As is so often the case nowadays, I had
to be reminded by a glance at my Facebook feed that as I write this,
it is the May long weekend back “home” in Canada, a country I
haven’t seen for more than a decade.
I couldn’t even remember the official
name of the holiday; had to look it up on Wikipedia. (It’s the
Victoria Day weekend.) More and more, the Internet is my only link to
my homeland.
But there is much more than that to the
disconnect I experience between my old home and my adopted one,
something that occurred to me during a much better-known May holiday,
on the first of the month: International Workers’ Day. Here in
Thailand, it is a public holiday known in English as Labour Day. In
Canada and the United States, that name is applied to a completely
different holiday on the first Monday of September.
In the US, the difference derives from
the reluctance of president Grover Cleveland to recognize a workers’
holiday that commemorated a massive act of anti-worker police
brutality, the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886. But while the
September workers’ holiday in Canada was not officially declared
until 1894, it commemorates an earlier, Canada-only event that
eventually led to the repeal of anti-union legislation. Outside
Quebec, May 1 has never been very important to the Canadian labour
movement.
It is unfair to disparage the North
American Labour Days as “fake” simply because they do not
coincide with the internationally preferred date, but the dichotomy
has come to symbolize for me the great gulf between the lot of
workers in East Asia and those in North America.
On the most recent May Day, there were
sporadic protests in some North American cities, variously viewed as
a resurgence or a death rattle of the Occupy movement. While the
goals of Occupy are noble, they do seem to be too little too late.
Wealth and power have gradually shifted from workers to a tiny
oligopoly centred in the towers of the financial industry, and to
profit-addicted mega-corporations that happily export jobs to other
countries where workers are easier to exploit, while elected
governments in Canada and the US look the other way, and the people
who elected them are bought off by the resultant cheap goods in
Wal-Mart.
What we have in North America is
massive, probably irreversible, erosion of workers’ well-being. The
word “erosion” derives from the Latin rodere, “to gnaw”;
the word “rodent” derives from the same Latin root. The image
presented is one of rats in $1,000 suits gnawing away ordinary
people’s jobs, savings and pensions, and North Americans for the
first time face the spectre of their children’s futures being less
prosperous and rewarding than their own.
This could have been avoided. If
workers had lived up to the spirit of Labour Day and marched and
struck to preserve their rights, as their forebears had faced up to
police truncheons and bullets and tear gas to win those rights,
instead of merely using the first Monday of September as a last
chance for a summer picnic with the family, if they had paid
attention to what was going on around them, seen beyond the
pro-consumer hype of free-trade agreements, had resisted the
emasculation of the media by corporate monopolies, and had not
squandered the great gift of the ballot box by electing anti-worker
governments that allowed university tuition to rise beyond their
children’s reach without accumulating huge debts, allowed banks to
cook up “complex instruments” with which to sabotage the economic
system while stealing from pension plans and enriching the oligarchy,
and weakened unions.
But the wealth we in the “developed”
world used to enjoy before the Wall/Bay Street mafiosi plundered it
didn’t come out of thin air, nor was it “generated” by our own
hard work, at least not entirely. Much of it was stolen in the first
place from the “developing” world. That word “developing”
began as a euphemism, but in the process of robbing their own middle
class, the Western oligarchs and lapdog politicians have
inadvertently enriched the East. And so we have “emerging
economies”.
And here we find another Latin word,
mergere, “to dip”, which gives rise to both “emerge”
and “submerge”. In the past, Asia was forced underwater by the
European colonizers and its own corrupt mandarins who enabled the
exploiters. Now, old-fashioned colonization has vanished from East
Asia, most recently in 1999 when Portugal returned Macau to Chinese
rule, two years after the sun set on British Hong Kong. Globalization
was supposed to be the new colonization, making theft of resources
and enslavement of people more efficient through technology and
deregulation.
To some extent, that has turned out to
be the case, but there have been unintended consequences. China has
become the new leader of Asia, and may soon take over the world. It
has done this by manipulating the West’s two great modern economic
systems, capitalism and communism, into a unique form of planned
economy that has used Asian values (including corruption and
brutality) to amass great power, while real wages of its huge
population have gone up notably (admittedly from a very low base) at
the same time as those in the West are dwindling. Underpinning this
is the unsustainable debt that is rocking the foundations of Europe
and North America, of which China is the main creditor.
Similar economic shifts have occurred
elsewhere in the region, but much of Southeast Asia, while in various
measures inspired by and benefiting from the “Chinese miracle”,
has departed from that model by embracing democracy. Again, these are
democracies with Asian characteristics, which means primarily that
they brook a level of corruption officially frowned on by the West,
though as the collusion between the corporate/financial mafia and
political leadership becomes more blatant, Western frowning is now
increasingly shrugged off as mere hypocrisy.
In the early 1980s, while I was working
for the British Columbia Ministry of Highways trying to scrape
together enough money to go back to college after Milton Friedman’s
economic theories started destroying jobs everywhere – and had
dried up opportunities in what had previously passed for my career –
the right-wing provincial government tabled a sweeping set of
anti-labour bills branded as “restraint”, very similar to the
“austerity” plague that has infected most Western economies these
days. This inspired something called the Solidarity Movement, as unionists around the province rebelled against the government.
A mass rally was called in Vancouver’s
Empire Stadium, and the government initiated a campaign of threats
against any provincial employees who attended. Many of us, including
me, ignored the threats and exercised our right of free assembly.
Government goons came to my workplace to see if anyone was missing;
my boss told the goons I was indeed absent but on a legitimate “flex
time” day off (which was true) and that he neither knew nor cared
how I spent my free time (which was only partly true). About 45,000
attended the rally.
Union bosses met with the government
and won some concessions, averting a general strike in exchange; but
it was a last gasp, for the Decline of the Western Empire initiated
by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was well under way. Canadian
workers kept their head above water better than many others, but in
the end its was submergere for all but the privileged Rodentia
order.
The Solidarity Movement took its name
from the concurrent Solidarność in Poland. Of course the two were
very different; one group fighting to obtain rights from a Communist
dictatorship and the other fighting to prevent a right-wing holocaust
from stealing the rights they already had. In the same way, the
modern Occupy movement claims inspiration from the Arab Spring, but
the needs and aspirations of the two are very different, and it
remains to be seen whether either will achieve anything in the end.
Meanwhile here in Southeast Asia,
workers are emerging as a force. It’s early days, and just like in
the West, a well-funded right-wing minority is wielding its power to
keep working people down. In Thailand, the Chamber of Commerce fights
tooth and claw against the “populist” measures of the Shinawatra
family brought to power by the once-oppressed rural majority of the
North and Northeast regions, while the elitist Democrats hold power
in the capital, Bangkok. Over the past few years we have seen a
military coup and deadly riots, and the once-lively media have run
for cover. But more sober observers than the Chamber and its allies
in the Federation of Thai Industries recognize that Thailand is
empowered by its workers, not its corrupt elite and certainly not by
its “revered institutions”. Parasitical industries like the
garment trade are fleeing for greener pastures in still-oppressed
Cambodia and Myanmar, while the automotive and electronics industries
flourish – and provide decent-paying jobs and career opportunities.
Back in the ’80s, we thought we had
it all, but our leaders let us down. To turn back the tide, to repair
the erosion, would take a lot of effort and willpower. I think it’s
too late “back home”, but this old leftie sees reason to hope in
emerging Asia. That hope will be dashed, again, if the workers of
East Asia drop the ball like we did.
