Opinion: May 1 is International Workers’ Day, and we should celebrate to not only show solidarity with workers organizing their workplaces, but also because a victory for the working class is a victory for students.

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May 1 is May Day, the international workers’ holiday to celebrate the victories of the working class and highlight its continued struggles. Yet May Day has broadly disappeared from the public consciousness despite its importance, even on college campuses. However, the increased discussion of labor and national union victories in Starbucks and Amazon speak to the holiday’s significance and the need for college students to celebrate.
May Day commemorates the Haymarket Massacre of 1886 — which won us the eight-hour workday — but most students will never interact with the history of labor organizing in their education. Former Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation President Rajeev Ravisankar spoke to me about how discussion of labor and May Day is non-existent.
“Labor is stripped out of the equation and overlooked, deliberately,” Ravisankar said. “Students feel ambivalent about labor; it’s something in the past.”
Ravisankar currently teaches a course on labor in the media at the School of Journalism and Communications; it’s one of UO’s few classes that acknowledges the role of labor movements in winning positive change for the working class. The underrepresentation of labor in our studies causes students to associate themselves with a set of aspirational ideas rather than their material reality. Excluding students from the working class serves the interests of the holders of capital. For instance, it is in the UO administration’s interest to keep you from identifying with the underpaid and overworked graduate employees, residence assistants and dining workers.
We erroneously believe that our degrees will grant us upward mobility beyond those positions despite how intimately close we are to the working class.
“You are one step away from precarity,” Ravisankar said. “The vast majority of students are going to enter into relationships of employment and need a wage to survive.”
Students feel the same economic strains and woes of workers who toil for long hours while worrying about rent and grocery prices. According to the American Psychological Association, more than 1/3 of American college students struggle to meet basic needs; 36% are food insecure and live in unstable housing. Many college graduates will work middle class jobs after college; according to a report by Georgetown University, 63% of jobs require a postsecondary education.
May Day is a celebration for all members of the working class, even those who are not currently selling their labor in a workplace. It is in your best interest as a student to fight for better wages, working conditions and benefits for the working class, because whether you like it or not, you will join it after graduation.
Further, if a fellow worker wins those benefits in their workplace, you can use that to leverage your workplace and lobby for better conditions. If a unionized retail worker elsewhere makes over $15 an hour with benefits, then your boss is coerced into providing competitive conditions unless they want to lose your labor. On our campus, May Day is for the EMU Starbucks workers fighting for a union or students working campus jobs, and for all students and all workers.
Allow May Day to make you conscious of your position and your kinship to the working class, both in university and after it. Even if you’re not working, show solidarity with those that are struggling for better conditions.
To help out immediately, you can attend May Day events organized by the Eugene and campus community. On May 1 there will be a fair at the Park Blocks at noon organized by Eugene Democratic Socialists of America. The campus’ UO student workers group and Young Democratic Socialists of America have organized a similar workers’ event on May 3 at 2:30 p.m. at the EMU amphitheater.
Just as an injury to one is an injury to all, so is victory.