In the best tradition of May Day, labor and community networks across the country are activating existing coalitions and forming new ones to launch mass mobilizations on May 1, 2025. We will demand housing and healthcare for all, well-paid union jobs, fully-funded schools, adherence to civil rights, investment in working families instead of militarization, and the defense of immigrant rights and the environment. Working families will call off work and mobilize afterwards to show billionaires and bosses that we the many—not the few—must govern.
Many in the labor and social justice movements have been inspired by the UAW’s 2023 Stand Up Strike, and subsequent calls that all workers align contracts for a joint expiration on May 1st, 2028. Building for 2028 is great and necessary, but we can’t wait that long to scale up our resistance. May Day this year offers us an important structure test: an opportunity to measure our forces, take stock of new formations, determine which parts of the labor movement are ready to throw down, and see just how much work we have ahead.
Crushing unions, criminalizing protest
Trump’s return to the White House, propelled by billionaire bro Elon Musk, ushered in the most anti-worker administration in a century—but their animus is nothing new. The US has the distinction and dishonor of having one of the bloodiest labor histories of all the core capitalist countries. Local law enforcement, federal troops, the National Guard, state militias and private security like the Pinkertons were used to crush railroad and coal strikes, the eight-hour-day campaign and agrarian union organizing in the late 19th century, and provoke the lynching of IWW leaders in 1919; police killed striking steel workers during Chicago’s 1937 Memorial Day Massacre. We saw an unmistakable pattern of state-sponsored repression of unions before the full implementation of the New Deal framework of legalization.
The violent repression of unions was accompanied by the general criminalization of social protest. After World War I and the Russian Revolution, government authorities at all levels cracked down on suspected radicals, many of them immigrants. Some 250 people were deported and 10,000 arrested in the raids spearheaded by US Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. The only presidential candidate who was a convicted felon prior to Trump was labor organizer Eugene V. Debs,, who was jailed for six months for leading a national railroad strike in 1894. Later in 1918, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison while running for president and opposing the US involvement in World War I.
Organizing persists, labor rises
Despite the efforts to silence, criminalize, and kill labor leaders, workers in the late 19th and early 20th century persisted in their struggle to gain power and control over employers that were getting bigger, more concentrated, and more industrial.They engaged in strikes and general strikes in key sectors of the economy while building the most successful national union federation to date, the Knights of Labor, in the 1880s, which at one point represented 20% of all US workers.
Additionally, the efforts to tame “the jungle” of unfettered capitalism led to Progressive Era reforms that curtailed child labor, pioneered the first regulations on corporate monopoly power, and instituted occupational and safety regulations. Even the roaring ‘20s caused employers to introduce a nascent form of “Fordism” that paid higher wages while deskilling factory workers, but simultaneously increasing their workplace power. Company unions that the bosses controlled flourished, but only temporarily. The next downturn would set the stage for labor’s most spectacular rise in US history.
The high tide of labor organizing in the US lasted roughly from 1934 to 1947. The global meltdown of markets during the Great Depression and the record levels of unemployment, property loss, and wealth liquidation that it caused represented an unprecedented and systemic rupture of epic proportions that has not been replicated since. This shows how a period of great instability—what social theorists Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall referred to as the “interregnum”—can exhibit tendencies from the old world that is dying (e.g., waning corporate supremacy) alongside features from the new world emerging, (e.g., the legalization of labor organizations with the National Labor Relations Act).
To address the damage done by the Great Depression—and the demands of social movements—the US adopted a Keynesian economic model to intervene in the economy to create jobs, secure union rights, and guarantee income and relief for seniors and the unemployed. The best parts of the Keynesian consensus of the post-world War II order allowed record wealth redistribution and brought about the halcyon days of labor union density. It also set the stage for the birth of the Civil Rights movement, as Black leaders in the Congress of Industrial Organizations provided infrastructure and resources for movement trailblazers.
Backlash
Since the 1970s, there has been a protracted assault on working families. This manifested in economic policies of deindustrialization and decentralization—moving union jobs to overseas locations or anti-union regions of the US. Union density declined by two-thirds, and union rights came under attack. These assaults also took shape in concerted, long-term organizing to roll back civil rights protections and regulations on business. This period has seen a rightward shift in politics, with the wealthy donor class increasingly empowered.
The crises of 2020 brought a break in the hostile climate for union workers. Bidenomics took a turn away from free trade and back to protectionist trade policies also championed by the first Trump administration’s Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer. Biden was not only the first sitting US president to walk a strike line, he also was the first in 50 years to reject cuts to Social Security, and expanded the program to public sector workers on deferred pension plans. None of those reforms led to a sizable increase in the number of people joining unions.
