Workers are still in chains

They’ve become replicants of the very system they oppose.

- Terry Bell

For most trade unions and worker movements around the world, yesterday's May Day was celebrated more with a whimper than a bang. The widespread jubilation, pride and optimism of the fairly recent past was missing.

Times have changed. The future of work and, therefore, the future of trade unions, is uncertain. The gains of recent years are threatened or are being clawed back.

There are also echoes now from over the past century of the rise of authoritarianism fuelled by racist, religious and even linguistic nationalisms, which have morphed in some regions into ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter. The prime sufferers, once again, are the workers.

And it is the resilience and fortitude of often brutalised and exploited workers who organised to become a bulwark against greater deprivations visited upon the poor and dispossessed that May Day traditionally celebrates.

Theirs was a long, hard and often bloody road that needs to be studied and understood by anyone hoping for a better and more democratic world.