Present in the May Day crowd in New York City of more than 25,000 who then marched peacefully a mile and a half down Broadway to Federal Plaza, where Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintains an illegal detention center, were members of People’s Action member groups VOCAL-NY, Citizen Action of New York (CANY), Our Bronx and Community Voices Heard.
These included Ms. Nathlyin Flowers from VOCAL-NY, who in 1963 joined Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the streets of Washington, DC in the March for Jobs & Freedom.
“This is how we win, by coming together,” said Ms. Flowers.
Washington Square was a meaningful choice for this May Day rally: It’s where Samuel Gompers, the immigrant cigar maker who in 1886 founded the American Federation of Labor, Eugene V. Debs and other early labor leaders gave speeches and set aside their differences to campaign together for an end to child labor and to establish an eight-hour workday.
Washington Square is also near the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where a devastating industrial fire in 1911 took the lives of 146 workers, mainly immigrant women, which led to some of the first workplace protections in the United States.
“You can’t do it unless you organize,” said New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, quoting Gompers, as he spoke to the thousands of workers from more than 60 unions and supporters, including the one Gompers founded, the AFL-CIO.
Earlier in the day, these same groups marched on Amazon’s corporate headquarters, to demand an end to Amazon’s surveillance contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and mistreatment of workers.
“Having fear is normal,” said José, an Amazon driver who spoke at the rally. “But we have to transform that fear into a fight against Amazon and all those corporations that oppose us, so we can build a better life and fight for our rights.”
Even though May Day commemorates key struggles in the workers’ rights movement in the United States, and is celebrated around the world as International Workers’ Day, it has until recently been neglected in the country where it was born. In recent years, the immigrant rights movement has revived the anniversary as a “Day Without Immigrants,” a way to show solidarity and make the work and contributions of immigrants visible to everyone.
Now a new coalition, May Day Strong, has further revitalized this alliance between labor and community groups. This year, hundreds of unions and civil society organizations, including People’s Action and many of its affiliated groups, helped organize more than 5,000 demonstrations across the country, around the rallying cry of #WorkersOverBillionaires. Together, they called for an economic blackout with “no school, no work, and no shopping.” An estimated 100,000 students walked out of schools for these events.
This year’s May Day Strong mobilizations built on the momentum created at No Kings rallies earlier this year, as well as the powerful shows of support that brought tens of thousands into the streets of Minneapolis and Chicago after the violent surges of ICE agents to those cities.
Down Home North Carolina sent a dozen buses of grassroots leaders to the state’s capitol, Raleigh, where they joined teachers from the North Carolina Association of Educators to demand funding for public education. School systems across the state shut down for the day, as students and teachers participated in May Day events. The state currently ranks 46th in the nation in teacher pay.
In Missouri, Jobs with Justice joined the Missouri Workers Center and other groups to organize actions in four cities, and in Chicago, youth organizers from ONE Northside spoke out at Target, to demand the company end its cooperation with ICE and pay its fair share in taxes, before joining a larger rally which attracted tens of thousands of participants in downtown Chicago.
“I’m here to stand in solidarity with my peers who are being silenced by ICE,” said Stella, a young person who attended the rally. “I’m here to demand that the money being taken out of my education and being put into Target’s pockets comes back.”
This year’s May Day rallies were not an isolated show of force, but an effort to build a broad-based coalition between organized labor and community groups with the kind of muscle we will need if assaults on our democracy and working people continue.
“The corporate oligarchy did not get here overnight, and it will not be dismantled overnight,” said Jackson Potter, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union and one of the key supporters of May Day Strong. “What has always changed the balance of power is workers and communities moving together over time. That is what we are building.”