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Currently viewing articles tagged with May Day.
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Unions and the crisis
The political and economic setting facing the union movement today is the most difficult since the Great Depression. Unions have already confronted two decades of unrelenting assault from neoliberal policies of labour-market flexibility, austerity and political conservatism. Then, the global financial crisis ripped across the entire world market. Many forecasts for 2009 are projecting negative growth for the world economy as a whole for the first time since the 1930s.
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Tony Clarke’s remarks at Canadian Dimension May Day Dinner
Tony Clarke and Maude Barlow, joint recipients of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award were honoured at the May Day, 2006 Ottawa Annual Benefit Dinner for Canadian Dimension. Here is the text of Tony’s remarks on that occasion
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What You Need To Know About May Day
For more than 100 years, May Day has symbolized the common struggles of workers around the globe.
The seeds were sown in the campaign for the eight-hour workday. On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of North American workers mobilized to strike. In Chicago, the demonstration spilled over into support for workers at a major farm-implements factory who’d been locked out for union activities. On May 3, during a pitched battle between picketers and scabs, police shot two workers. At a protest rally in Haymarket Square the next day, a bomb was tossed into the police ranks and police directed their fire indiscriminately at the crowd. Eight anarchist leaders were arrested, tried and sentenced to death (three were later pardoned).
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Demanding More Than Democracy
Over a million people filled the streets along the historic route of Mexican social protest on May Day—marching from the Angel of Independence to the Zocalo, and then filling the enormous square at the city’s centre. This was the largest demonstration in the city’s history, a great peaceful outpouring crying out, not just for formal democracy at the ballot box, but for more. The multitude demanded true choice in the country’s coming national elections, but they wanted more than that, too. People took to the streets to demand a basic change in their country’s direction.
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