1 May - Labour Day festival

[Bonobo]

Trade unionists march for Labour Day
01.05.2010 13:02

photo - east news

Several hundred people braved rain, Saturday morning, to attend a demonstration in Warsaw, organized by the OPZZ trade union in celebration of Labour Day, May 1, a national holiday in Poland.

The demonstration was lead by OPZZ president Jan Guz OPZZ. A minute�s silence was observed in memory of the 96 who died in the Smolensk air disaster on April 10.

The procession, which started outside the parliament building, included leader of the Democratic Left Alliance and presidential candidate, Grzegorz Napieralski.

Labour Day has been observed in Poland since 1890.

After World War II the May 1 holiday was celebrated very solemnly by the communist authorities. There were marches, rallies and meetings in which participation was often mandatory.

In post communist Poland, May 1 is the beginning of a long weekend holiday, with May 2 being celebrated as Flag day and May 3 as Constitution Day.








Apart from normal leftists, there were also communists.

















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[Bonobo]

Warsaw’s 1 May Labour Day parade cancelled
27.04.2011 13:50
For the first time since the war, the International Labour Day march – an iconic fixture in the communist calendar - will not be seen on the streets of the Polish capital this year.

The official reason is that the march clashes with the beatification ceremony of Pope John Paul II in the Vatican and a religious parade celebrating the penultimate step in the late pontiff's path to sainthood is set to take place in Warsaw.

Warsaw city authorities have told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper however that left-wingers would have been granted a separate parade, had they applied for one.

According to the paper, the decision to leave Warsaw is political, as the celebrations are being transferred to the coastal city of Szczecin, location of the embattled former state shipyards.

“We're moving with the spirit of the times,” says Tomasz Kalita, a spokesman for the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), a party created from the ranks of former communists.

“In Paris and London, the modern left is demonstrating in the vicinity of deteriorating work places. We're following in their footsteps,” he added.

“We have chose the Szczecin shipyard as its a flagship example of the incompetence of Donald Tusk's government,” he said, referring what he sees as the government’s neglect of traditional manufacturing industries such as shipbuilding.