01/05/2020
MAY DAY 2020: MASS STRUGGLE FOR A PEOPLE’S RECOVERY
International Workers' Day Statement from the Communist Party of Canada
This May Day workers around the world are struggling against a double threat. The deepest economic crisis since the “Dirty ’30s” is causing huge lay-offs, lost incomes and savings, and waves of evictions, foreclosures, and bankruptcies for small businesses and farms, triggered by a global pandemic Covid-19 virus for which there is as yet no vaccine, and a vast under-supply of medical equipment, supplies, staff, and hospitals to stave off sickness and death. The pandemic has compounded the growing menace of unchecked climate change, global inequality, and imperialist wars.
Corporations are using the crisis to jack up prices and profits on scarce medical equipment and supplies, while also re-organizing production to make permanent reductions in the labour force when the pandemic has passed.
For capitalists, everything is a commodity. Every crisis is an opportunity to make a profit, to cut costs, to beat or eat the competition, to expand. Today’s victims are the front-line healthcare workers who are dying because PPE is not available, the elderly locked into under-staffed and under-funded private for-profit long-term care homes, and workers on the job in unsafe conditions; or laid off without EI, sick pay, or even a job.
The role of capitalist governments is to bail out the corporations ‘in need’, to keep a firm hand on the unemployed and the dispossessed, and to save capitalism through this crisis, and the next crisis and the one after that.
The coming depression, and the pandemic that triggered it, changes everything. Seven million unemployed and counting changes everything.
The labour and peoples’ movements are at a crossroads: people before profit. Or profit before people.
We’re all in this together, but we won’t all get through this, without a mass struggle led by labour and its allies for a people’s recovery.
This May Day, it’s the unity of the labour movement in the fight to defend workers’ jobs and living standards, and oppose imperialist wars and catastrophic climate change, that will make all the difference.
http://communist-party.ca/may-day-2020-mass-struggle-for-a-peoples-recovery/