Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
May is the love month for poets and pagans. Fertility is fragile and short. Make the most of the opportunity, and make that dance around the old Maypole count. I'm a fan of the month, and its pagan principle.
The first day in month of May has a much different meaning for people in many parts of the world. This is the day to commemorate International Workers Day. As in so many cases, the United States does it differently. In America the homage to labor gets a spot in September. The commemoration to work doesn't even get an official calendar day. The holiday gets the rotating first Monday of the month as just another three day weekend binge for RVers and off-roaders to celebrate the end of summer. Americans don't seem bothered that summer always has at least two weeks to go officially before ending its seasonal cycle. Call it the leaving-the-game-in-the-seventh-inning syndrome.
Another curious element of America, and Canada for that matter, putting the labor holiday at the ninth month might just go back to fertility in an artificially perverse sort of way. We start every year on the first day of January, and the American Labor Day times out on the calendar as a ritualized end moment of an annual female pregnancy term, which becomes an odd pairing of what the word labor might represent in the back recesses of the North American mind. Maybe this helps explains why workers in this country continue get less and less of the economic stick.
I am reminded again this last month of the terrible price labor in this country has paid over the past several decades with the latest mining disasters in West Virgina and Kentucky, which ended with both the government and the mining union's failure to protect their workers from criminal corporate behavior.
Mt first recollection of any mining disaster goes back to the Sixties, and the Bee Gees. When I first heard the Gibb brothers on the radio in the mid to late 1960s I thought it was the Beatles under the pseudonym, Bee Gees. The Bee Gees first song to reach North American shores was the New York Mining Disaster 1941. The song was not about an actual mining disaster that occurred in New York, but was a fictionalized account of one that took place in a small village of Aberfan in Wales. This disaster was particularly cruel in that of the 144 persons who lost their lives 116 were children between the ages of 7 and 10.
A mining disaster has been determined to mean that at least five persons lost their lives in an accident. Just an arbitrary number when you stop and think about. The most recent Kentucky coal mining accident where two miners lost their lives is not considered a disaster. It is only a disaster, I guess, if you are related to one of those who perished. This April has seen a coal mining disaster in West Virginia and a coal mining accident in Kentucky. Thirty-one miners have lost their lives, and at both mines safety regulations were routinely violated and the labor union was nowhere to be found. It seems the mining union has been driven out of the work place.
Think about racking up 639 government health and safety violations and still doing business-as-usual to kill 29 people at your facility. This is exactly what Massey Energy Co. did for the past year and change. The mine that Alliance Resource Partners from Tulsa, OK owns in Kentucky where the accident claimed two lives has had more than 40 closure notices from state and federal agencies since 2009. This particular mine also was cited 840 times for health and safety violations. You have to ask what the health and safety rules at this stage of the economic game really mean in this country. Certainly does not mean much to those who lost their lives, or to their surviving family members. Certainly means nothing to the public at large who shrug these disasters off just another crawl on the 24/7 talk TV drone.
Here in Kern County most of the work disasters occur in the oil refineries and wells. Kern Oil & Refining Company recently settled a local lawsuit for $250,00 after having a worker killed and six others workers severely injured over a three year period. The company was also cited during this period for multiple safety and health violations. The Bakersfield Californian reported the following statement from the company after the terms of the case was issued, “We consider this matter closed and intend to conduct our usual course of business.” No admission of guilt was handed down by the court, which is absolutely what happens in every litigated case brought against every flagrant corporate violator.
None of this is news any longer. Today this stuff surfaces as the run of the mill cycle of "usual course of business" in a country of outsourced jobs and with the highest unemployment levels since the 1980s. Mining disasters get the usual government hacks uttering the more and more hollow words that something will change and how precious every life is, but very little really changes to put corporations on notice that safety violations and death will have major consequences for the corporate criminals.
It is not like we as a culture have just awakened to this reality of corporate-greed-with-zero-responsibility gone-wild. We have watched this shit build for a long time. Hundreds of books have been written on the subject. Pop music has even weighed in on the epidemic. Two of the worlds greatest songwriters pegged the consequences of the corporate business trend early in the game at the outset of the 1980s with separate albums devoted to the wreckage that globalization and union busting were leaving in their respective wakes.
Bob Dylan laid out the reality in song from the wonderful Infidels album with the song Union Sundown. "Well it's Sundown on the Union, and what's made in the USA. Sure was a good idea until greed got in the way." Neil Young put out a great album, Hawks and Doves, which included the masterful tune Comin Apart At Every Nail with these insightful lines, "Hey hey, ain't that right, the workin' man's in for a helluva fight. Oh this country sure looks good to me, but these fences are comin' apart at every nail."
Yes,we have come apart at every nail. It is something we can no longer afford to deny. Haven't people in America and throughout the world had enough of multinational corporatism, and the cheapness principle of lowest cost for the masses to maximize the highest profits for the few? Let us celebrate this first day of May with renewed energy to mend all those fences, and to build a better tomorrow filled with love and respect for all working people. Maybe the latest Mayday-Mayday-Mayday cries from the Gulf of Mexico over yet another corporate caused natural disaster will be the final major turning point.
To better May Days in our future.
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