Black NJ says: May 1st—Justicia Ahora!!!

"We don't just demand jobs for all," People's Organization for Progress chairman Lawrence Hamm proclaimed, "Slavery had a JOBS for ALL plan! We demand jobs at a living wage, good union wages that will allow us to educate our children. We demand jobs that won't require us to hold three or four separate ones at the same time just so we can buy shoes for our babies!!!"

In the wake of Arizona's racist new anti-immigrant law (SB 1070) which requires local police to stop and question anyone they may suspect of being born outside the U.S., and further obliges anyone who might be questioned to carry papers to prove their status, the battle against this apartheid-like ruling has drawn the line for May Day marches. Latina/o and other immigrant workers, immigrants' rights advocates, and the labor movement in general planned major May 1st rallies in immigrant population-centers across the country. Not since the massive, multi million-strong immigration rights rallies of 2006, has the International Workers Holiday been celebrated with huge rallies in so many locations.

The New York-New Jersey metropolitan area hosts many massive immigrant communities, so it ought to be no surprise that NYC and Brooklyn, as well as Trenton, Newark, and Morristown all had multiple rallies May 1st. Newark's wasn't among the largest, but the working people in attendance may have been among the most motivated.

May Day originated in Chicago during the struggle for the eight-hour day in 1886. That first May Day saw more than 300,000 U.S. workers walk off their jobs in over 13,000 businesses. May Day has, from the first, been associated with immigrant rights and the struggle of Black workers as well as "simple" labor-economic demands. The bulk of marchers in that first May Day were foreign-born workers and relocated former-slaves looking for labor-justice during the "Long-Depression" (1873-96) following the Civil War.

While the actual history of May Day may be of limited academic interest, it becomes truly important as U.S. workers develop the understanding necessary to fight the modern 21-century fascism of the "tea-party" movement. As POP's Larry Hamm pointed out, no worker is illegal to the mortgage companies who scam us into "loser-loans" that big bankers then speculate on, and no social-security card is required by employers if they can use the threat of our status (or lack of status) as a wedge to keep us from uniting to fight in our own collective interests.

Union members from the Laborers International Union (LIUNA), the CWA, the International Longshoremen's Association, the IBEW, and other labor organizations joined the rally. Soulful music and incisive speakers prepared the crowd of more than 100 to plan ahead, build the growing movement, organize future actions and take the next steps. Newark mayoral candidate Mirna White spoke (in English and Spanish) about the city's responsibility to its citizens. Ms. White didn't condescend, patronize or speak-down to the foreign-born demonstrators (as current mayor "Hollywood" Booker often seems to do), and I was impressed.

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A May Day Treat

As blogged below, the action tomorrow, in the U.S. anyhow, is going to be the continuing battle of immigrant workers. While you're waiting (I hope) to take part, here are a poster and a photo from earlier May Days to get your blood pumping.

They are courtesy of Izquerdia PuntoInfo, the online daily of an Argentinian Trotskyist outfit whose staff has assembled a eclectic, heartening and non-sectarian collection of May Day posters and photos here.

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A May Day Surprise?

Tomorrow is May Day, the international working class holiday. Last year this global celebration saw its most important observation in the United States since the 19th century. Millions of immigrant workers left their jobs, closing down tens of thousands of workplaces, joined by students who left empty schools across the country. May Day, 2006 was part of the great levantimiento of last spring. The outpouring of immigrant workers demanding justice and recognition totally blindsided the US ruling class and the mainstream media.

I rather expect that's going to happen all over again tomorrow. My friend John, who works as a building contractor in Wisconsin, wrote me last week:

I just had a contractor call me and tell me he would not be working May 1 on one of my jobs-- because he was joining the walkout that day. (It was a hesitant..."I don't know if you're aware of the walkout that day...")

I told him I was, and was planning to be there, too.

What are you hearing?


[crossposted at DailyKos, where there are a couple interesting comments about Arizona]

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In NYC, It's Not Fear of Immigrants...

In reading Jimmy Higgins' earlier post here on anti-immigrant sentiment and the danger of nativism--and the interesting responses--something struck me sharply. Living for my whole life in New York City, it’s hard for me to analyze or even relate to the fear and loathing of immigrants that grips some parts of the U.S. What we in NYC fear is somewhat different, and was clarified for me by a conversation with a cousin at a recent family gathering.

My cousin, whom I’ll call Tony, has a semi-skilled job with a telecommunications company and recently moved with his wife and kids from Staten Island to a New Jersey suburb. Tony’s widowed mother, now about 70, had made her global proletarian passage from a small town near Naples to the industrial Red Belt of Bologna to a textile factory in Scotland to a laundry in Staten Island—where she met and married my late uncle, and still lives.

“I don’t feel good about where my mother lives,” Tony was telling me. His mother is in the house that had been my paternal grandmother’s, across the street from a city bus depot in a racially mixed poor and working class neighborhood. Though not an activist or a self-identified progressive, Tony is married to a woman of part-African descent who looks like a person of color (as do their kids), and he is sensitized to racial stereotyping on a gut level. He groped for words to articulate his concern about his mother’s neighborhood. “There’s too many people who—I don’t know what’s the right way to put it—lowlifes, people who don’t work.”

“People who don’t work” really captured for me what many folks in New York City fear. People who don’t follow the rules of civil behavior because they have no stake in keeping it together and getting ahead, in getting up in the morning and functioning. People who will turn a little brush or disagreement into a big fight because they have nothing better to do and no other way of feeling effective or gauging their impact on the world. People who leave their garbage in the hallway because they’ve given up on taking any pride or pleasure in how their surroundings look. People who might mess with your elderly widowed mother or throw garbage in her yard just for the hell of it….

Now, often the expression of fear and loathing of people who don’t work can be white people’s code for dumping on Black and Puerto Rican people, or a way of simply blaming the victim and ignoring the historical and structural economic dynamics that cut off some racially and nationally oppressed peoples from stable jobs, viable home mortgages, etc. But it’s not always that, or only that. And it’s not expressed only by white people.

I remember about eight years ago when I was working in a second chance high school for older teens, counseling one African American young woman who was very proud and happy that she was holding a part-time job. With no parents around, she was living in the projects with her grandmother and also with two uncles who were dealing drugs. Their apartment had recently been raided at 6 a.m. by a SWAT team who put 9 mm pistols to everybody’s head and asked where the drugs were. My student, with help from nobody that I could tell, had gotten her self back into school and found a job. Looking toward the future, she said, “ I just wanna come home at night and have to ask what was on Jerry Springer--‘cause I was working all day.”

For many working class people, especially those with the least economically secure lives, the contempt for people who don’t work is fueled by the terror of what you know could happen to you if you lose your grip and can’t make it into work—and could happen very quickly.

All of which goes to say that in New York City, most people seems to know that most immigrants work their butts off for very little money and came here because they do want to get ahead. And therefore, from what I can tell, there is very little of the classic anti-immigrant hysteria, but a lot of fear and loathing of people who don’t work.

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