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If you live in North America, you might have gotten a day off today owing to the success of the ruling class in banishing the spectre of labour history from the minds of the toiling masses. You should have actually got May 1st off.

Here are a few drive-by links:

Nihilistic_kid talks about racist and nativist sentiments in the labour movement…and speculative fiction community.*

Race and class have always been tied together, and only fools and bosses try to separate them out. For a while, Debs was a fool. For a much longer period, the labor movement was Fool Central, and there is still plenty of foolishness to go around. When assisting in the ultimately failed attempt to organize some Manhattan bicycle messengers into the Teamsters in the 1990s, I saw that some the black and Latino messengers got “information packets”about the union from their employer, in which it explained that labor unions were much like the Ku Klux Klan and held down minorities and women. That’s a hard charge to beat, but is much harder when it’s true. Naturally, in our case it was false — though there were plenty of reactionary characters in the Teamsters, especially those who were collecting big checks to “organize”…nothing. They got theirs already, and this sort of race-bating, not effectively answered as a matter of principle, helped doom the organization drive. Racism and chauvinism split movements far more decisively than flag-waving and chest-thumping about class to the exclusion of race helps movements. That’s why the labor movement had to learn to shuck off the ideologies of racism and nativism — a lesson it keeps having to learn, actually.

Speaking of the Ku Klux Klan, did you hear what happened to them in Knoxville?

“White Power!” the Nazi’s [sic] shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.

Finally, the most recent update to the I.W.W. vs. Starbucks is in the New York Daily News.

“We don’t think people should spend their hard-earned money on a company that has no respect for its workers,” said union organizer Daniel Gross, 28, outside the Manhattan courtroom where the hearings are taking place.

“Any time workers organized, the company responded with a vicious anti-union campaign,” Gross added.

The charges stem from incidents at four Starbucks locations in the city. The labor relations panel, an independent federal agency that mediates labor disputes, found enough merit in 30 of the union charges to take the company to court.

And with that, I am off to mourn the end of summer.

* I don’t really know the context of the latter. Apparently, I need to do more reading.