The May 1 Movement (M1M) is a coalition of working class organizations and progressive allies, with representation from various sectors, including organized labour, youth, media, women, human rights, migrant and various ethnic communities.
M1M formed in 2009, “the initial idea was bringing out May 1st as international workers day” says Marco Luciano of Migrante Ontario.
“We would like to share our experience of May Day, but also be able to learn from the worker struggles of other communities.”
Participants of the Coalition include: Barrio Nuevo, Bayan Canada, BASICS Free Community Newsletter, Canada-El Salvador Action Network (CELSAN), CASA Salvador Allende, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) – Toronto, Latin American Trade Unionist Coalition (LATUC), Migrante-Ontario, Progressive Nepali Forum of the Americas, Tamil Resource Centre, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1000A, Victor Jara Cultural Group, Women United Against Imperialism
For our BASICS May Day issue, we interviewed several of the representatives of the various mass organizations that are part of the M1M coalition to share their struggles and why they are a part of M1M. The interviews are below.
Barrio Nuevo // Pablo Vivanco
Barrio Nuevo is an organization in the Latin community here in Toronto, comprised of people of Latin American descent. We see a commonality between our people in terms of cultural heritage, but also with our conditions here as immigrants, as working class people.
Census data has verified that the majority of Latin Americans in Canada have lower wages and have higher rates of unemployment despite having higher levels of education. This indicates systemic oppression of our community.
We strongly feel that the answer to the systemic oppression of the Latin community lies, not necessarily asking government to do everything, but in trying to bring our community together to talk and try to find those solutions ourselves. We’ve worked with a number of people in the community organizations to bring people together to start discussing what are the issues affecting people on housing, on employment, on education.
We’ve worked to highlight some of those issues as well as try to engage our community in terms of elections. Not in terms of trying to get people to vote one way or another, but to get our community to start actually working together to discuss what the issues are. We are seeing more often that elections become less about engaging in the real bread and butter issues or things that are actually relevant to people’s lives and end up being ridiculous exercises in talking about who is a better leader among four guys who don’t spend any time in the places where people live. We wanted to begin those discussions.
We’ve also worked on campaigns around issues of police brutality. For example, this year, a youth of Dominican descent died following an altercation with the police. Recently the coroners report confirmed that the youth died of asphyxia due to that interaction with the police. The police were acquitted and resolved of any wrong doing in that.
One of the other things we worked on this year is the issue around of why so many Latin American youth drop out of school and why there is such poor representation of Latin Americans in universities. These things signal that there are systemic issues that our community actually needs to overcome in order for people to advance themselves, in order for the community to advance themselves. And things that signal that our community is on the bad end of some significant social injustice.
May 1 is a date that resonates with our community because it continues to be a focal point of struggles back home. In Latin America where people recognize that it is the day when social movements live, people go into the streets regardless of what government is in there, regardless of whether they are permitted or not, regardless of whether they are going to face repression or not.
We’re involved [in M1M] not only because of the significance it has for people back in Latin America, but because we feel at a time when we are starting to see an unprecedented attack on every sector of working people (immigrant, non-status, unionized, and even those with historically the most protection and privilege) May 1 can act as something that unifies.
We see that the situation in the world is getting more difficult for pretty much everybody, everywhere. But at the same time, its not bleak: there’s hope. May Day is a day when all those groups can come together and realize that we all have commonalities and that we have a common adversary. Now it’s our time to act; it’s our time to come together to go out into the streets, just like people in Egypt, Palestine, Venezuela, Nepal and other places have been doing.
CASA Salvador Allende // Manena D.
CASA Salvador Allende is a grassroots non-profit organization that works primarily with the Chilean community, although the organization is open to working with others in the Latin-American community.
Casa Salvador Allende Toronto was created honouring Salvador Allende’s legacy of envisioning a world focused on social change, a world where there is justice for all.
Space for participation is given to members of the Chilean-Canadian community and Latin America to identify commonalities that allow us to work in building the Canada we want.
Right now, we are participating in a community education project. This five year project aims to provide an arts-based education program for children between the ages of 3 and 14 originating from Latin America. The project is in response to the shortage of resources and programs available to the Latin American community.
We work towards and promote solidarity activities for respect of human rights, social justice and democracy in Chile and the world.
The current Chilean government is not a people friendly government; it is corporation friendly. Similar to the struggles we face in Canada today, in Chile there is a shift towards privatization, and there is an anti-union climate.
There is a lot of social injustice in Chile. There are a lot of people that have been displaced due to the earthquake. The current government has failed to help the most vulnerable members in the community. Yet, after the earthquake, corporations have benefited from incentives to rebuild their enterprises and have made a profit at the expense of the marginalized population.
We have started a watchdog movement where we are keeping tabs on what is happening Chile. The Chilean-Canadian community in Toronto has had fundraisers to support Chileans victims of the earthquake, such as Caleta Tubul, a small forgotten fishing community in the south of Chile. We campaigned to buy fishing equipment so that the community could return to work and regain their dignity and their ability to rebuild.
It is very important for CASA Salvador Allende to be a part of the M1M and to put some pressure on the Canadian government to recognize May Day as an important day to celebrate the labour movement.
