Protests, general strikes, road blocks, rallies are the way the International Workers Day celebrated across the world on 1 May 2017. It is a day to remember the Chicago workers struggle to get our rights of 8 hours’ work, 8 hours’ sleep, 8 hours’ recreation and their sacrifice. Not only remembering the past struggle also to stand in solidarity with workers struggle across nations and to continue our fight towards establishing the socialist society.
Increasing unemployment, contract and unorganized workers, employment insecurity, low wage and depleting working conditions, low standard of living conditions are common now. Workers and students are protesting in mass numbers against the austerity measures, increasing education fees, exploitative workers policies and laws.
The democracy in third world countries and former colonies is like premature baby as the transformation to capitalist society did not happen on the grave of the feudal society. Now these countries are under local colonizers who are dominant land holding class/caste groups and national bourgeois in these societies. And now national bourgeois are joined their hands with imperialists across world and vigorously implement the free market economic labour reforms through the state policies they control.
To divert from the crisis the capitalist system is facing in the globalization era, unemployed youths are mobilized against the employed youths. local workers are mobilised against immirgrants and workers are mobilized on the basis of caste, ethiniciy, religion than class basis in South Asia.
In the globalized economy, like how capitalists are linked together, we workers are in globally linked assembly line. Like how capital flows where ever it finds opportunity, our struggle and fighting spirit against exploitative capitalist system has to flow wherever it needs the solidarity.
The networking of working class cutting across nations is the need of the hour to unite us. The technology advancement is helping in a big way to transmit the spirit of the struggle very fast to the working class of the other parts of the world and have lot of learning opportunities from it.
In this context, my heartfelt wishes to the initiative of Transcontinental May Day 2017, a digital platform to bring together the struggling masses of students and workers across world on behalf of FITE.
Parimala,
President,
Forum for IT/ITES Employees(FITE),Tamilnadu