Trump’s follow-through on his campaign promises—continuing and expanding tariffs to rebuild the country’s manufacturing base—has produced economic chaos and yielded no initial dividends for workers or consumers. He is deploying the power of the state to destroy labor rights, civil rights, the social safety net, and the right to protest.
Trump eradicated the union rights of one million federal workers by executive order, and his Department of Homeland Security tore up the contracts of another 47,000 workers at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Taken together, these moves were an attack 100 times greater than President Ronald Reagan’s lockout of 11,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981. More than 500,000 postal workers are likely next on Trump’s list. The abduction of graduate employee union members for opposing the Israeli assault on Gaza may represent a point of no return for using state power to silence dissent and organized labor.
The billionaires cozying up to Trump to get their government contracts and tax breaks are gleefully calling for the elimination of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to snuff out nascent union drives at Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joes despite the more than 60 million non-union workers who want to join a union.
Resist and grow
Labor upsurges during some of the most inhospitable and economically difficult times in US history show that organized labor and our allies possess the ability to resist—and even grow—today.
Resistance was on display in Chicago after Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan promised to make the city ground zero for mass deportations, and threatened elected officials with arrest—specifically Mayor Brandon Johnson, who is a member and organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union. On Friday, January 24, 2025 federal agents attempted to enter a Chicago public school for the first time ever. They came to apprehend an 11-year-old for posting about the President on social media—an act that provided the pretext for sending Secret Service agents to the child’s home and school.
The school community sprang into action, using the CTU contract and district policy to refuse entry to the agents since they did not possess a criminal judicial warrant. Meanwhile, staff alerted district officials and the union, and kept students in class to protect them in the event the agents entered the building. It was a true testament to solidarity and bargaining language into our agreements that protect our students and staff from anti-immigrant demagoguery.
This incident suggests that Trump 2.0 will be more effective at wielding the machinery of the state with aggression, disruption, and unprecedented impact. But that overreach is also creating the conditions for another uprising against mass raids and attacks on undocumented workers like that of 2006, a year when around two million people took to the streets across the country on May Day.
Labor and community have already united to protect our sanctuary city and state protections; hundreds of schools have mobilized walk-ins and sanctuary teams to fight back against the Trump attack. A convening at the Chicago Teachers Union this past March brought together unions facing contract expirations with immigrant rights organizations and national networks planning May Day marches. More than 250 people came from 26 states and British Columbia: members of large locals in the AFT, NEA, AAUP, British Columbia Teachers Federation, UNITE HERE, AFGE, United Auto Workers, SEIU and dozens of other labor unions, as well as community organizations like Make The Road, State Voices, Center for Popular Democracy, Mijente, Showing Up for Racial Justice, and others to begin organizing the next round of marches, protests and agitation.
For many of the organizations involved with May Day mobilizations, this is the first time we are working outside of our union sector or region, and alongside federal government and private sector locals, with the participation of national community networks and their local affiliates. We already have seen sign-ups from more than 950 cities in all 50 states, with more than 1,150 May Day actions scheduled. Labor and community coalitions will be anchoring the biggest marches. This will give us new partners to map geographies that have burgeoning union organizing campaigns, nodes of production where workers have disproportionate power, and community forces willing to throw down to defend our democratic rights and institutions. The national May Day actions will build lists, contacts, and coalition experiences that can be mined immediately for developing the training, staffing, and outreach plans to build stronger concentrations of worker-led campaigns.
While pundits like David Axelrod denounce the “unrealistic expectations on the part of activist Democrats who want a catharsis,” we know from successful global efforts to oust autocrats that, as Congressmember Jaime Raskin says, “A rally a day keeps the fascists away.” In Serbia, the movement that toppled the Slobodan Milosevic autocracy had 1,162 mass demonstrations across hundreds of cities and villages during a four-month period. The April 5 #HandsOff protests, combined with the labor and community coalitions leading May 1, are the start of the kind of movement necessary to shut down workplaces and centers of commerce in order to restore and expand economic, civil, and social rights that MAGA billionaires are seeking to eliminate.
Our movement-making moment has arrived. As the Trump oligarchs dismantle key services and protections that support working families, taking the government back from billionaires will require strong labor-community coalitions that can transform the US into the multi-racial egalitarian democracy we have always claimed to be. Big and bold actions on May 1, 2025 and beyond will be required to strengthen the organizations and coalitions we have, while we build the new ones we will need.
Like the workers’ movement in 1886 that called for an eight-hour day, we have an opportunity to demonstrate our collective vision for a society that provides union rights, immigrant and civil rights, housing, healthcare and fully funded schools for all. Cities and communities across the country are building marches and actions at www.maydaystrong.org; Join us.