Week In Review
May 3 2013
by Bill Onasch
Three Important Occasions
Since our last Review three annual dates marked in red on our calendar have passed. All are observed
throughout the world; two originated in the USA, the other in Canada.
Earth Day, April 22
The first Earth Day in 1970 reflected growing environmental awareness, given a big boost by Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring expose of DDT, and a 1969 fire on the polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.
1970 was a turbulent time during the anti-Vietnam War movement. Shortly after Earth Day, Nixon
invaded Cambodia, student protesters were killed at Jackson State and Kent State, and huge
demonstrations erupted across the country. Like the earlier civil rights movement, the antiwar movement
had shown mass demonstrations to be effective over the long haul.
Astute politicians sought to offer the new environmental activists a nonconfrontational avenue for this
tactic in hope of containing and coopting it. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) secured a Federal
proclamation of April 22 as Earth Day. Liberal Republican Mayor of New York City John Lindsay
turned over Fifth Avenue for a march, and most of Central Park for a rally. About a million turned out.
There was also a huge gathering in Philadelphia where Democrat Senate leader Ed Muskie was the
keynote speaker. All in all, it’s estimated twenty million took part in activities in virtually every city,
town, and campus across America.
The impact of this mass sentiment won some significant reforms. The first Clean Air Act with regulatory
controls was passed in 1970. It was followed by the Clean Water Act in 1972. Both were signed by
President Nixon.
But, unlike the civil rights and antiwar movements, there were no sustained coalition efforts to maintain
an independent environmental movement. As the campuses quieted down after the end of the Vietnam
War, and it appeared that reforms could be won through more conventional politics, the character of
Earth Day was transformed from mass action in the streets to atomized celebrations as exciting as
Dental Health Day.
The environmental challenges we face today are much greater than polluted air, water, and soil. Those
threats can be reversed in relatively short time with off the shelf technology. The damage from global
warming, resulting from the release of greenhouse gasses, is irreversible and threatens our very
biosphere. Saving a sustainable environment for future generations requires a combination of new
technology and a return to organic agriculture, a restructuring of energy and transportation and sensible
reductions in wasteful consumption, a renovation of our urban cores and a reversal of urban sprawl.
These efforts will be the biggest projects ever undertaken by human society and will provide full
employment for generations to come. But we don’t have any time to waste launching this unprecedented
mobilization.
An urgent prerequisite is a revival of the spirit and tactics of the first Earth Day–but this time
democratically organized independently of the politicians loyal to the climate destroyers--with the
working class taking the lead.
There have been some modest hopeful signs. 50,000–including some trade union contingents–rallied
in Washington in February against the Keystone XL pipeline. Protests against fracking, also with some
union participation, are spreading. And even the left, sometimes slow to embrace the “tree huggers,”
started to discuss what can be done at a recent EcoSocialist Conference in New York City.
Workers Memorial Day
Starting in Canada in 1984, International Workers Memorial Day is observed on April 28. It reminds
us of those who died on or because of their job. According to the UN’s International Labor
Organization,
* Each year, more than two million women and men die as a result of work-related accidents and
diseases
* Workers suffer approximately 270 million accidents each year, and fall victim to some 160 million
incidents of -related illnesses
* Hazardous substances kill 440,000 workers annually – asbestos claims 100,000 lives
* One worker dies every 15 seconds worldwide. 6,000 workers die every day. More people die while
at work than those fighting wars.
There were certainly some high profile workplace disasters in the run-up to this year’s commemoration.
With many questions still unanswered, fourteen were killed, and the tiny town of West, Texas mostly
obliterated, in an ammonium nitrate explosion at a fertilizer distribution center.
And, of course, there was the latest workplace carnage in the garment district of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
At least 500 are known to have perished, and hundreds more injured, in the collapse of a building where
several thousand mostly women workers were cranking out wares for big North American and
European retailers. Cracks in the building had been shown on local television the night before and an
engineer brought in for inspection literally ran from the building fearing imminent collapse. But the
building owner joined the bosses in cajoling and coercing workers in to their place of death. On May
Day, thousands of angry workers marched through the streets of Dhaka.
Less dramatic but no less important than such calamities are the indications in a study recently
summarized in the Canadian Bullet, New Occupational Breast Cancer Study Challenges the Cancer
Establishment.
Generally, Workers Memorial Day is commemorated in the USA mainly at small gatherings of union
staffers. They at least comply with half of the famous Mary Harris “Mother” Jones admonition--Pray
for the dead and fight like hell for the living!
May Day is as American in origin as baseball, jazz, or biscuits and gravy. The international working
class movement annually honors the heros and martyrs of 1886 struggles in Chicago for the eight-hour
day with marches, rallies, picnics. It’s a legal Labor Day holiday in many countries. But here not so
much.
Throughout most of Europe the theme this year was the fight against Austerity. Greek workers
supplemented traditional marches and rallies with a 24-hour general strike. Hundreds of thousands
marched throughout the Spanish state to protest mass unemployment and evictions.
Worker rights were the main demands of huge demonstrations in Korea and Turkey.
The big march in Berlin had an anti-nuclear power emphasis.
In Montreal police using the infamous bylaw P-6 attacked a fringe demonstration following the main
event of tens of thousands, arresting 300.
In the USA there were a dozen or so marches, mostly numbering in the hundreds, focusing on immigrant
worker rights.
Time For Another Break
Okay, I know I just had one. I took a week break from news updates and the WIR while helping out on
a Midwest Socialist Educational Conference held in Kansas City last weekend. In addition to cooking
up some chili to feed the hungry I made a presentation entitled American Socialists and the Labor
Party Question–From Debs to Mazzocchi. Carl Sack, a knowledgeable grad student from Madison,
addressed the topic of Socialism and Climate Change. Stefanie Levi from the Twin Cities, who spent
several years living in Greece, dealt with the impact of Austerity on that country and how it’s being
fought. My old friend Adam Shils from Chicago analyzed the relevance of socialist strategy today. And
an even older friend, Dave Riehle from St Paul, showed how he is utilizing his retirement from being
a locomotive engineer to expand pursuit of his passion for working class history. Dave gave us a
PowerPoint presentation about how Marx used his influence among German immigrants in the Midwest
to get them on board with Lincoln in the struggle against slavery. It was a rewarding experience for
me–and I’m sure all involved.
But it got me even farther behind in my efforts to rejuvenate the kclabor.org web site. Regular readers
know I have been unable to update the site for the past few months and have had to use this Google blog
for the Week In Review. With a generous contribution from a loyal reader and long-time friend, I’m
now in a position to put new software in to a new computer and reclaim control of the site. But this will
undoubtedly require many hours of tedious work that can’t be well handled in spare time. So I am
allowing myself the next two weeks to focus my full attention to this overdue relaunch.
You can expect the next News Update on the Labor Advocate Blog will be Monday, May 20 and a
Week In Review should appear about the same time. If all goes as planned the KC Labor website will
also have a fresh look by then. Thanks for your patience.
That’s all for this week.
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