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The Brief Origins of May Day
- constantcrying 1y ago[flagged]
- derelicta 1y ago[flagged]
- constantcrying 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't comment like this on Hacker News. Please take note of the guidelines, in particular these ones: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't comment like this on Hacker News. Please take note of the guidelines, in particular these ones: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gymbeaux 1y ago[flagged]
- navigate8310 1y agoIs there any link to May Day with the emergency distress call of an airline?
- voidUpdate 1y agoMayday is from the french m'aider (a short form of venez m'aider, "come [and] help me")
- ramesh31 1y agoSolidarity forever.
- bsnnkv 1y agoFor the union makes us strong
- constantcrying 1y ago[flagged]
- bsnnkv 1y agoMaking the generous assumption that there is a gap in your cultural knowledge and sharing the source of these two lines with background context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Forever
- constantcrying 1y agoI have clear conflicts of interest with the working class, who work in factories. If I were in a union it should advocate for factory workers working more.
- bsnnkv 1y ago> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- constantcrying 1y agoThere is no snark here. The union wants my job outsourced so that factory workers can keep theirs. Please tell me why I should have solidarity with them.
- throw0101a 1y agoIt's a bit amusing that May Day was due to the major strike in the US, but the US doesn't celebrate on that day, but in September: > There was disagreement among labor unions at this time about when a holiday celebrating workers should be, with some advocating for continued emphasis of the September march-and-picnic date while others sought the designation of the more politically charged date of May 1. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe.[18] In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative,[19] formally adopting the date as a United States federal holiday through a law that he signed in 1894.[2] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day#Labor_Day_versus_May_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day#Labor_Day_versus_May... Labo(u)r Day of US/CA/JP/AU/NZ: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Observance_of_International_Workers%27_Day_RGBY.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Observance_of_Internation... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Day
- gymbeaux 1y ago[flagged]
- constantcrying 1y ago[flagged]
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- brickfaced 1y ago[flagged]
- candiddevmike 1y agoHappy Beltane!
- soupfordummies 1y agoBadass read. Geez we are soft today…
- constantcrying 1y ago[flagged]
- DrillShopper 1y agoI have a feeling this submission will be [flagged][dead] in the next half hour - that's how soft we are.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pera 1y agoWe have been conditioned to fear the idea of demanding a more fair distribution of wealth: My great grandfather for example was shot dead by a cop during a union strike. Nothing happened after that event, just silence, fear and a deeply traumatized family. It is very important to remember that many of the things we enjoy today as workers only exist because of the enormous courage of workers from the 19th and early 20th century who fought really hard for a better future.
- irrational 1y agoAnd a reminder that the police have never been on the side of the people. They are they muscle of the state.
- matkoniecz 1y ago> police have never been on the side of the people that is a remarkable generalization, that overstates things to the point of being misleading > They are they muscle of the state. still, there are better and worse states if you go fully pacifist and disempower yourself and your state it will not result in peace - it will result in someone else, likely worse, taking over Police in my country did some bad things (and far more bad things when we were a Russian puppet state) but last time I had an actual contact with police it was on railway station when they have cordoned off a group of aggressive football hooligans. I assure you that I preferred policeman over group of drunk abusive hooligans. And some kind of "muscle of the state" is needed to keep such people in check. (at the same time, police power should be kept on a leash)
- PaulRobinson 1y agoThe US does have a rich history of labor movements and it's sad that they've been diminished - arguably because of perceived and actual corruption in living memory - while working conditions for many haven't really improved. In the UK, also a nation with a very rich history of labour movements and philosophy (Engels family owned factories in Manchester, which he and Marx used as justification and evidence for many of the points made in Conditions of the Working Class), has also seen a recent decline in labour movements - but that's partly because working conditions have improved so massively in recent decades: employment rights, statutory holidays and minimum wage have all improved. However, in recent years something has changed, and I think a lot of people are now looking at holidays and working conditions in other countries: France (a socialist republic), Germany and Canada all seem to have better work/life balance, strong productivity, remain in the G7 and the roof hasn't fallen in. I do wonder whether the rise of zero-hour contracts and the gig economy, the debate in the US over tipping as a basis for not paying a higher minimum wage, the lack of holidays and so on, might lead to more interest in either new labour movements or reinvigorating the old. What's interesting for me is the productivity data shows that many businesses that need knowledge workers to function make more money and grow faster if they allow more work/life balance, but the messaging from the leadership pushes back against it. RTO and 5 days working weeks seem to be less effective than nomadic/remote work and 4x10 or even 4x8 working weeks. AI should, in theory, make that even more possible, but I don't think that's how most in the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 or FTSE 100 want it to work out. It's going to be an interesting thing to watch/be part of in years to come, but history tells us transition moments are often violent: can that violence be avoided?
