So, welcome to Workers’ Day, 2005. By how many degrees will you be able to raise the fever of your solidarity with fellow workers today? Will you be spending the day at one of the political party’s mass activities? Or did you wake up late, still have a face like a train wreck and are planning no more than a walk, a substantial lunch, an afternoon nap and maybe an early evening movie?
For a couple of decades now, 1 May has meant nothing more than another day off from the daily grind. Pure and simple. It has become yet another one of the oodles of lame excuses for bringing this country to a halt. Compared to other European countries, Malta has one of the largest numbers of days off a year. We must be the only country in the world enjoying not one, not two, but five national days. It really has become a sad joke.
This year, this fact has been thrown into sharper relief because Workers’ Day falls on a Sunday and the debate was on whether it would be made up for with another day off. Not quite ideologically stirring stuff. It is also symptomatic that on Thursday evening, presumably to whip up some enthusiasm, the Labour Party resorted to putting Alfred Sant in front of a Super One camera to ramble on about his book on the April 1958 riots against the British colonial government. When, on the eve of Workers’ Day, a social democratic party reaches back almost half a century to gain political mileage it is certainly not a good sign.
The MLP’s and, to some extent, the PN’s political predicament is understandable. Gone are the times when this day was an occasion for workers to get together and genuinely celebrate their hard-earned rights. The image of workers storming the barricades to feed their families is no longer inspiring, reassuring or sensible in the age of European integration, instant communication and globalisation. Economic life has become too complicated and multifaceted for such empty clichés.
The path which brought us to where we stand today has not been short. And, as with everything Maltese, it has been intimately intertwined with politics. Prior to 1987, Workers’ Day was a bloody political battleground on which the PN and the MLP fought for its soul, each citing a completely different set of reasons and principles for claiming it. One did so in the name of freedom, the other in the name of socialism. Workers’ Day was just politics by other means.
With each year since 1987, this gladiatorial element started to lose its raison d’être, sinking under the wave of prosperity, freedom and normality ushered in by successive Fenech Adami governments. After 1996, with the turbulence of a collapsed Labour government, its bitter aftermath and the final cliff-hanger of the European membership saga, there was always too much going on in the country for Workers’ Day to really amount to much.
Today, Workers’ Day is in complete limbo. Sure, the two political parties continue to go through the tedious motions of organising political activities to commemorate it. But they do so for purely partisan political reasons. It is just another occasion to bash each other, score points and spin a political agenda. In other words, it’s business as usual. After you go to the movies tonight, catch the news on TV and you’ll see what I mean.
As with everything else, these surface developments have deep roots in sociological and economic soil. The pointlessness and absurdity of today’s politicking in the name of the worker is not accidental. It is results from the fact that the very notion of a ‘worker’ is losing its original significance and collectivist meaning.
At the individual level, men and women no longer define their identity exclusively by what they do. Contrary to what Marx predicted, the market has not impoverished workers to the point of destitution. It has made them more affluent, gave them new freedoms and made them ‘citizens’ – political, social and cultural actors – in their own right. You are no longer what you eat. You are what you are.
Secondly, the nature of work and the workplace have been so radically changed that traditional assumptions about the collective and identical interests of workers no longer hold. The communications and information technology revolutions, along with the rise of the service sector, have dispersed what used to be unified workers’ interests onto various planes.
Notions of class and class warfare are no longer popular, particularly among sensible socialists who want to be in government. Tony Blair and Gerhardt Schroeder brought about change because they read this writing on the wall. Class did not lose its political currency by chance but because it no longer reflects the way people think about themselves. We have not all become equal. It’s just that class warfare is no longer seen as an adequate solution to today’s economic and political challenges. Class is no longer a benchmark for self-definition. What class does a 22-year-old Maltese graphic designer working for a foreign firm from her home office in Birkirkara belong to?
Thirdly, the globalisation of the markets and the dismantling of trade barriers have unlatched once and for all the traditional bond between national protectionist policy and the trade unions along with the unreconstructed political left. It is no longer possible, let alone desirable, to have a government protecting companies that fail to be competitive on the international market. A government can create the right institutional environment for business to flourish. But it no longer has control over which companies sink or swim on the seas beyond Grand Harbour.
In this sense, many more workers are realising that what safeguards their jobs and improves wages and conditions are their abilities and resources, not the politician or the union leader spouting rhetoric from a podium on a day like this. Pace Marx, workers of the world, you’re right.
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