Join us for a Virtual May Day!
Join the Edmonton May Day Committee in a virtual celebration of International Workers’ Day!
Listen to live panellists and performers and participate in an interactive discussion:
6:30 – 8:30pm - Friday, May 1st, 2020
Watch on YouTube with this link MayDay
Click here to see details of the event on Facebook.
This event will be a chance for working people in Alberta to SPEAK UP on May Day and to hear from other workers, unions and community organizations.
This will be a public Zoom meeting. If you have a Zoom account, you can join at the time of the event by clicking here. Or you can join by audio only via phone and entering the meeting code: 885 2518 3782. Click here for a listing of call in numbers. Participants are advised the event will be recorded and shared online.
If you are joining by video, you are encouraged to display your May Day messages, organizational placards or banners, or get creative by writing a slogan on your face mask!
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This year, May Day is an opportunity to encourage more and more workers to speak up to protect their safety, their rights and their lives.
The dangerous and destructive nature of the capitalist system is clearly exposed in the coronavirus crisis. Working people are answering the call to protect our collective health, but half measures or outright negligence of employers and governments are having disastrous impacts.
In seniors care, food processing and other sectors, workers have been speaking out for years about what is needed to combat unsafe and unjust working conditions. Workers know what must be done, but what we are missing is the power to decide.
Imagine what working people could build with the $7.5 billion Jason Kenney decided to direct to a US oil corporation? Instead of imposing cuts and layoffs of tens of thousands of workers in K-12 and post-secondary education, we would use those resources to educate ourselves and to empower people, especially young people, to build a new society!
Workers’ empowerment has always been the guiding spirit of May Day since the origins of the day in the eight-hour movement, which advocated eight hours for work, eight hours for recreation, and eight hours for rest, a demand that galvanized workers’ movements more than 100 years ago.
In this pandemic period, more and more people are seeing that our collective health and well being cannot be left in the hands of corrupt corporations or self-serving politicians. But beyond the pandemic, we have no interest in continuing on with “business as usual,” in a status quo of for-profit seniors care, monopoly agribusiness, two-tiered rights for migrant workers, colonial violence and climate inaction.
As workers around the world will mobilize on May Day, albeit under quarantine conditions, we also stand in solidarity with workers around the world, especially the people of Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and Palestine, where sanctions and occupation are deepening the pandemic crisis.
Here in Canada, we have seen the devastating results of years and years of neo-liberal globalization, privatization, deregulation, and wrecking of our social programs result in the terrible tragedy unfolding in seniors' homes. Those who slashed social programs and tried to silence the voices of the workers who care for our seniors are now desperately trying to cover their tracks.
The lesson is that workers have to take the lead by exercising control over the decisions which affect their lives. On May Day, let us take up this challenge! It is the working people who are fighting for a society which provides for all and in which the rights of all are upheld.
Who decides? We decide!
No one left behind!
End the privatization of seniors care! Quality public seniors care now! Staffing ratios now!
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for all!
Lip service is not enough: Power to the front-line workers!
Health care for all regardless of immigration status!
Workers rights under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back!
The workers united will never be defeated!
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