Movements Join and Align on May Day in Chicago and Beyond

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Mass Protest Comes to Chicago on May Day
Author: 
Andrew Kennis
Locality: 
Summary: 
As thousands of people descended upon downtown Chicago to protest on the globe's labor day, movements are joining up with one another in ways not often seen before.

Laura Padron is a modest, shy, polite and soft-spoken twenty-year old. But she doesn’t mince words when it comes to explaining what brought her out to the May Day protests attended by many thousands of people in Chicago and beyond.

“I was nine years old when my father was deported, even though he was a legal resident of the United States,” Laura explains in a soft, but strong and defiant tone. Looking straight into my eyes without blinking, she says with conviction, “They deported him, taking away his legal immigration status. We don’t know what to do, but that’s the reason why I am here today … so that finally, they pay attention to us and our struggle, both on a personal and on a collective level.”

Today in Chicago, a number of struggles converged into one. The immigrant rights movement joined forces with the labor movement, which in turn joined forces with Occupy activists, who in turn joined forces with student activists. Some were involved in more than one of these causes. Some were involved with just one. Others, just showed up for the first time to learn something new and see what all the fuss was about.

“We came here today to see what was going on, because there were fliers all over campus,” explained Maria and Jamie, two 20-year-old DePaul students. “We aren’t Occupy activists, but we know something is wrong,” said Jamie, while her friend Maria added, “Yeah, that’s why we wanted to show up today … to learn and see something new.”

“Law Day”

I was a quarter short of my fare for the subway on the way to the march and protest today, but the subway worker at the Blue-line, Chicago Avenue station wasn’t going to send me off looking for change. Tyrone noticed my reporter’s notebook on me when he saw me come up short for my fare and said, “are you going to something … you know, special? I saw a bunch of helicopters flying overhead today,” while handing me a quarter to get my fare card up to $2.25.

One can hardly blame Tyrone for his confusion. Today is May Day, a holiday long recognized to be the labor day for all of the world’s workers, the international labor day ironically started and initiated from none other than right here in Chicago. But the United States is not one of the 80 countries around the world to officially recognize the holiday. Instead, as is the case every year, President Obama officially commemorated what has been called “Law Day” on May 1st, a tradition began in 1958 during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, with this year’s theme being dubbed, “No Courts, No Justice, No Freedom.”

The irony could not be even higher for people like Laura Padron. The law has failed her and millions of other families, some of whom have documented members coupled with others who are undocumented. Laura says that she knows of many people whose families have been ripped apart at the seems by the “law” and disallowed from being re-united anytime in the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, the irony of “Law Day” also applies to people like Ron Kaminkow, who has been a blue-collar, dues-paying union member for decades on end. He currently is a railroad worker, who proudly stated that there was, “no other place I’d rather be on a day like this one, this is the city where it all began.” Kaminkow elaborated while standing between several of his union brothers:

We’re here today because workers around the world don’t stand a chance if we don’t unite in solidarity with one another. Corporations have developed a global economy and capable of moving production from one country to another, pitting one group of workers against another; without international solidarity, there is no chance to improve the working conditions, the wages and the benefits of average, every-day-working people … the people who do the work and make up the vast majority of the people in this planet. That is what international workers day is all about.

Kaminkow was talking about May Day, not Law Day of course, and its origins in Chicago. Just under 126 years ago, labor resistance and protest in Chicago during a national strike resulted in an internationally publicized trial and the execution of four labor activists, sparking an annual tradition that has been taking place and recognized around the world. It is called May Day and it takes place every May 1st.

Flash-forward to 2006, a year which explains why people like Laura Padron have been showing up on May Day protests for a number of years. In that time, well over a million took to the streets in Chicago and dozens of other cities across the nation. May Day has become a day of struggle and protest in the United States, in favor of immigrant rights and reform to what advocates have long decried as being a broken and unjust set of immigration laws.

Since the time that the 2006 protests were undertaken, well over a million people have been deported and record-breaking deportation levels have been reached under the Obama administration. Programs such as “Secure Communities” – which by ICE officials’ own accounting reveal less than a third of deportees as having committed a serious crime – and corrupt private businesses running immigration detention centers, have become the “new normal” under the current administration.

As a result, immigration advocates and activists met with Occupy activists weeks ahead of the planned May Day protests to combine their causes and organize together. The causes were seen as compatible and mutually beneficial.

As immigration and labor advocate Teresa Gutierrez explained on Democracy Now!, the causes literally organized together:

I think it’s extremely exciting that the Occupy Wall Street movement has not only just made its effort to organize around May Day, but it’s spent hours in deliberation with immigrant and labor organizations to find ways to come together. The OWS movement has a noble attitude of not applying for permits, for example. But when you are dealing with a vulnerable population such as those that can be—that are undocumented and don’t just spend a night in jail, but could be deported, permits, security, marshaling, those sort of things are very important on May Day. So the OWS movement was extremely—it took a position to be in solidarity with immigrants. And so, the message of the deportations, of legalization, has not been lost, even within the solidarity that we are putting together with OWS and labor.

