It may have escaped your attention, but yesterday was labor day in the USA. Comrades can be forgiven for missing it, since the unions in the world’s strongest and most advanced capitalist country are notoriously small and politically weak (quite a coincidence!). Only 12 per cent of workers are unionised, and labor day has become simply a day off and time for a barbecue for most citizens. The US union movement has not always been this way, however.

In fact, it was in the US that the internationally celebrated May Day originated. In 1886, US trade unions called for a general strike on the 1st May demanding an eight-hour day. This led to a week of action and shocking police brutality against strikers, culminating in the Chicago Haymarket riot. When police moved in to disperse the crowd in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, fighting broke out in which seven policemen and four workers were killed. Following the incident, five unionists received the death sentence, allegedly for inciting the crowd to violence.The first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris in 1889, called for international demonstrations to mark the anniversary of the riot.

The commemoration proved so popular in Europe that the the 1st of May was at the next congress ratified as International Worker’s Day.

The US Labor Day, taking place on the first Monday of September, is slightly older, beginning in 1882, but has a very different source. It was begun by the most conservative of the American unions, the Knights of Labour. Fearing repeats of the militant rallies and protests of May 1886 -which the ‘Knights’ had disavowed- President Grover Cleveland gave official sanction to their version in 1887.

The title of this post- taken from the Boston Globe’s editorial, gives an indication of the level of politicisation of workers in today’s USA. But in recent years debates have been going on. Fed up with stagnation of membership, in 2005 several unions have split from the AFL-CIO, the equivalent of Britain’s TUC, to create the Change to Win Federation. It is telling that the unions in the new federation -representing service, textile, building, and hotel & restaurant workers- are those low-paid, casual workers who suffer most from neoliberal capitalism. CtW leaders argue that for the unions to be effective in securing better conditions, membership must increase massively- a fair point. Unfortunately, they are opposing this to involvement in the political arena. This is a trend in the union -and socialist- movement known as economism, which leads to worker’s organisations fighting only for better wages and hours and not for greater democracy and freedom.

The AFL-CIO is also economistic, and it’s involvement in the political sphere, which mostly involves giving money to the Democrats, is hardly encouraging. The Democratic Party has shown itself to be just as willing to union-bust as the Republicans, making decent wage demands difficult to achieve with either party in power. Indeed for this very reason it may seem tempting to abandon the political stage altogether; the economism of CtW becomes easier to understand. But unionists affiliated to Change to Win should realise that this is not the answer. The greater democracy and freedom we have, the easier it becomes for workplace struggles to succeed. The more we falsely separate politics from economics, in the way of bourgeois professors, the more we weaken our movement.

-Laurie Smith