EDIN URJAN KUKAVICA AND WHAT ABOUT THE OTHERS...

By Edin Urjan Kukavica

...not to mention the remaining days of May and the remaining months?

Almost on this day five years ago, I wrote: “It’s May Day! Labour Day. In Wikipedia it says it’s “The day when in 1886, about 40,000 workers protested in Chicago, demanding goals symbolized by 3 eights: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours of cultural education, and when the police intervened, killing six and wounding about 50 workers. Many protesters were arrested, and the strike leaders were brought to court. Five were sentenced to death, and three to long-term imprisonment. In memory of the bloodshed in Chicago, at the 1st Congress of the Second International in 1889, it was decided that on that day, every year, workers’ protests would be held, so that from the following year (1890), May 1st became the international day of general solidarity of the working class... During the following years, workers in Western countries, with the mediation of trade unions and agreements with employers, or the state, achieved notable successes in the fight for their rights, so social tensions were calmed over time. In Eastern countries, workers’ movements were controlled by Bolshevik, or communist parties, which formally advocated social justice, but workers were exploited even more than in the West. Low wages, forced and extended work due to alleged state interests, with strictly controlled trade unions, were the basic features of democracy and any workers’ self-organization in those countries.”

In a primitive era, over a hundred years ago, trade unions – on behalf of workers – sought to introduce standards in the USA, at least an eight-hour workday. When this promise was not fulfilled, trade unions initiated a general strike with a bloody outcome. From a Bosnian perspective, these sacrifices – like, for that matter, many others – make no sense at all because, apart from the fact that nothing changed for them, more than a hundred years later, labour is more humiliated, and workers are more disenfranchised than ever before. In failed economies like ours, with an indeterminable number of unemployed and pathetic employment programs that “give the unemployed the right and opportunity to look for work themselves” – as the director of the Federal Employment Bureau said the other evening – a worker is a means by which an employer obtains capital. And not a valued means, because there are too many unemployed, which gives the employer the “right” not to value the one who brings him profit, because “if you don’t want it, there’s someone else who will.”

Trade unions have devolved in those hundred years: trade unions do not exist in private companies, and the so-called “branch” unions, in most cases, instead of advocating for workers’ and human rights, have turned into a misanthropic collaborator of the authorities, sacrificing even latent influence for crumbs from the table of the powerful. It seems that trade unionists had more consciousness in the 19th century, when American workers demanded the introduction of the eight-hour workday standard. The prophetic words of the German immigrant August Spies, spoken in Chicago: “let’s stick together, or we won’t succeed” still sound as relevant as they are utopian.

Interestingly, May Day first began to be traditionally celebrated in Mexico with grand festivities, and some American trade unionists in the second half of the last century went to Mexico to see how this holiday was celebrated in an organized manner. Upon their return, they stated that they were ashamed of the American disregard for this day, which in the USA was associated with communism, partly because May 1st, since the October Revolution, was also celebrated as Labour Day in the former USSR. This is the main reason why Americans celebrate Labor Day – instead of May 1st – on the first Monday in September. Once, the scent of May lilac, on May 1st, used to suppress the smell of lamb and ćevapi. The working class would flee the cities into nature, and breweries would increase their production quotas for their workers weeks in advance. Once, the entire political elite would rush to parks where citizens came for May Day portions of free beans, to pose for cameras and television crews, with or without red carnations in their lapels. Today, even that is not interesting to them. Hated faces have recently been announcing new measures in favour of employment or promising that they will solve all the workers’ problems if they come to power, but none of that has anything to do with May 1st, but with elections. Workers will be dealt with – if at all – only one day, and tomorrow, the underpaid will have a workday longer than eight hours, and the rest – the unemployed and civil servants – will have to do nothing all day again.

How does this date in Bosnia and Herzegovina differ from April 30th or May 3rd? By the fact that the economic system in our country is more like feudalism than capitalism, or by the fact that morbid imagination colloquially calls it “when the lambs fall silent,” associating it with the number of young sheep that will be sacrificed and eaten that day in the name of idleness. May Day will be celebrated in this way mainly by the unemployed, underpaid, (for wages) deprived, and dissatisfied; the rest will mark it; they will take the opportunity, combine two non-working days with the weekend, and travel somewhere to rest their heads and bodies. Exactly one year ago, I wrote: “I cannot help but... reflect on the short collective annual leave on the occasion of the so-called Labour Day. Only exceptionally uninformed people can be surprised by the lack of initiative or even any interest in organizing some form of workers’ protests. Besides the known facts that the largest monolithic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina consist of the unemployed (over 550,000) and pensioners (over 350,000), workers in this country are a true rarity. Almost an incident. Reduced to a subcritical mass, exhausted to the extreme not only by non-payment of wages and non-payment of contributions, but above all by the constantly looming threat of possible and certain job loss in case of any reaction against the employer’s mood, but above all thanks to the futility of all previous protests organized by their anemic, bureaucratized, but also suspiciously inactive “trade unions,” workers neither know with whom nor against whom to protest. The systemic and systematic devaluation, destruction, and finally privatization of the capacities of all branches of production from basic, through construction, to defence industry, entrusting their fates to more or less “controversial businessmen,” mostly prominent members and/or sponsors of parties for which they voted hoping for a better tomorrow, decapitated and castrated, workers have completely lost their self-awareness as a serious force capable of causing, initiating, and conditioning change.”

We face an election (or elections): will we continue to wait for the next May Day to conclude that we are (still) being exploited and not paid, or will we, with a hefty bill, collect it from the beginning of autumn?”

Obviously, five years later, there was no need to write anything new...