The hollow ritual of May Day

I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that the observance of the International Workers Day, popularly known as May Day, marked on May 1 every year by workers in at least 66 countries where it is a public holiday, is rapidly degenerating into a hollow ritual in our country. The workers do not appear to look forward to it any more. The public is blissfully nonchalant about it. 

The union leaders and workers who take part in the annual parade wearing white t-shirts and black pairs of trousers and black skirts, once regarded as the symbol of the workers’ fighting spirit and radicalism, are no longer the poster children of workers’ strength, power and unity. They look more like spent men and women passing through an assembly line of a ritual that has lasted for some 100 years and is beginning to fray at the edges. My sneaking feeling is that the day and the parade do not make much sense to them anymore.

We do not need to look into the entrails of a chicken to offer some informed guesses as to why the most important day in the life of workers in this country is increasingly treated like a day not worth remembering by those who should remember and celebrate it. I don’t think this has anything to do with the famous explanatory phrase for our behaviour called the Nigerian factor.

May Day was never meant to be marked by mere ritualistic parade of leaders and members of the various workers’ unions. It was always meant to be much more than a ritual. It was always meant to remind workers of their long and sometimes brutal struggle with their employers for better pay and better working conditions – and the greater challenges ahead. It was always intended to remember May 1, 1886, when 300,000 workers in 13,000 businesses in US pressing for a healthier eight-hour working day, poured out to the streets on strike. The workers eventually won.

  It was always meant to do two important things: a) draw attention of the public, the government and the employers of labour to the mere existence of those who draw the water and hew the wood; b) demonstrate the power and the unity of workers; and thus tell employers of labour there is a limit to their mindless exploitation of workers. 

More importantly, May Day helps workers to renew their faith in the power of their unions to effect changes in their lives of hard scrabble lived mostly on the slow lanes of social progress. May Day provides the union leaders a unique opportunity to address the workers and the country.

We knew May Day as a day of unusual rhetorical fire storm that shook heaven and hell in equal measure. Union leaders spewed the lava. They looked and sounded almost impregnable. Those who are old enough would recall the leadership of Alhaji Hassan Sunmonu, who led the workers to battle from the front. Nor are we likely to forget so soon the days of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, the immediate past governor of Edo State, our most articulate union leader so far whose fighting spirit had no equal in the long struggle by workers and their leaders to earn the basic right to decent life and living. 

The stormy petrel rode on the crest waves of his spirited fight with the authorities over the objection of our workers to the frequent increases in petroleum prices to Government House in Benin City. He became our first labour leader to join the enemy camp. He must have borrowed a leaf from his late countryman, Tom Borha, who used to say he was with the masses but that he needed to be on the other side to know what they were doing. 

I do not know how Comrade Adams related to and treated civil servants and local government workers in the state but it would not be entirely foolish to suggest that the former champion of the rights and the welfare of workers could not have polluted the water after drinking to his fill. 

There is a degree of placidity on the labour front. I do not suppose our labour unions are without fire-breathing leaders. They are just not breathing fire any more. Perhaps, the times have changed. But it would be cynical to suggest that the lot of the workers has dramatically improved such that fire breathing by union leaders has become blasé. Nor do I think the labour leaders are tired of fighting for the rights and the welfare of our workers. They are still fighting with the blunt weapons that have seen better days: strikes. Almost everything they have tried to do to make our workers live rather than exist has brought the workers nothing but more problems. They fought the government to a standstill on petroleum product prices. Something called deregulation has helped to provide peace on that front.

Our labour leaders forced the government to accept a minimum wage of N18,000 per month many years ago. It looked like a living wage then. But as we speak, a good number of the states are still unable to pay the minimum wage. Labour has not been able to ensure the full implementation of the minimum wage. It was foolish of labour leaders to suggest the unattainable: N48,000 monthly minimum wage. 

My take is that May Day has gradually degenerated into a ritual because there are no more controversial issues that pit the workers and their leaders against the government as was the case with the periodic increases in the prices of petroleum products.

Our labour leaders should trawl the society in search of new and sensible challenges. Not minimum wage because they have gone down that path before several times and it has proved an albatross on the neck of the labour leaders every time; not strikes because strikes are old and worn out weapons that routinely exacerbate the problems of workers. 

What then?