- brickfaced 1y ago[flagged]
- constantcrying 1y ago[flagged]
- DrScientist 1y ago> RTO and 5 days working weeks seem to be less effective than nomadic/remote work and 4x10 or even 4x8 working weeks It does depend on how you measure it. Given diligent workers you could argue that working from home is better for 'on task' work, than the distractions of the office - however some of those distractions create value for companies that's hard to measure. I've lost count of the number of times I've had the polite - how are you type conversation - via a chance encounter in the office, that has lead to an idea or new connection that moved something forward, ( have you tried X? Have you talked to Y ). These don't happen when you are on task working from home. For companies which are knowledge based - this sort of spontaneous creativity happens more when people are all together and less when people have to intentionally reach out. Companies aren't just the simple sum of the individuals and a lot of the creativity happens off-task.
- parpfish 1y agoWhy don’t labor issues resonate more with tech workers? I know that we’re not a monolith and are actually a heterogeneous mix of opinions, but there frequently talk about job dissatisfaction (career burnout, comically stingy equity grants, etc). But when organizing comes up, it’s usually treated with disdain because so many have bought into highly individualistic hustle-culture and the narrative that unions only exist to help lazy freeloaders
- DrillShopper 1y agoThe vast majority of tech workers I know come from comfortable middle class suburban backgrounds, so I'm not surprised they're anti-union and anti-labor.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoI will admit that the return to office push was the first time I actively considered forming a union or at least an org that would fight for that specific benefit. Covid changed me.
- SirFatty 1y agoA lot of "comfortable middle class suburban" folks I know are in the trades. Hardly anti-union with that group.
- gymbeaux 1y agoBut they entered their field with the union already established. Humans won’t fight for a damn thing.
- SirFatty 1y agoOk? That has nothing to do with my comment pointing out that "comfortable middle class suburban" != anti-union and anti-labor.
- DrillShopper 1y ago
- brickfaced 1y ago[flagged]
- amarcheschi 1y ago[flagged]
- brickfaced 1y ago[flagged]
- amarcheschi 1y ago[flagged]
- sriram_malhar 1y agoA the way we do that is to declare that someone is a communist (whether or not they are), then equate communism to terrorism, then treat it with McCarthyism or Napalm.
- tsimionescu 1y ago...with rights for all workers that today it would be unthinkable to even question? Or worse, women's suffrage? Or rights for people of color? There's no such thing as a (successful) social movement that doesn't employ some amount of violence - the police and the state more generally simply won't allow it.
- malcolmgreaves 1y agoI see you don’t understand what communism means. We’re talking about socialism here. Don’t let fear of what you haven’t bothered to learn rule your life.
- flmontpetit 1y ago[flagged]
- cruzcampo 1y ago
- booleandilemma 1y agoI wish we were off today in the US. This holiday makes me jealous of my international friends :)
- gymbeaux 1y ago[flagged]
- matkoniecz 1y ago> Tell me which rule I broke. hard to say without knowing what was there
- cruzcampo 1y agoThere's a lot of regressives here actively abusing the flagging functionality for censorship - ironically the same kind of people that'll tell you how much they care about freedom of speech (the unspoken part: but only if its speech they agree with)
- justinrubek 1y agoUnfortunately, I don't think this is a good place for discussion, and it isn't being addressed properly by the moderation team.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- flmontpetit 1y agoSocial media cracking down on leftist ideology is something that needs to be studied. They are very slick about it, and will usually find some way to make it appear legit (eg: deliberately interpreting obvious sarcasm as literally as possible and then hitting you with the content policy) but at the end of the day anybody can see that reactionaries can get away with calls to violence and war crime apologia while the rest of us have to be on their absolute best behaviour. It really goes to show you that capital has no ideology and will adopt whatever shape it needs to as the political climate changes. The United States government is now fascist, and therefore the investor class is also fascist.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y ago> Literally thousands of working people embraced the ideals of anarchism, which sought to put an end to all hierarchical structures Something that groups of people rarely seem to realize: you don't have to accept a binary. You don't have to put all hierarchical structure to an end. You don't have to do ONLY one thing or ONLY another. Life is about balance. Doesn't matter what side of a spectrum you're on. Conservatives, capitalists, evangelicals, anarchists, socialists, leftists. Each group is often dominated by a polarizing, binary force. Some fiery personality is agitating so hard for their point of view that they will only accept total capitulation and domination of their position. But that doesn't leave room for the middle way, compromise, a diversity of states of being. And so it creates conflict, even warfare. I've worked in both systems (capitalist hierarchy, anarchist non-hierarchy). Both are useful. Both suck. The reason they both suck, is their incapacity to accept that sometimes the "other way" is better to get a specific thing done. But they can't see outside their own limited model. They're 2-dimensional, when they need to be 3-D. They won't allow the "other way" in, because they're afraid it will taint "their way", and in some way ruin or defeat it. But if they did finally compromise and allow an alien system to co-habitate with their own, they'd see the truth. A composite of glass and plastic is better than either of them alone. Foreign organisms living in your gut make you healthier. It's the sum of the good properties, closely aligned, that contribute to a better whole.
