Today is centennial of Labor Day celebration

The Philippines celebrates its Labor Day on May 1 because one of the very first demonstrations against the American colonizers happened on May 1, 1903. A mass demonstration led by the Union Obrera Domocratica took place right in front of Malacañang with the activists shouting "Death to Imperialism!" On the 1st of May, 1913, the First National Labor met in Manila to commemorate the first labor demonstration under the American regime. And on May 1, 1947, President Manuel Roxas, celebrating the first Labor Day under the Republic of the Philippines, told the nation to make sure "that we do not simply replace one tyranny with another – the tyranny of capital with the tyranny of labor." He was obviously referring to the communist threat in the country then.

It is good that we have our own official Labor Day celebration, but find it ironic that we have no official Farmer Day commemoration. We are, after all, an agricultural country and since the Spanish period the feast of San Isidro Labrador, patron saint of farmers was a church feast celebrated by all Filipino farmers. A farmer is a person who cultivates a farm; a laborer, one who does unskilled manual work for wages. Planting rice is still the hardest form of work. As the song says, "bent from morning till the set of sun; cannot stand, cannot sit, cannot rest for a little bit." This is universally acknowledged. The French painter Jean Francois Millet immortalized the farmer’s contribution to society in two of his paintings: The Gleaners and The Man with the Hoe that inspired Edwin Markham’s poem of the same title:

Bowed by the weight of the centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.

Work is the most sublime form of prayer and next to faith in God is faith in our own labors. The Iraq war is only serving to prove what Thomas Carlyle said, "The true epic of our times is not ‘arms and the man but tools and the man’." In short, we are here in this world to build, not destroy. From the very inception, that has been the role of labor.

In the Philippines, Labor Day has taken an added dimension. People seeking reforms use the holiday to dramatize their demands. On May 1, 2001, the sympathizers of deposed-President Joseph Estrada gathered and tried to stage another EDSA. Going by news reports, we may have similar demonstrations today. We respect people’s right to demonstrate. All we ask is that the demonstrations be peaceful.

The best way to celebrate Labor Day is to use the holiday as the occasion when the whole nation acknowledges and pays tribute to labor’s contribution to the peace and progress of the nation. Labor is not only the source of our individual and national wealth, it is the foundation of our traditional culture.