History Channel series Life After People, an artist’s rendition of a cityscape after which all the humans in it somehow disappear. It’s quiet, and still, with trees growing out from the sides of crumbling towers.

To say that this image has anything to do with the movement’s plans for May 1, which the person who posted it is involved in making, might cause both paranoid-style right-wing radio hosts and the most anarcho- of primitivists to froth a bit at the mouth. And so they should. Ever since the idea of working toward May Day started catching on in Occupy Wall Street last January, it has been infused with the impulse of creating the vision of a radically different kind of city.

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• Trayvon Martin protesters on Monday blocked the front doors of the Sanford Police Department in Florida for nearly five hours but walked away peacefully after convincing city officials to hold a community forum.

• In Tunisia, police fired tear gas Monday to disperse a rally of hundreds on a central Tunis avenue where demonstrations are banned.

• Pilots for Spanish airline Iberia, part of International Airlines Group, went on strike on Monday, grounding 150 flights in the first of 30 one-day strikes to protest against the start-up of low-cost carrier Iberia Express.

• Egyptian train drivers staged a sit-in in Cairo’s Ramses Train Station on Monday, bringing rail traffic across the country to a halt for more than seven hours, to demand an additional allowance for working on Saturdays, bonus increases and risk allowances.

• Opposition supporters wearing white ribbons walked in a circle during a Red Square protest against the rule of Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Sunday. At least three activists were arrested after pitching a tent near Lenin’s Mausoleum.

• Thousands of Shiite Muslims from Islamabad and Rawalpindi on Sunday participated in a sit-in outside the parliament to protest the killings of Shiite Muslims in Pakistan and government crackdown against the innocent people of Gilgit City.

• Bahraini security forces fired tear gas and water cannons at thousands of protesters marching Friday in support of a jailed human rights activist whose nearly two-month hunger strike has become a powerful rallying point for the tiny nation’s Shiite-led uprising against the Sunni monarchy.

• On Friday, police in India dispersed protesters who staged a sit-in protest against the gang-rape of a woman.

A march in Madrid during the general strike, via the FotogrAccion collective.

Last Thursday, people across Spain made a show of force in a general strike, at a scale ranging from the government estimate of 800,000 to the 4 million claimed by the unions. It was timed to challenge new reforms that are expected to make it easier for employers to fire workers, dealing a blow to organized labor.

The 15M movement, which began with occupations in the central squares of cities around the country last year, played an important role in the strike’s success. Despite ongoing conflicts between the largest unions and 15M, several weeks ago the movement’s key organizations — including neighborhood assemblies, Democracia Real Ya, Yo No Pago and the Platform of People Affected by the Mortgage (PAH) — announced their support for the general strike and started working to make it a success.

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