- pessimizer 1y ago> Something that groups of people rarely seem to realize: you don't have to accept a binary. You don't have to put all hierarchical structure to an end. You don't have to do ONLY one thing or ONLY another. I do not understand your framing. You don't "have to" do anything. These are people talking about what they wish to do. > Life is about balance. Pseudo-Buddhist bullshit. You are lost in abstraction. These arguments are actually about material conditions, they're not just personality conflicts. Middle-class people lose contact with this fact, because they have no material worries; or rather their material conditions are simply tied to whether their employer believes they are profitable to employ. Of course middle-class people have to "compromise." Or rather they have to paint their total and continuous submission as a compromise, complain about the inflexibility of their bosses, and dream of one day having the leverage to order people around themselves. Arguing that the best solution is in the middle is just the moderation fallacy. It's not profound, it's the law of averages. It's the kind of thing you can say regardless of subject, an invariant, that will always make people who believe in the law of averages believe you said something profound.
- graemep 1y agoMay day has much older, possibly separate, origins as a celebration of the start of summer.
- stuaxo 1y agoIt's been a long time, and the 8 hour day was a good advance back then. Now, we need a 4 day week (1 day less work) at the same pay, just as back then they moved from 10-16 hour working days to 8, for the same pay at the end of the week.
- OJFord 1y agoAs usual for the US, this is really The Brief Origins of US May Day, or charitably perhaps the socialist May Day, and otherwise May Day has its origins centuries before the existence of the US. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/history/the-history-of-may-day https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/history/the-histor...
- dang 1y agoAll: Hacker News is for curious conversation. Bashing people who hold opposing views with harsh phrases driven by pre-existing emotion is not only not curious conversation, it poisons it. Unfortunately, quite a few of you have been doing that in this thread. That's not ok, and no, the topic does not excuse it—on the contrary: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) If you aren't feeling curious, or can't post thoughtfully and substantively, please take a break until you are and can.
- TimTheTinker 1y agoI think modern people in the West, and especially people who are against communism, may not realize that Marx's ideas took hold so forcefully because they seemed to provide a way for everyday workers to fight back against the working conditions that arose following the industrial revolution. (Charles Dickens's novels provide a lot of detail from the perspective of the working class.) One example: in retrospect, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia resulted in much death and starvation. But the people of Russia in the 1920s were fed up with the working conditions and effective two-lane legal state in Russia (i.e. the law bound poor people and protected rich people) that had existed for hundreds of years under the Tsars. As far as I can tell, rule of law is always the best answer to injustice - a law that reflects the will of the people, binds all equally, and protects all equally. But when injustice has persisted for a while, people can be vulnerable to ideologues and ideologies that can take advantage of the situation, create a new ruling class, and cause an overcorrection.
- computerthings 1y ago[dead]
- vidialaxmi 1y ago[dead]
- susiecambria 1y agoI wonder how many people, tech included, know someone in a union. Similarly, I've always been curious about working for the government. When I was in high school and even college, going to work meant private sector even though half my family (uncles, grandparents) worked for the government. I know for sure that not knowing union members and not truly knowing that family worked in government influenced my views and some choices.