It came to me as a complete surprise to find out that in Canada May Day is not even talked about. For Chileans, May Day is a very important day when we celebrate workers’ accomplishments and we reflect on the struggles yet to be resolved.
United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Canada Local 1000A // Leanne Wilkins
The United Food and Commercial Workers Canada Local 1000A consists of 30,000 members and about half of them belong to the Loblaw’s group—so Canadian superstores such as No Frills.
Our members face a constant demand by the employers for concessions in their collective agreements. Wages is number one. Benefits are up there. Schedule language—employers basically want to abolish any seniority clauses in the work place. They want to have more control over health and safety, which is a huge concern for us.
On average, a Loblaws contract is above minimum wage for the 5+ year employee. So they have a lot to lose after years of trying to get to that point in collective bargaining. To have it basically stripped away is a slap in the face, since the company is basically profiting off their backs.
Loblaws’ point of view is: we don’t care about you as a worker, we care about our bottom line—we pay you too much compared to our non-union competitors like Wal-Mart and Sobeys and so you need to go back down to minimum wages.
Instead of tearing away at the contracts and lowering wages for members, we are trying to get out there to unionize the non unionized retail grocery store workers like the Sobeys, Wal-Marts and Price Choppers.
Many of our members, in their home countries, celebrated workers’ day. And really, international workers’ day should be celebrated by all workers, regardless of whether you are unionized or not. It shouldn’t be just for organized labour in September. It should be for all workers.
We find that workers are often pitted against each other—organized unionized against non union, full time versus part time, all of those things and instead of bowing to that divide and conquer attitude, we should all be coming together. And so being involved in the M1M coalition is definitely one way of doing that.
Women United Against Imperialism (WUAI) // Ashley M.
Women United Against Imperialism is a women’s collective comprised mostly of working women. Many of the members of our organization are migrant workers and working class women with issues with status, precarious work, state repression, and policies that negatively affect our community here in Canada.
We are also faced with the effects of colonialism, violence, patriarchy, forced migration, poverty, unsafe working conditions, and racism amongst others.
We bring out the issues that many of us face by organizing under an anti-imperialist feminist lens. Our focus over the course of the past few months has been on violence against women (in regards to state and personal) and our last forum was focused on confronting precarious work.
In the past, we have focused on issues such as war and occupation, the right to status and systemic repression of imperialist and non-imperialist nations—all of which interconnect with precarious work and violence against women.
We continue to focus on these issues and building alliances with different communities locally and internationally.
The initial reason why we joined M1M is because we are a working class women’s collective and wanted to highlight the importance of recognizing international workers’ day as international day of solidarity with other workers. This was one of the biggest pushes for us to join.
It’s important to work with other communities to join together in unity, connecting us with a lot of other communities that make up the thread of Toronto and all over the world. May Day is important and celebrated all over the world and it’s important to continue to keep that flame alive.
Migrante Ontario // Marco Luciano
Migrante Canada is a chapter of Migrante International which is based in the Philippines. It has chapters in 100 countries. Migrante Canada itself is an alliance of 16 organizations from BC to New Brunswick.
The members of Migrante are Filipinos. We do a lot of work with Filipino migrants and immigrants on migration and settlement issues.
A lot of our members are caregivers here in the greater Toronto area. We do a lot of work on the changes to the live in caregiver program and also in the bigger temporary foreign worker program.
Because Migrante is an advocacy organization, we don’t have the capacity to provide services such as legal matters. So we do a lot of work with progressive lawyers and unions who can provide these services. One of the projects we have is the unionization of care givers in Ontario.
Another important aspect of our work is to help Filipinos form their organizations and affiliate with Migrante. To affiliate with Migrante, there is a basis of unity: you must work to address the rights and welfare of Filipinos here and also understand the root causes of migration – that migration here is not a choice, but we are forced out of our country.
Filipinos that are here today did not choose to be here. Because of economic conditions in the Philippines, lack of jobs, lack of industries where people can work, lack of subsistence farms, people are forced to go abroad to look for work. Currently there are almost 4,000 Filipinos leaving the Philippines everyday. There are 8 million Filipinos abroad, living and working in 198 countries.
We thought that it is really important for folks in Canada to understand the importance of May Day. In the history of our struggles in the Philippines, we are brought up [understanding] that May 1 came out of the struggle of international working people.
Coming here and seeing that Labour Day was celebrated in September, I was confused. In Canada, Labour Day is a parade. It’s not even a march.
In the Philippines, people come out not because it is not a working day, but because it is a time where the people’s issues are really brought out. People take to the streets because there are demands by the people. In Canada, the whole message that Labour Day is a workers’ day is watered down.
Progressive Nepali Forum in Americas (PNEFA) // Mukti
PNEFA brings Nepalis in North America into its network and tries to raise voice against discriminations and autocracies and for pro-people activities, pro-national sovereignty activities and pro-democratic activities.
PNEFA has opined over major incidences in Nepal (such as Nepali border encroachment and brutalities, insubordination of pro-monarch army to the legitimate government) through press releases and submission of memoranda to concerned embassies.
PNEFA is involved in M1M because May Day raises voices related to human rights and democratic issues related to the largest and productive section of society—the labouring class.
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