It’s International Workers’ Day, and all across America labor and a wide range of activist groups are staging rallies and demonstrations in solidarity with a global agenda for change. For decades the day—created in memory of workers killed at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886 while on strike for eight-hour work days—all but slipped into oblivion. But recent developments and trends in the world of work seem to have created an urgency within the labor movement to safeguard workers’ hard-won turf and to check the corporate-political alliance that is constantly shifting economic goal posts.
Dr. Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist economist, discusses the crisis the U.S. system is in, and the consequential crisis it has created for workers.