April 26, 2000
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
RTMARK DECLARES MAY 1 AN AMERICAN HOLIDAY
May 2 elsewhere; holiday to protest corporate erosion of leisure
Contacts: RTMark (info@rtmark.com)
Decadent Action
(decadent@underbelly.demon.co.uk,
www.underbelly.demon.co.uk/decadent/)
RTMark, a U.S.-based corporation whose "bottom line" is cultural
profit, has acquired the three-year-old Phone In Sick Day from the
Europe-based Decadent Action group.
The holiday comes with an impressive track record: it was considered
responsible for the "sickouts" of 2000 British Airways employees in
1997, and of thousands of Irish policemen in 1998.
Until this year, Phone In Sick Day was observed on April 6, the start
of the U.K. financial year. At the urging of its largest investors,
RTMark has moved the date to May 1 (May 2 outside the U.S. and
Canada) for three important reasons:
1. To bring an important American holiday back home.
Mayday commemorates ten Americans who lost their lives fighting for
the eight-hour workday, and their sacrifice has been celebrated since
1889 nearly everywhere in the world except America. As the U.S. is
RTMark's primary market, RTMark wishes to help rectify this
imbalance. (See rtmark.com/mayday.html for more history.)
2. To call attention to the loss of the eight-hour day and other
quality-of-life indices in America.
Mayday heralds the approach of summer, a time that still means
"vacation" to those in most First-World nations. But substantial
vacations, like the eight-hour day, have passed into American
leisure history. While the average number of hours worked per year has gone down throughout the First World, it has gone up in America, with Americans now working six weeks more per year than they did in 1973 to achieve the same standard of living. Phoning in sick en masse will function as a "mayday" distress call by increasingly harried Americans. (Visit rtmark.com/sickday.html to see Andrei Codrescu explain this most eloquently.)
3. To call attention to the dwindling quality of life everywhere.
The erosion of leisure is no longer limited to America. As European
countries are increasingly forced to dismantle social programs and
adopt American-style measures to benefit corporate health, we can be
sure that they will all go the way of the United States: two-month
vacations will shrink to two weeks, maternity leave will go from six
months to five days, etc. Therefore RTMark encourages Europeans, and other First Worlders for whom May 1 is already a holiday, to
phone in sick on May 2. (In the Third World, of course, the effects
of neoliberalism are unspeakably worse than a mere erosion of
leisure; it would be tasteless to suggest that phoning in sick might
accomplish anything there.)
RTMark's primary goal is to publicize corporate attacks on the
public welfare. To this end it acts as a clearinghouse for anti-corporate sabotage projects. RTMark's Phone In Sick Day takeover bid
was accepted by Decadent Action in part because of RTMark's greater
rights as a U.S. corporation, which permits it to pursue profit with
fewer legal hindrances than anywhere else. As Decadent Action
spokesperson Kitty Banks says, "We are pleased with the handover to
RTMark, who are in a better legal and geographical position to take
the event to a global audience."
February 12, Decadent Action and ®TMark
announced the global merger of Decadent Action's original, U.K.-based Phone
In Sick Day and ®TMark's USA Phone In Sick
Day. As USAPIS was an important bellwether of ®TMark's
global progress, and a forerunner of "tactical
embarrassment" (it was condemned
by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), ®TMark
was understandably excited to assume primary stewardship of the resulting entity,
which was renamed World Phone In Sick Day 2000.
®TMark expects World Phone In Sick Day 2000 to be the strongest Phone In Sick Day yet. The 1998 U.K./USA
Phone In Sick Day was held responsible for a "sickout" by U.K. police, and was
featured on the BBC in England and in astrology columns in America; its 1997
predecessor was widely connected with an important "sickout" by British Airways
employees and likewise received extensive press coverage.
World Phone In Sick Day highlights in productive ways the extent and depth
of dissatisfaction with savage "new economy" realities. On the downside, it
has already been appropriated by several commercial entities, with legal actions
pending in the U.K.; however, unparalleled ease of participation and comprehension--it
has been called "the one-liner of protest holidays"--complete the image of a
real cultural winner... and on a global scale.
As an American corporation, ®TMark benefits
from considerably laxer legal restraints than any such U.K. entity, and greater
freedom to accomplish its aims with a minimum of "liability," or personal responsibility.
This was one of the primary reasons for the merger of the U.K. and USA Phone In Sick Days, and we share with Decadent Action, the U.K. originator of the holiday, the hope that WPIS2K will be able to exploit new markets in heretofore
unimaginable ways.
Along with the merger came a number of internal restructurings, most importantly
WPIS2K's transition from its Anglocentric date of April 6 (the start of the
U.K. financial year) to the more universal Mayday. This is of special import
considering the wide array of globe-wide activities planned this year for this
most impactful of American holidays. The decision to move WPIS2K to Mayday
has met with some accusations of chauvinism, and has even been cited as yet another example of U.S. interests taking the global
forefront; but the fact that Mayday is celebrated in every
country except America has helped show that once again, our interest is in the global picture. (Click here for more regarding the date change.)