Friday – May 1, International Worker’s Day
International Workers’ Day has special significance this year given the GOP’s assault on front-line workers. I’m thinking particularly of those in meat-packing plants who are being pressured to return to work, even as hundreds of workers are falling ill of Covid-19 and some are even dying. Trump is willing to exempt the plants from employee lawsuits but not to force the plant themselves to undertake measures to protect the workers. The Iowa governor, meanwhile, has said that workers who refuse to work due to coronavirus fears won’t receive unemployment benefits.
As conservative stalwart but now NeverTrumper Bill Krystol tweeted,
So the Republican position is employers should get a waiver of liability if their workplace turns out to be unhealthy, but employees should lose unemployment benefits if they won’t return to that unhealthy workplace. Will American capitalism survive the current Republican Party?
Who knew that Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle would return to relevance? Meat packers once again stand in for all those who are expected to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the well-off.
These other workers include hospital employees who are still not getting sufficient personal protective equipment, especially in the V.A. hospitals. And those airline, metro, bus and other transit workers who are getting sick at disproportionate rates. And those Navy seamen who were supposed to gut it out when the coronavirus broke out on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. And those West Point cadets who are supposed to return to New York to hear a presidential commencement speech. And the prisoners and prison workers in America’s jails.
Add to these the economic casualties, including those teachers, hospital workers, police, firefighters, and other state employees who will lose their jobs if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refuses to help cash-strapped states. (State pensioners will also take a hit if states are forced to declare bankruptcy.) And the postal workers who will be out of work if the USPS to go belly up, as Trump is threatening. And all those small businesses and their employees who are losing out as large corporations vacuum up the trillions of dollars passed by Congress that were supposedly intended for the masses.
It’s time to dust off Percy Shelley’s “Song: To the Working Men of England.”
Written at a time when, because of the French Revolution, England had turned reactionary, Shelley’s poem was turned into a song and sung by working class organizers. It begins by pointing out class injustice:
Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
Wherefore feed and clothe and save
From the cradle to the grave
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?
Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?
Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?
Or what is it ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?
The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.
Sow seed—but let no tyrant reap:
Find wealth—let no imposter heap:
Weave robes—let not the idle wear:
Forge arms—in your defense to bear.
The poem concludes by warning of inaction’s dangers. If you don’t stand up to the “stingless drones,” Shelley tells his readers, then the chains you forged will be used on you, as will the weapons you manufactured. In the end, you will be buried in winding-sheets that you yourself have woven:
Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells— In halls ye deck another dwells. Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see The steel ye tempered glance on ye. With plough and spade and hoe and loom Trace your grave and build your tomb And weave your winding-sheet—till fair England be your Sepulcher.
America, starting with its packing plants, will be the sepulcher for many of its workers if we shrink back now.
