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Fifthfiend
05-01-2012, 01:09 PM
I am obv. working because of my identification with the oppressor class but man Oakland is looking to get super-real about this, there's people with signs and police with riot gear and people with signs and police with motorcycles and people with signs and police with teargas guns and people with SIGNS.

Anyone else seen anything going on where they are, is this a thing in the New Yorks and the Seattles and the Washington Dark Carnivals?

mauve
05-01-2012, 02:07 PM
Yeah, apparently in Portland, Oregon they're worried about that. There's usually a May Day protest in Portland, but this year they're expecting the Occupy folks to be there too. Don't know if there's anything like that going on near where I live. Hopefully not.

Professor Smarmiarty
05-01-2012, 02:35 PM
Literally too poor to get the train to May Day celebrations. The master plan of my opressors is revealed.

Melfice
05-01-2012, 02:59 PM
Lots of Germans over in the border cities of the Netherlands, celebrating their Labour Day by shopping here, while us Dutch folks are working hard.

Shameful, I say. Shameful! We should also have Labour Day here!
(Let's just briefly ignore that April 30th is Queen's Day, which is generally also a day off for almost all people.)

Flarecobra
05-01-2012, 03:52 PM
Not much going on here. Kinda rainy. Nice tempeture though.

Karrrrrrrrrrrresche
05-01-2012, 04:18 PM
Why the fuck would May Day involve riots?

Sithdarth
05-01-2012, 05:15 PM
Because its also associated with Unions and left-wing political movements in America for some reason. So people generally use it as an excuse to protest generally about labor and or wealth disparity issues.

Flarecobra
05-01-2012, 06:10 PM
That's news to me.

Professor Smarmiarty
05-01-2012, 06:12 PM
It was declared international workers day by the second international in the late 19th century in the after two sets of riots that had occured on May 1. It's a day of stopping work, epressing voice as the proleteriat and brotherhood and union of workers across the world.
Like what the shit else is May Day? It's May so let's have a celebration?

CABAL49
05-01-2012, 06:16 PM
It is also Walpurgisnacht.

Professor Smarmiarty
05-01-2012, 06:18 PM
Nobody cares about your shitty festivals celebrating religious oppression.

akaSM
05-01-2012, 06:56 PM
So, what makes this "May day" different from other May days?

Osterbaum
05-01-2012, 06:56 PM
Vappu! In Finland all of the traditions sort of combine.

mauve
05-01-2012, 07:26 PM
Current stats:

SEATTLE, WA: Black-clad protesters, probably anarchists, according to police and news organizations, are causing property damage with PVC pipes and paintball guns, breaking windows and such. Self-proclaimed superhero Phoenix Jones was spotted out on the streets with pepper spray; no reports yet on whether he's actually using it, or if he's taking any action at all at this point. No word on which side he supports, if any.

PORTLAND, OR: So far appears a peaceful demonstration. They do this every year in Portland and they have all the proper permits to be there. This year the Occupy crowd has boosted the attendance rate, but it looks like all they're doing is marching and signing petitions for everything from increasing the number of jail beds and prison conditions to marijuana legalization.

ELSEWHERE IN OREGON: People dancing and waving signs in front of the Bank of America.

Satan's Onion
05-01-2012, 11:14 PM
My part of WA is pretty solidly Republican--more "what do you mean, 'social contract'?" types than "when my bigger brother Jesus gets here, you'll all pay" types--so I didn't even know there was a local Occupy thing until I saw it on the news, and it was maybe a dozen people in the park with some signs.

They had a barbecue, apparently. It looked kind of fun. But I had to be in school, with a Spanish quiz and a chemistry exam.

:(

CABAL49
05-02-2012, 01:08 AM
Nobody cares about your shitty festivals celebrating religious oppression.

What? Walpurgisnacht is when you are supposed to party.

Mr.Bookworm
05-02-2012, 02:30 AM
Outdoor fuckin' starts today.

katiuska
05-02-2012, 05:56 AM
So my brother wrote a pretty excellent note about his experiences being part of a labor union at the Strand Bookstore in NYC. It's kind of long, but I'm copying it here because I'm not sure if he wants me linking back to his Facebook page.

