HVALF President Ian Robinson’s May Day Speech
Ian Robinson, our President, could not be here today, so he asked me to deliver these remarks. My name is Sharon Simonton. I’m speaking to you today in my capacity as the Huron Valley Area Labor Federation’s new Field Coordinator. The HVALF represents 39 local unions whose 22,000 members live and work in Washtenaw, Livingston, Jackson, and Hillsdale Counties.
International Workers Day was first celebrated in the United States on May 1st 1890, four years after the general strike in Chicago that began at the McCormick farm implements factory and culminated in the Haymarket massacre three days later. The prosecution – and, eventually, execution – of four labor leaders, falsely assigned responsibility for the loss of life on May 4th became an international cause celebre. Workers organizations around the world have been celebrating the cause of workers on May 1st ever since. So this is a good moment to take a breath and remember the history that got us from 1886 to where we find ourselves today.
International Workers Day was born in the Gilded Age – a period during which the very rich ran the state and federal governments of this country. In those years, Lincoln’s promise of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” was usurped by the uber-rich who the muck-raking journalists of the time dubbed the “Robber Barons.” At the same time, as part of the same process, the promise of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. constitution – equal rights for all people, regardless of color – was betrayed by Jim Crow and the lynch mob in the South, segregationist restrictive covenants in cities across the country, a Supreme Court that upheld both, and a Congress that let all of this happen.
The Gilded Age ended with the stock market crash of 1929, the decade-long Great Depression that it triggered, and the upsurge of the U.S. labor movement, led by the new industrial unions like the United Auto Workers or UAW. In the 15 years from 1932 to 1947, the share of all US workers belonging to unions – “union density” more than tripled from 10% to 34%. This dramatic growth provided the political base for FDR’s New Deal legislation, including the worker rights enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the old age pensions and other benefits to the poor in the Social Security Act of the same year, and the federal minimum wage, 40 hour work week and ban on child labor found in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. These policies and the labor movement that made them possible, built a more equal and democratic society than we had enjoyed up to that point.
But there was a fatal flaw in the New Deal: to get his new laws through Congress, FDR had to rely on Southern Democrat votes, and those Southern Democrats demanded as a condition of their support, that farmworkers and domestic workers – jobs in which Black labor was concentrated in the South – be excluded from coverage under the new worker rights and fair labor standards laws. Residential segregation, in the North and South alike, was similarly reinforced by New Deal institutions such as the Federal Housing Administration or FHA and its practice of “red-lining.”
Some unions fought hard against these racist restrictions on the scope and quality of American democracy. For example, faced with wildcat “hate strikes” in 1941 and 1942, the UAW demanded that FDR use the government’s power over companies producing war materials to fire any white worker – union member or not – who refused to work side by side with Black workers. The UAW also helped to fund MLK’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. But too many unions accepted the deal with the devil that FDR made with racism. So it took the Civil Rights – or Black Freedom – movement of the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, to bring the U.S. closer to the kind of democracy that Lincoln envisaged at Gettysburg.
When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, he said that it would cost the Democratic Party the white Southern vote for a generation. That turned out to be a radical under-estimate: even though most white voters are not in the South, no Democratic candidate for President has won the majority of the white vote since 1964. That shocking statistic reflects the fact that the labor and civil rights movement victories of the 30 years from 1935 to 1965 provoked a sustained counter-mobilization by racists, religious conservatives and corporate elites that is still under way today.
We can trace a line from Nixon’s 1968 “Southern Strategy,” through Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” dog whistles and attacks on the federal government as “the problem, not the solution,” to the Trump regime’s open embrace of white Christian nationalism and rule by the rich. This counter-mobilization achieved a new victory earlier this week when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Louisiana v. Callais, struck down the last significant provisions of the Voting Rights Act left standing by previous conservative court decisions.
Since 1968, when Nixon was first elected President, union density – and with it, labor movement power – has been eroding. In 1968, almost 30% of American workers were still union members; today, we are back to 10% – the same place we were *before* the great upsurge of the 1930s and 1940s. That erosion reflects the adverse change in the balance of class power caused by the political success of the alliance of white Christian nationalism and corporate neoliberalism. At the same time, weakening the labor movement has been a necessary precondition for further undermining democracy in this country. And so, by this vicious circle, we are now in a new Gilded Age, ruled again by very rich white men who bring the norms of authoritarian rule that operate in their companies to the conduct of national politics.
We don’t have to go back to the 1930s to see how important unions are to overthrowing authoritarian regimes. We can look at South Africa, where the Black unions working together in the Congress of South African Trade Unions formed the core of the African National Congress that freed Nelson Mandela from Robben Island and overthrew Apartheid in the 1980s and 1990s. Or we can look at South Korea, where (in the same years) a worker-student alliance overthrew the military regime that ran that country. Or to Brazil, where the unions organized into the CUT federation were the basis of the Workers Party or PT that forced the generals who had run the country since 1964 to relinquish power to elected, civilian authorities. It is no coincidence that the Presidents of South Africa and Brazil today were, in the time of their struggles for democracy, the Presidents of their respective metalworkers’ unions – the most powerful unions in COSATU and the CUT.
The American labor movement can and must play this kind of role too. Fortunately, we don’t face the kind of long-entrenched authoritarian regime that the labor movements of S Africa, S Korea and Brazil did. We face an effort to establish an authoritarian regime that has not yet succeeded, though they have done a lot to move us in that direction in a year and a half and clearly aspire to complete the transition as quickly as possible.
So our challenger is easier, but still not easy. We’re not ready to meet even this more limited challenge yet, and even when we are ready, the US labor movement is not strong enough to win this fight on our own. But together with other organizations that share our commitment to protecting the rights of working people – ALL working people and ALL rights, including our rights to determine who makes the laws under which we live – we can build a political economy that aligns with the principles that Lincoln laid out in his 1861 address to Congress. In that address, he said: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
Together, as the song says, “We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.” Let’s make it happen! Solidarity forever!
- Ian Robinson (5/1/26); spoken by Sharon Simonton at Ann Arbor May Day Rally