Among such causes also included that of student activism. One of the leading concerns brought by student activists since the Occupy movement sprung to life just last October, is that of the student loan crisis.

“Given the pathetic state of the economy and the crazy rise in tuition costs, what are students like me expected to face when we graduate? Bad job prospects and the worst student debt levels, ever seen? The nation’s student debt has now hit 1 trillion dollars, while students have worse job prospects than ever before,” decried Owen, 21-year-old DePaul student in his third year of study as an Education major.

The data support’s Owen’s sentiments, as is duly exhibited by a graph drawn from figures stemming from the Census, FinAid.org and the Progressive Policy Institute which shows a steep rise in student-loan debt concurring with a sharp drop in average earnings for full-time workers over the course of the last decade.

Public Officials Ignore Occupy, Reuters Derides Protests, In Spite of Actions Organized Across the Country

Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and other major policy makers across the nation did not pay much mind to the May Day protests undertaken in well over 100 cities today. President Obama was duly scheduled for a big trip to Afghanistan, which dominated the nation’s headlines, as he gave a major policy address while appearing with Afghan President Karzai.

As a recent analysis published by Fairness and Accuray and Reporting found, the issues that the Occupy movement had catapulted into the mainstream political and media arenas – that of income inequality and corporate greed – have been largely dissipating for many months. Concurrently, public officials are addressing and responding to Occupy activism less than ever before.

This was one of the apparent principal motivations behind organizers to “come back” and be more public again with their activism and resistance, as actions in recovering foreclosed homes and many other more community-service oriented work were not getting the kind of media attention that their public occupations were garnering. It is unclear whether public occupation strategies will be undertaken, but for now, Occupy is clearly jockeying to be in the limelight again.

May Day was the return from the hibernation taken from more public actions and was highly touted with a lot of organizing energy and efforts. Nevertheless, many mainstream news media outlets either stuck strictly to event-oriented reporting, describing actions taken in the protests across the country, or went farther and literally derided the movement, as was the case with the business news wire Reuters and this report, which was headlined “Occupy Wall Street resurgence a dud” and filed by Conway Gittens:

… the demonstration lacked the crowds of the protest's early days, leading many to question if the movement has any movement left. Political strategist Henry Sheinkopf says this group's day in the spotlight is fading fast because it lacks one clear message everyday Americans can rally behind, “We can identify who the 99 percent are, everybody else would probably like to be in the 1 percent, they just don't know how to get there, and the issues are just not coalescing. There's no place to organize around,”... The lack of enthusiasm at Tuesday's events show a lack of commitment by the masses needed to effect change.

Protesters at Chicago’s May Day rally took issue with such descriptions. “The corporate media is likely going to depict us in an unfavorable light, we have never been their favorites, for obvious reasons,” glibly remarked Patrick, a 24-year-old DePaul student, while adding that protests were being organized around the country and the globe.

135 May Day Occupy protests were undertaken across the United States, including major cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, Miami, Los Angeles and Portland. Much media attention was grafted onto instances of property destruction undertaken in Seattle, anonymous and fake “anthrax” letters sent to corporate and government officials with a harmless white power and May Day “greetings,” as well as New York City cops chasing protesters on scooters.

With news coverage such as this, it is perhaps less surprising that Paul Viollis and Douglas Kane, owners of the New York City-based Risk Control Strategies, saw the revenues for their business double in 2011. Viollis and Kane stoked their business on advising, “Senior level, C suite execs and entrepreneurs, people who have had significant liquidity events and are now retired investors, and on the institutional side, single and multi-family offices and the advisor community. The majority of our clients are wealthy families, a significant amount are corporations …” Viollis told the Huffington Post last December. Viollis had the following to say about the Occupy movement:

We’re looking at a group of folks that are in fact organized, even though we don’t give them credit for that. These are educated people. These are not only educated people, but they’re intelligent. And on top of that, now they’re well funded. So, if you put all of those things together, and then you take away—like our, you know, good old Maslow used to say, you know, hierarchy of needs—you take away their food, their water, their shelter, you take away their ability to earn, and now you have people that are just genuinely angry. And their disdain—their lips drip with disdain towards those that have. And I’m not saying it’s justified or not justified: it is what it is. And that leads you into where we are today, this platform of risk, where the trajectory is going to be very clear. It’s going to be: how do I interrupt business, and how do I make you pay? Someone is going to pay, according to them, for their lot in life. And that’s the direction it looks like they’re going to take.

Will Laura Padron see her father again? Will Ron Kaminkow see a rise in global labor solidarity lead to a concurrent rise in labor and living standards? Will the Occupy movement regain its influence on mainstream policy making and discourse? Or will the clients Paul Viollis represent continue to run the country and successfully steer clear of the purported “risks” posed by popular resistance movements? As of yesterday, the Occupy movement has returned to the public limelight and only time will bear the answers to what remains a very uncertain future for this country, as well as the still-faltering global economy.

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