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WORKERS DEFY THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER ON MAY DAY  
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Luis Feliz Leon
April 30, 2025
In These Times
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_ A guide to May Day 2025 actions. _

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Where are the pitchforks? President Donald Trump’s administration
has declared open season on the working class. Its henchmen
have unleashed
[[link removed]] kidnappings
by state agents, worksite raids that spread terror and stifle
workplace militancy, massive federal layoffs, funding cuts with
devastating consequences and attacks on diversity, equity and
inclusion, as well as efforts to eliminate collective bargaining
rights
[[link removed]] wholesale.
The array of assaults may appear dizzying, but that’s by design:
Confusion, division, fear and hopelessness are classic boss tactics,
intended to silence dissent and chill organizing. We’re now seeing
them on a national scale, as Trump and his cronies work to
consolidate power while handing out tax cuts for billionaire pals and
giving corporations carte blanche to fleece the public and the
services they depend on (including access to medical care). The end
game is oligarchy.

Amid the fear and uncertainty, the organized working class,
comprising 14 million union members, has largely been quiet or
focused on their individual fights. But the scope and horror of
attacks on workers have jolted unions to consider new tactics and
forge new alliances.

A May Day Strong [[link removed]] coalition of
over 200 organizations, including major national labor unions and
hundreds of community organizations, is planning 1,273 mass
mobilizations, from strikes to sit-downs to rallies,
across 1,031 cities and towns nationwide on International Workers
Day, May 1. Among the anchoring organizations are the Chicago
Teachers Union (which first brought groups together), National
Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Communication
Workers of America, Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and United
Electrical Workers, as well as the Sunrise Movement, the Center for
Popular Democracy, Indivisible, and a panoply of other issue-based
organizations, from Palestine organizing to reproductive justice to
immigrant rights.

Participants will raise the unifying banner ​“For the Workers,
Not the Billionaires,” a nod to the populist message of Occupy Wall
Street in 2011, when thousands of people turned out to denounce
bankers for the taxpayer-funded bailout.

“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,” wrote
[[link removed]] Jackson
Potter, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union,
in _Convergence _magazine. CTU is one of the main conveners of the
May Day Strong Coalition. The national day of action, Potter
continued, “ 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.”

In some instances, unions are linking preexisting struggles against
billionaire employers, whether university systems, hospitals or the
superrich, and tying them to the broader class-wide assaults Trump has
turbocharged in his 101 days in office. In others, community
organizations and unions are testing out new alliances to bridge
specific campaigns to a broader class-struggle orientation that
positions working-class people as the countervailing power to
billionaire rule. Will this be a dress rehearsal for possible general
strike in May 2028? It’s all premature to say in these whirlwind
times
[[link removed]].
But one thing is for sure: Working people will be flexing their
collective muscles in a range of arenas in class struggle, from
saving Medicaid to standing up for federal workers, nurses, immigrants
and any human being whose rights are being trampled on by Trump and
his minions. May Day will be a national demonstration that will
polarize today’s struggle not along resentful, racist lines of
immigrant vs. ​“native,” but along the class-struggle lines of
workers vs. billionaires. 

In Chicago, the site of the 1886 Haymarket affair that sparked the
May Day holiday, the organizing got started with an in-person
convening in March, followed by online meetings that drew thousands of
participants. The CTU, Arise Chicago and dozens of other labor unions
and community organizations will lead a march at 11a.m. from Unity
Park to Grant Park. The action not only honors the pitched battle for
an eight-hour day in 1886, but also the 400,000-person march on
May 1, 2006 to defeat a measure criminalizing undocumented
immigrants. A loose coalition of immigrant rights organizations in
Chicago is organizing one-day strikes, distributing letters through
social media and other channels reminding workers of their right to
withhold their labor to protest unfair labor practices at their
workplaces.

Minnesota will have a full day of actions
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workers at 12 p.m. to stand up to Trump and Musk as well as to
corporations like Delta, Uber, Lyft and the Metropolitan Airports
Commission. Anchoring organizations include local immigrant rights
groups and SEIU Local 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, the Flight
Attendants, the Machinists, Teamsters Local 120, and AFGE. Later
at 5 p.m., a unity rally at the state Capitol is expected to draw
tens of thousands, and will include liberal anti-Trump groups
like Indivisible. 

In Philadelphia, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will headline
a hundreds-strong rally at City Hall with local labor and
immigration-rights leaders. In New Orleans, hundreds of registered
nurses at University Medical Center will go on strike as
they negotiate
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a first contract.

California will see some of the largest actions. Twenty thousand
healthcare, research and technical workers across the University of
California system have timed their unfair labor practice strike for
May 1. Their union, UPTE of Communications Workers Local 9119, is
striking because UC announced
[[link removed]] a systemwide
hiring freeze on March 19, 2025, using Trump’s threatened cuts as
cover, without giving the union notice or an opportunity
to bargain. 

UPTE President Dan Russell, who was elected as part of a reform slate
in 2021, says the University of California is ​“using the
political climate as an excuse for the behavior that they had already
been exhibiting … which is refusing to bargain in good faith to
address the staffing crisis, and just continuing to commit, you know,
one unfair labor practice after another.”

AFSCME Local 3299, representing more than 37,000 patient care
workers across the same UC system, also plans a walk-out
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May Day over similar illegal hiring freeze allegations. ​“The
University of California sits on $10 billion in unrestricted
reserves,” says Todd Stenhouse, spokesperson for
AFSCME 3299. ​“It has routinely handed out raises of 30-40% to
its growing legion of Ivory Tower elites, chancellors and the like. It
provides them low-interest home loans. They can use them to buy second
homes. And all the while the front liners, the people that answer the
call button, people that are sweeping the floors, people that are
serving the food right, are struggling like never before to make ends
meet.

​“International Workers Day is a time for workers to celebrate
the ongoing struggle, but it is also a time to reclaim our voice in
a very uncertain time against employers who, frankly, don’t know
what it means to walk in our shoes.”

At noon, the expected 60,000 will swell in number as other unions
join in solidarity rallies across California, including the United
Auto Workers 4811, UC-AFT 1474, Teamsters Local 2010, and the
California Nurses Association. There’s also a planned teach-in
at 1:30 p.m.

In Georgia, the Union of Southern Service Workers is planning a march
on Atlanta City Hall alongside partnering organizations, including the
Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Atlanta Jobs with Justice, United
Campus Workers, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights and the
Indivisible Project. Planned stops include an immigrant detention
center and a local OSHA office.

Katie Giede, an 11-year server at Waffle House and member of the
Union of Southern Service Workers, said she would be marching to take
on billionaires like Waffle House boss Joe Rogers III. Last year, she
and her co-workers pressured
[[link removed]] their
employer to raise wages from $2.92 to $5.25 hourly in two years
across most markets.

_Luis Feliz Leon
[[link removed]] is an associate
editor and organizer at Labor Notes._

_Reprinted with permission from In These Times
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All rights reserved. _

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