May Day in occupied Haiti

From the blog of cartoonist Stephanie McMillan in the USA:

Help Support May Day 2012 in Haiti!

April 19, 2012 at 9:07 am

Following is a letter from a member of Batay Ouvriye (Workers’ Struggle) requesting support for their activities for May Day. I’ve volunteered to collect donations for them through my Paypal account.

Please pass this along to friends and contacts who might want to contribute.

Thank you for any support you can provide!
–Stephanie

* * *

Batay Ouvriye, (Worker’s Struggle, www.batayouvriye.org), a labor movement in Haiti, is planning a series of activities to commemorate International Worker’s Day (May Day), 2012.

The objectives of these activities are to:

· Continue to build the workers federation known as May First Trade Union Federation/BO.
· Reinforce the combative capacity of the trade unions inside BO (so that members are better prepared to fight for worker’s interests).
· Plan a national meeting of all union delegates.
· Elect the new executive committee of the newly formed union SOTA/BO. (Sendika Ouvriye Tekstil ak Abiman, Creole for Textile and Clothing Workers’ Union).
· Organize a march on May Day in Port-au-Prince.
· Organize marches throughout Haiti of sweatshop factory workers, peasants, and agricultural workers.

To organize these series of events, urgent funding is needed and we ask for your financial support and solidarity. It is not easy for workers to organize themselves across great distances in a land which is constantly attacked by natural disasters, foreign intervention, and brutal regimes. The Haitian workers, who are constantly in danger of repression, ask for your help and support. Any contribution which you can make will benefit Haitian workers in their struggle to better their conditions. Thank you for your help!

Please send contributions to the Paypal account of supporter Stephanie McMillan: here.

May Day’s Radical History: What Occupy is Fighting for This May 1st.
Jacob Remes, AlterNet: “The history of May 1 as a workers’ holiday is intimately tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the labor movement, and to the long tradition of American anarchism…. Yet May 1 lives on, and indeed has been rejuvenated in the United States in the past few years…. Immigrants, mostly from Latin America, had brought May 1 back to its birthplace, and in so doing they resurrected its history as a day specifically for immigrant workers”: here.