It's May Day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day), so here is a thing I wrote that you can read.

Further information about the current situation, which I only touch on lightly, can be found in this totally sweet comic (http://takebackthestrand.com/2012/04/09/old-rare-and-new/), and generally all around the worker-created website, Take Back the Strand (http://takebackthestrand.com/).

Labor unions in America are often dysfunctional. Right-wing pundits are quick to expound (at length) on this fact, but it’s something that rank-and-file union members understand through experience. It’s difficult for even the most ardent proponent of organized labor to deny that the unions have their problems. However. It is important to recognize that there is a world of difference between the word dysfunctional and other words like broken, obsolete, irreparable, worthless, evil, or unnecessary. The union in America, like any institution of value anywhere, is imperfect but is at the same time invaluable. And at a time when so large a percentage of working people are struggling to get by, and when organized labor is being militantly vilified, undermined, and dismantled in a manner not seen in generations, the fight of any individual union to retain what integrity it has becomes as important as the effort to save the institution as a whole from complete dissolution.

I lived for several years in one of the country’s most vibrant, interesting, and expensive cities. And despite a college education, a good work ethic, and the willingness to take almost any job and to start from the bottom, the only reason I was able to eke out any sort of a living at all was because I had the good luck to be hired at Strand Books. After months and months of searching for work, of interviews and application after application, of temp jobs that couldn't cover my share of the rent for a crumbling apartment in what a cop once described to me as “one of the worst neighborhoods in town,” Strand was the only business in the city hiring people like me that also offered anything resembling a living wage, not to mention health insurance and sick days. It was also the only one in which the employees belonged to a union. This was not a coincidence.

The Strand Bookstore is an anomaly. This is why management has been able to market it successfully as a New York Landmark, and why they been able to boast in the press of their continuing financial good fortune while rivals such as Borders (which, during my time there, was itself seen as an existential threat) have met their demise. It is certainly unusual for the staff of a retail establishment to belong to a union, and to enjoy the protection and benefits that come from such an arrangement. And I did sometimes hear the criticism—from management, from the press, from everyday people outside of the store, and even from fellow employees—that this was in fact more than we deserved for the sort of work we did.

I should make it very clear at this point that no person in the Strand union, or for that matter its lower-level management team, is getting rich or somehow living more opulently than the millions of New York's other working people. To the contrary, it was often difficult for my wife (who, it should be noted, also worked 40+ hours per week) and me to make ends meet, and this without having any children to support. The wages I made at Strand, the healthcare benefits I received, the fact that I could take a day off when I was sick without suffering a cut in my paycheck: these things did not allow us to live decadently. But they did allow us to live. To me, this cuts straight to the bone of the argument that there are vocations that are somehow undeserving of the so-called perks of union membership.

This is not say that membership in a union entitles a person to special privileges. I served as a shop steward in my time at Strand, and in that capacity I occasionally had to attend disciplinary meetings for employees alleged to have broken the shop rules; mostly to ensure that management was not unjustly trying to apply punitive measures against the employee (this rarely happened in my experience, and when it did the union would step in and see to it that the case against the employee was dropped). Most times, the employee had in fact been in the wrong, and the union allowed for them to warned, suspended, or terminated. Membership in any union does not give any member a right not enjoyed by their non-union counterparts to be lazy, late to or absent from work, or otherwise to behave inappropriately. Even if this is something not widely understood by the public, it is something union members know well. What union membership does provide is access to an arrangement between employer and employee that even the most conservative demagogue would be hard-pressed to argue against: that any person who works full-time should be able to make a living and to support themselves and their family. This concept, when expressed (I believe appropriately) as a "Core American Value," should apply equally to people working in every field; including factory workers, bank tellers, public-safety employees, educators, short-order cooks, truckers, insurance analysts, migrant farmhands, senior executives, and yes, even retail employees. And in a country without a significant manufacturing base, in which there are hundreds of applicants for a single opening for even the lowest-level public-sector position, and in which more and more people find themselves working in service and retail, regardless of previous training, education, or experience, it becomes more and more important to realize that the primary perk of union membership—namely the right to make a living, the right simply to get by—does in fact belong in sectors of the economy in which unionization has heretofore largely been without precedent.

