After some seven years as a member of the Union of Southern Service Workers, Jamila Allen is a seasoned labor organizer, having led three successful strikes during her time working at a Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers in Durham, North Carolina. Through one single-day strike and a subsequent weeklong strike, she and her co-workers won a COVID-19 safety policy for their store and 33 other locations during the height of the pandemic.
That experience taught her a lesson that she now shares with everyone, hoping that they'll recognize their own strength and the fact that they're not alone.
"Don't be afraid to strike," Allen said in a phone interview with Salon. "Don't be afraid to organize. You have power and you have numbers. You have somebody to back you up."
On May 1, Allen's chapter of the Union of Southern Service Workers will be participating in a national day of action, hosting a rally at 4 p.m. followed by a march to Bicentennial Plaza in Raleigh for higher pay and increased respect in the workplace — and against the billions of dollars in proposed Medicaid cuts Congress is considering. Their efforts will be part of more than 1,000 May Day Strong events in more than 850 cities in the United States and abroad.
The goal of the national day of action is "to raise awareness and get people on board for the fight," Allen said. "The first May Day, there were thousands of people out there. You still got to fight to this day with just as many thousands — maybe more — almost for the same purpose that May Day started with."
With its U.S. roots in workers' fight for an eight-hour workday in 1886, May Day has long been a national day of action for union organizers and workers' rights activists to protest for better conditions, protections and pay. But this year activists say the fight is more important than ever in the face of an executive branch challenging the rights of workers, immigrants and queer people, as well as a legislative branch that appears unwilling to challenge the president. They're calling for greater solidarity, and their target audience is their fellow Americans — not President Donald Trump.
"I ain't got nothing to say to Donald Trump. It's clear," Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, told Salon in a phone interview. "I got everything to say to my fellow Americans who want to create a society [where] they can make a fair wage, where they can have universal healthcare, where they are sheltered in homes that they can afford, where they can walk their children to a fully-resourced school down the block," she added. "That's the America that we're building."
In his first 100 days in office, Trump has initiated a vastly unpopular tariff policy that will likely raise the prices of goods amid the nation's affordability crisis, fired or laid off tens of thousands of federal workers; he has also authorized executive actions targeting LGBTQ+ Americans and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. One of his largest actions has been his campaign-promised immigration crackdown that's seized and detained American citizens, documented immigrants and tourists, while overwhelming courts across the country with active litigation over mass deportation efforts.
Amid the onslaught, Trump's approval rating has fallen 8% since his inauguration to just 44%, one of the lowest ratings of any president in decades, according to a New York Times average of nearly 200 polls, including Ipsos, Emerson College and Marist College surveys.
Davis Gates said that May Day activists seek to harness that growing dissatisfaction and galvanize other Americans around protecting themselves from an administration that's dismantling "everything we've understood, resisted and struggled for." Through protests, rallies, meetings with officials and trainings, the coalition wants to build collective power and show others that solidarity will be the tool that allows them to resist and advance a society that "clarifies the values of justice," "equity" and "the common good."
"We want an America that doesn't yet exist," Davis Gates said. "We have to show ourselves as a space, and that's what May 1 is. It's a coming-out party to show ourselves as a group of neighbors willing to create a community coalition in the face of a growing threat to all of us."
In Seattle, May Day organizers have united a broad swath of advocacy groups, including major local unions like the United Auto Workers and United Food and Commercial Workers Union, immigrant rights groups and political organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, to drive home their broad list of demands. Among those demands is a call for the abolition of the Northwest Detention Center and of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement writ large, which the community is rallying around following the ICE arrests and detentions of two local labor organizers.
We need your help to stay independent
"For us, it really has become a fundamental 'fight back' event, and we think that it's going to be the biggest it's been in years," Rigo Valdez, organizing director of MLK Labor, a Washington affiliate of the national AFL-CIO, told Salon. "The Trump administration has really attacked both workers, immigrants and our social infrastructure, so it's bringing a much broader base and coalition together to fight back."
Valdez said the coalition is anticipating thousands of attendees to join in their planned action: a march through the city on May 1 starting at Cal Anderson Park. The protest will cap weeks of lead-up events from Know Your Rights trainings for immigrant workers, defense trainings and panels on LGBTQ+ rights.
The focus of their efforts, Valdez said, is to resist the Trump administration's "attempt to take over" public infrastructure and privatize federal jobs as well as its attacks on federal workers, immigrants, trans people and other members of their community. But he also said he hopes that other Americans, particularly those with "buyer's remorse," will see the actions occurring in Seattle and around the country as motivation to stand up and defend the nation's core principle of democracy.
"In order to beat back these attacks, we have to come together — all segments and all facets of our community — to defend things that we took for granted, like due process and the separation between the judicial and executive branch," Valdez said in a phone interview, referencing the recent arrest of a Wisconsin judge on charges of obstructing ICE.
"If we don't unite, first they'll come for immigrants, and then they'll come for workers, and then they'll come for you," he warned.
For Neidi Dominguez, executive director of workers' rights group Organized Power in Numbers, this year's May Day action hits especially close to home. After more than 20 years living undocumented in the U.S., the Mexico-born activist became a naturalized citizen last May. But the Trump administration's targeting of immigrants has left her afraid, both for herself and her twin, two-year-olds.
Dominguez told Salon that the energy around the state of the U.S. reminds her of the darkness and outrage around the proposed anti-immigrant legislation progressing in Congress in 2006, which spawned massive nationwide protests that she had participated in. Now, however, the moment has an added heaviness because the top-down attacks are targeting working people of all walks of life.
"I have made my life here, and I want this country to become the country that it was meant to be and the experiment of democracy that we've been for the last 237 years," Dominguez said in a phone interview. "I believe in that experiment, and I want to be part of making it a reality, and I know deep in my soul that this isn't it."
"It really feels like we are losing the country as we know it, and it's beyond attacks on immigrants," she added.
On May Day, Dominguez's organization is helping to anchor four actions across the Sun Belt: the Raleigh, North Carolina rally and march; a 9 a.m. march at the State Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona; a 5 p.m. rally with speakers and march in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she's based; and immigrant and worker's rights trainings and a rally in Houston, Texas. Activists are hoping to see thousands of people turn out to each of the marches and at least 100 workers attend the trainings, she said.
At a time when it feels as though "those in power are betting on us being too afraid and too overwhelmed by the shock and awe," Dominguez said it's important for Americans to show up and make it known they won't go down without a fight — despite how scared they may be or how deeply they may be feeling the impact of the government's actions.
She said she hopes others take away that they're welcome, that they own this fight, and that, as working people, they all feel the same pain at the hands of the government no matter who they voted for in 2024.
"This May Day is us marching for ourselves and hoping to inspire more working people to turn that anger and fear into action and to stand up together," she said, adding: "We just want to remind working class people that we have the power by coming together."
Shares