On May 1, 1886, over 300,000 workers went on strike for an eight-hour workday. To honor their bravery and that of every worker that has fought for their rights, May Day has since been officially declared International Workers’ Day in 66 countries.
This May Day, scores of workers deemed “essential,” including employees at Target, Amazon, Walmart, FedEx, Instacart and more, went on strike to demand better working conditions. At the same time, tenants across the country withheld May rent. Some renters entered their second month of striking: In April, one-third of renters nationwide did not pay their rent.
These strikes are just the beginning. COVID-19 and the lack of a coherent government response has instilled a furious class consciousness in the American working class. Despite the pandemic being far from over, some states are poised to reopen as soon as this week, forcing thousands of people to choose between going back to work and risking their lives or losing unemployment benefits.
Despite announcing an official count of over 1 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, the government has yet to announce any concrete plans to help millions of struggling Americans beyond a flawed, minimal stimulus check that many have yet to receive or will not receive at all. Calls for rent cancellations, free universal testing, cancellation of student loan debt and other aid programs alongside longer, stricter closures that have been implemented in other countries have been ignored for weeks, while the government continues to bail out Wall Street and mega corporations to the tune of several billion dollars.
The message is clear: the government doesn’t care about our lives as long as the wealthy keep making money. On May Day, workers and renters together presented an organized front whose message is even clearer: we will not die for your profits.
Class consciousness is the necessary first step to any kind of great change. The American government has never been suited to the interest of all the people over whom they claim authority. It has never listened to the people, and only serves to sit back and let the rich get richer while everyone else suffers as they try to scrape by. COVID-19 is no different. When people band together under the knowledge that our suffering is not our own fault, but is forced upon us by a government that would rather let the president tell us to inject bleach than shut down the country to stop the spread of a deadly virus, we wield great power.
There’s a reason the US is so afraid of unions and the power that organized workers have. Three days of dedicated strikes and protests won the eight-hour workday in 1886. The simple fact is billionaire CEOs are not the ones making their money. The workers they employ on minimum wage and in poor conditions are the ones that suffer so they can isolate in their sprawling estates with their families through the pandemic, never once putting their own lives on the line to put food on the table. They know that without us, they cannot survive.
When workers come together, we lift each other up. When we realize that it’s not our individual faults that we can’t seem to quite make enough to pay off student loans or move into a nicer apartment, we can work together to dismantle the systems keeping us down.
COVID-19 has revealed just how broken the systems are – to many people, this is the first time the wool has been pulled from their eyes. May Day was just the start of an uprising of people who know that their poor treatment is a deliberate choice and that they deserve better. We don’t have to sit and watch our friends and family suffer and die because states want to re-open in order to stop paying unemployment benefits.
We have the power to change things if we stand together as a united front. Happy May Day and may the spirit of every worker who has fought for change before us guide us forward.
Elliot Colloton is a sophomore sociology major and co-organizer of the Hofstra Student Workers Coalition.