Times are hard everywhere, of course, but the movement of the last thirty years to dismantle the unions and to reduce or eliminate entirely the gains they have made, much increased since the economic downturn of 2007 and 2008, does nothing but diminish the quality of life for the rank-and-file; until finally they accept the frankly unlivable standard of wages and benefits commonly found among other workers in the same fields. The Strand's union, flawed as it may be, and its employees' elevated standard of living, modest as it may be, should serve as a model for all retailers, and all businesses, in the nation. The opposing model—which Strand's senior management seems to have embraced—is that every employee should engage in a race to the lowest wage with none of the protection offered by bargaining collectively. We can try to expand on the model that says every full-time employee should be able to make a living (even if it isn't exactly a grand living), or we can adopt the idea at the heart of the two-tier system that only those who happen to find themselves in the higher tier deserve to get by. Only one of these models is tenable in the long term for the vast majority of working people, and it isn't the one currently being pushed by the management at Strand.

And I have to say that I am proud when I see what the Strand workers have been doing on this front, though not because like I feel that I had anything to do with it. I sat on the committee representing the employees during the previous round of negotiations, and I was bitterly disappointed by the contract to which we eventually agreed; largely because I was concerned it would enable management to do exactly what they have been attempting to do during this time around. Every time you give up a significant amount of ground, it becomes an almost impossible task not to loose even more in the future—let alone to gain back what you have lost—and while I continued to work with the union as a shop steward until I left Strand Books, New York, and the East Coast, I walked away from those contract negotiations with the horrible feeling that, uphill battle or not, we had failed the membership. No, I am proud simply because what the employees at Strand are doing now is something that has needed to be done for years, and someone is finally doing it. And those someones are people like me, working in positions too frequently seen as undeserving of respect or even a living wage, who are throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the effort to show that they, like all people, do in fact deserve exactly that. It is for that reason that even though I am no longer among their numbers, and even though I am removed from their struggle by time and by geography, I am proud to say, "I support the Strand workers."

Some background: My brother worked at the Strand for nearly the entirely of his tenure in New York and was on the union committee during the last half. The bookstore has one of the few examples in the country of a retail-sector union, but there's been a continual effort by upper management to diminish it over the past few years. Management and the union have been unable to reach an agreement over this round of negotiations, so the workers have been without a contract since September and rejected the most recent terms put forth by management, which would have involved a significant decrease in benefits for current employees and even fewer benefits for new employees. They went to the picket line yesterday, but I can't find much information so far, so I'm not sure how that went.

Magus
05-02-2012, 04:04 PM
May Day has not traditionally been a big protest day in most of the U.S., though, so it's understandable people are confused by it. Like do you think most people in the U.S. are going to celebrate a socialist holiday generally associated with the International? I doubt it. It's getting press because of Occupy Wall Street planning to coincide with it this year, though, so maybe in the future it will continue to pick up steam in the Us.

phil_
05-02-2012, 06:13 PM
Walpurgisnacht has booze and girls and monsters and monster girls. May Day has people reminding me that, as a person making minimum wage a leech stealing from my betters, I don't deserve to live.

I'll take the monster party.

Wait, I missed both? Dang...

Kyanbu The Legend
05-03-2012, 03:26 AM
Walpurgisnacht has booze and girls and monsters and monster girls. May Day has people reminding me that, as a person making minimum wage a leech stealing from my betters, I don't deserve to live.

I'll take the monster party.

Wait, I missed both? Dang...

Dang indeed.

Anyway it's been quite here in NJ. Honestly this is the first I heard of May Day.

Seil
05-03-2012, 03:12 PM
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