[Reader-list] May Day Greetings

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear all on the Readers List

Today being May Day, International Labour day, some of us at Sarai decided to 
have Gulab Jamuns in the afternoon in memory of the eight hour working day 
many workers used to have in the last century. We also quietly remembered 
that it was one year since the Cybermohalla programme started at Sarai.

I hope that you all accept your correspondents heartfelt May Day greetings. 

In the afternoon, some of us went to the VV Giri National Labour Institute, 
in Noida to witness the inauguration of the website of the archives of Indian 
Labour, which was a collaboration between the Indian association of Labour 
Historians and the VV Giri NLI. Some of our comrades in Sarai had laboured 
intensively to help set up the online archive, and we had gone to display our 
solidarity with our (Sarai's) small corner of the international working 
class, and also, because we were not a little proud of the 'labour' put in by 
our fellow workers in getting the archive online.

When we got there, we realized that we would sit through a couple of hours of 
some excrutiatingly interesting speeches by trade union leaders, bureaucrats 
and technical experts. One bureaucrat gave the quotable quote of the 
afternoon - when she said that "workers are human, we need to put (human) 
faces to numbers". Luckily, there was nescafe, spring rolls and mayonnaise 
sandwiches to be had in the end.

Finally, we got lectured by the the minister of state for Labour Mr.Muni Lal, 
and the union minister for labour Mr. Sharad Yadav. Mr Muni Lal said that the 
the "labour department is a very important department, labour is a hot topic 
and a buzzword and hoped that the archive of Indian labour wouid help experts 
and researchers find methods to improve labour efficiency and productivity"

Mr. Sharad Yadav, veteran socialist, complained, like some have done on this 
list, that we (everyone, not just us lumpens at sarai - luckily he didnt even 
know who we were) dont pay enough attention to the teachings of M.K. Gandhi, 
and that this shows how willing we are to be inspired by foreign inspired 
teachings of Karl Marx, etc.

When he tried to log on to the website twice, with the password, Mahatma 
Gandhi, it did not work, not once, but twice. Naturally, the honourable 
minister, felt that the labour movement should pay more attention to the 
thoughts and teachings of Gandhi.

For a brief moment, in the middle of may day, it was wonderful to connect 
with the immense and inspiring reality of the state in India, and be reminded 
that we all were not numbers but human, and be told that we should all pay 
more attention to the man whose image is printed on many denominations of  
the units of abstract generalised exchange which denote occasionally the 
value of our labour power, and which also act as indices of the surplus 
values that is extracted from us all. 

Elsewhere in the world, May Day was observed in many other ways., some 
reassuringly traditional. I am pasting below, a brief summary of the days 
events in many countries, this is taken from the website of that great 
institution that represents the working class - the New York Times, 

and so here it is, International Labour Day, 2002 

solidarities

Shuddha
____________________________________________
May 1, 2002
Police and Activists Clash in May Day Protests
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:21 a.m. ET

BERLIN (AP) -- Demonstrators rallied against the right in Germany and France, 
merchants boarded up stores to guard against attacks by anti-capitalist 
demonstrators and riot police turned out in force as Europeans marked a tense 
May Day on Wednesday.

Police in Berlin used tear gas to quell overnight clashes with anarchists who 
threw rocks, set street fires and looted a supermarket, the worst violence on 
the eve of May Day for years. An estimated 5,000 police turned several parts 
of the German capital into restricted zones, including a main thoroughfare 
through the landmark Brandenburg Gate.

Scores of anarchist protesters were detained in several cities overnight, and 
police said two people were injured seriously in Berlin. May Day in the 
German capital has regularly degenerated into street battles between police 
and anarchists over the past 15 years.

In France, as many as 500,000 people demonstrated nationwide against 
extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, the largest turnout so far against 
the ultra-nationalist politician since he qualified for this Sunday's 
presidential runoff.

Earlier, Le Pen led several thousand supporters through central Paris. They 
chanted ``Le Pen, president'' and waved tricolor flags and signs that read, 
``I'm proud to be French.''

Some 700 supporters of a far-right fringe party marched through a Berlin 
suburb, escorted by nearly 2,000 police who kept them apart from heckling 
counter-demonstrators shouting ``Nazis out!'' At least one marcher was 
detained by police for making the banned stiff-arm Nazi salute.

``We're demonstrating because we love our country,'' declared far-right 
marcher Wolfgang Kuehl, 34.

At Berlin's city hall, labor leaders rallied a crowd of about 10,000 behind 
Germany's first industrial strike in seven years, due to start next week.

In Moscow, at least 140,000 trade union supporters holding up pictures of 
President Vladimir Putin rallied downtown. The Communists marked the occasion 
separately, drawing mostly elderly people who carried red carnations and 
proudly displayed World War II medals on their lapels.

In Greece and Turkey, protesters proclaimed solidarity with the Palestinians 
in their bloody struggle with Israel.

``A thousand greetings to the Palestinian resistance,'' read a slogan at a 
rally in Istanbul, Turkey. In Athens, about 6,000 people marched to the U.S. 
and Israeli embassies to protest Israel's military incursion into Palestinian 
areas.

In the economically struggling former Yugoslav republic of Croatia, workers 
marched through the capital, Zagreb, to protest government plans to trim 
labor rights. Polish officials laid flowers at a monument in the city of 
Poznan to workers killed in 1956 anti-communist protests, but the capital, 
Warsaw, was calm as many people left for the countryside for a five-day 
weekend.

Workers in Macedonia handed out platefuls of hearty cooked brown beans -- 
considered a laborer's staple -- in the capital, Skopje, as they demonstrated 
for an end to poverty. The country has the highest jobless rate in the 
Balkans.

In London, more than 100 noisy demonstrators on bicycles blocked 
intersections in the busy Oxford Street shopping area. Some of them, 
representing a variety of groups from environmentalists to anti-capitalists, 
went to the U.S. Embassy bearing a banner reading ``Capitalism doesn't work.''

Cuba's communist authorities called out more than 1 million citizens for a 
May Day march to protest Latin American criticism of its human rights record. 
President Fidel Castro was to head the annual workers march in the Havana.

In Asia, police clashed with protesters in at least three nations while 
elsewhere, workers demonstrated peacefully for better working conditions and 
higher pay.

In the Philippines, thousands of demonstrators were met on the streets by 
riot police amid coup rumors and terrorist threats. Police said they thwarted 
two possible terrorist attacks, including one that might have targeted 
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

Activists in Sydney, Australia, used May Day to highlight the plight of 
thousands of asylum seekers kept in detention centers for up to three years 
while their cases are reviewed. Police on horseback charged demonstrators 
after 500 people blockaded offices of a company that operates five of the 
detention centers.

In Singapore, police arrested two prominent opposition party officials and 
civil rights activists as they tried to stage an unauthorized rally outside 
the tightly controlled city-state's presidential palace. Police later 
arrested an additional activist who refused to leave a police station where 
one of the other activists were detained.

Malaysian police arrested 17 people as hundreds of plantation workers marched 
toward the world's tallest buildings in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, to demand 
better pay. Riot police backed by water cannon were on standby at the 
Petronas Twin Towers.

In Hong Kong, about 700 workers -- including maids from other Southeast Asian 
nations -- marched in downtown areas demanding that the government create new 
jobs, set a minimum wage and limit the working day to eight hours.