DemocracyNow.org – Hundreds of thousands of people across the world marked May Day on Tuesday by filling the streets and demanding better working conditions, greater job security and improved quality of life. May Day, also known as International Worker’s Day, resonated with protesters from Spain to Bangladesh to Iraq and throughout the United States. “This is brutal and dictatorial,” says Mariano, a member of Spain’s General Union of Workers who denounced his country’s conservative government for recently announcing job cuts in the health and education sectors as well as tax increases.
Several major unions joined with immigrant rights activists and tens of thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York City for a massive rally that marched to Wall Street. “I’m here today to support the efforts of May Day in fighting as a coalition to protect working families, struggling families and individuals — quite frankly, known as the 99 percent — to make sure that our issues, our causes are not forgotten and that we are not demonized,” says Barbara Ingram-Edmonds of District Council 37 AFSCME. Throughout the day, teach-ins, pickets and wildcat protests took place across the city. We also speak with Baruch University professor Jackie DiSalvo about the history of May Day, dating back to the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago on May 1, 1886.
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