Workers of the World Unite! With this rallying cry South Africa, alongside more than 80 countries around the world, celebrated May Day this past week.
As elsewhere, South Africa on Workers’ Day honours the place of workers and worker unions in society and our struggle for justice, equality, fairness and freedom.
South Africa renewed her commitment to the rights of workers and celebrated our own and international worker movements.
Since the 19th century the rights of workers were taken as the fundamental struggle for human freedom, not only because of unjust working conditions under which people suffered.
Workers’ rights were increasingly placed central to societal concerns due to new perspectives on how societies cause suffering by class between workers and owners, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described in the Communist Manifesto published in 1848.
The rallying cry comes from the Manifesto. It is its last line, its final word, as in its original German, “Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!”, Proletarians of all countries, unite! The call to action was popularised to add, “You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
The first major worker action that followed the publication of the Manifesto and the start of the international worker movement began when Austrian machine workers downed tools to demand an 8-hour working day.
The incident paints a picture to define who “the workers” are, what “worker rights” are, and what purpose and role of “worker unions” must be. Much of the definitions of each of these terms remain the same today.
The Manifesto tasked the worker movement with revolutionary action against existing social and political orders that oppress the workers and protect the owner who owns all the means of production, the land, labour and capital. The worker is the citizen who only has his body and ability to work, his labour, with which he can trade to make a living.
Today still, workers are taken to be citizens that do manual labour and do not access higher education. Today still the rights of workers are for working conditions, compensation and labour practices that are fair. In today’s world however new “classes of workers” challenge assumptions of who the worker is and what rights they have and for which they must struggle.
More simply put, the distinction between the owners and the workers is the one between the town and the farm – in the city people receive and use, but do not produce the goods that people on the farm produce with their hands, thereby establishing the two classes and fundamental hierarchy and conflict between owner and worker.
A third group however emerged in modern society, which has been argued as representative of a new class of worker beyond traditional definitions, the “knowledge worker”.
This new class of worker works with information, not their hands. They could access resources to gain higher education and join professions that focus on knowledge – markers that would make them part of the owner classes, the bourgeoisie.
They, however, also do not own any means of production and have only their labour to trade with to make a living – markers that would make them part of the worker classes. The knowledge worker finds himself in-between the owner of means and the worker with hands, and its symbolic home, the campus and college, in-between the town and the farm.
Located there, in-between owner and workers, the knowledge worker and his site of work on May Day must ask themselves: what bridge does our labour provide to disrupt the distance of town and farm?
* Rudi Buys, NetEd Group Chief Academic Officer and Executive Dean, DaVinci Business Institute.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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