May Day – The International Day of Struggle by the Workers

It is the workers, the youth and humankind that must be saved! Not the banks and the capitalists!

May 1st, 2020 — International rally: Three hours for the Workers’ International

Humankind has been plunged into an unprecedented crisis.

People are not dying from Covid-19, they are dying from a policy! All of the world’s capitalist governments are responsible for the policy of privatisation/ destruction of healthcare systems, scientific research and social welfare systems! Those governments are responsible for the 100,000 and more deaths to date, and for the disaster that is threatening humankind.

They are responsible for the dramatic conditions in which they organised the lockdown, denying it to those whom they are forcing to work without protection in order to guarantee capitalist profits, while workers and families “on lockdown”, especially the hundreds of millions who are part of the “informal sector”, are today facing the threat of hunger as well as the virus.

The ravages of the epidemic are combining with the consequences of the crisis of the capitalist system: tens of millions of jobs have been destroyed in the space of a few weeks, and we are being told that many more will be destroyed in the future, throwing workers and their families into job insecurity and poverty.

But all the capitalist governments do not care about that! As far as they are concerned, the only urgent issue is to “save the economy”, in other words the banks and the big capitalist corporations. The “bailout programmes” being announced are smashing the records set in 2008. That fact is that in many cases, these programmes have been approved with the support of parties that claim to stand for the working class.

During the crisis, while hospitals are lacking everything and hunger is threatening millions of people “on lockdown”, the military industry continues to run at full capacity, and the U.S. administration is taking advantage of the situation to strangle Iran, Venezuela and Palestine a little more.

And they are not stopping there: all of the capitalist governments are taking advantage of the crisis to ramp up their attacks on labour gains and democratic rights.

Every single labour gain is in the governments’ sights!

In India, the Modi government – which for months has been trying to use its discriminatory laws to divide the population on religious grounds – has just announced that it aims to introduce a 12-hour working day, challenging the Factory Act of 1948, which set an 8-hour working day.

In France, the Macron government – whose pensions reform provoked the most powerful workers’ strike action for 25 years – has used executive orders to introduce the possibility of increasing the working week to 60 hours in some sectors.

Such attacks are being carried out in each country. They want to turn the clock back for us by more than 100 years!

But the workers are not accepting this, because they want to live and survive. To the attempt to make them risk their lives to work, the workers have responded with strike-waves, and from the United States to Italy, they are saying: “We will not be cannon fodder!”

The workers have no other choice but to reject the calls for “national unity” between the exploiters and the exploited!

May Day means the struggle for the 8-hour working day and labour rights!

The International Workers Committee Against War and Exploitation, For a Workers’ International is issuing a call to the workers, to the youth, to the activists of all political tendencies of the labour movement:

• May Day means the international day of struggle by the workers!
• May Day means the struggle against war and exploitation, for a Workers’ International!
• May Day originally meant the struggle to impose the 8-hour working day, which today the governments and the bosses want to take away from us!

On 1 May 2020, the International Workers Committee Against War and Exploitation, For a Workers’ International is organising an

 

International rally: Three hours for the Workers’ International

“It is the workers, the youth and humankind that must be saved: not the banks and the capitalists!”

On that day, from New York to Mumbai, from Gaza to Paris, from Johannesburg to Beijing, from Moscow to Santiago de Chile, despite the disease and the blows that are raining down on the workers, despite the lockdown measures, we will rally together under one banner and for one cause:

➢ Requisition the billions from the banks and capital, and save the sick and the hospitals!

➢ Requisition the billions from war and ensure that everyone has enough to eat and somewhere to live!

➢ Requisition all the “bank rescue plans” for the benefit of the workers and their families!

➢ Unity of the workers against the anti-working-class measures of the governments that are taking advantage of the crisis!

➢ Maintain the 8-hour working day and all labour and democratic gains!

Daniel Gluckstein and Nambiath Vasudevan, Coordinators of the IWC

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Taking into account the confinement measures, this rally will be posted “online”.

To attend the rally, go to the IWC website: https://coi-iwc.org

To watch the rally in English and live:

• At 9:00 a.m. in Mumbai and all over India, and 9:30 a.m. in Dhaka
• At 8:00 a.m. in Kabul, 8:30 a.m. in Islamabad, 11:30 a.m. in Beijing, Manila and Irkutsk
• At 12:30 p.m. in Seoul and Tokyo, 1:30 p.m. in Sydney

To watch the rally in English, French & Spanish:

• At 9:00 a.m. on Friday, May 1st, on the West Coast of the United States
• At 11:00 a.m. in Mexico City, Lima
• At noon in Port-au-Prince, New York, Montreal, Santiago de Chile
• At 1 p.m. in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo
• At 4 p.m. in Rabat, Dakar, Ouagadougou
• At 5 p.m. in London, Dublin, Lisbon, Algiers, Tunis and Cotonou
• At 6 p.m. in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Rome, Geneva and Budapest
• At 7 p.m. in Bucharest, Athens, Istanbul, Moscow, Ramallah