With a month to go before mass marches and boycotts are planned nationwide, the May Day Strong movement for “No Work, No School, No Shopping” is accelerating.
Hundreds of organizations from coast to coast, including both big teachers unions—the Teachers/AFT and the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union—signed up with the Labor for Democracy coalition.
So have National Nurses United (NNU), locals from AFSCME and the Communications Workers, Starbucks Workers United, Jobs With Justice, and United Service Workers West/SEIU. It represents custodians, building engineers, and security personnel, among others.
Speakers on a massive Zoom call on April 2 added their unions to the list: The Minneapolis Union of Educators/AFT, NNU, the Professional and Technical Engineers, the United Electrical Workers, and the 50,000-member United Food and Commercial Workers Local 3000. They discussed how to motivate more people to join the mass protest.
Details about their plans, their agenda, and a toolkit—along with a long list of members in and outside of organized labor—are all at www.maydaystrong.org.
May Day Strong will go beyond “dethroning” tyrannical Republican President Donald Trump, says Mary Turner, RN, NNU’s executive director. That was the objective of the No Kings Days. The latest, No Kings III, drew 8-9 million people nationwide on March 28.
This May Day, Turner and the others said, many millions will make clear they’re taking the country back not just from Trump and his anti-worker policies and militarism, but from the billionaires and the corporate elite who back him.
They’ve stolen the U.S. from its workers, said Turner. That includes stealing control of workers’ lives and of U.S. politics. “We’ve returned to the days of the Robber Barons and the Gilded Age,” added Faye Guenther of UFCW Local 3000. “This will be everyday working people saying ‘enough is enough,’” and then returning home to organize unions to implement May Day’s goals.
The May Day Strong campaign got its first big boost on March 11, when the Chicago Teachers Union strongly endorsed it, then followed up by getting Mayor Brandon Johnson—a CTU member and former shop steward—to invoke a law permitting a city-wide day off from schools, too.
CTU is now urging businesses to join the closures. So are some of the organizers on the April 2 Zoom call, but they’re concentrating on amassing fellow unionists first for what they hope will be the most massive union nationwide demonstration in decades, if not in history.
That’s only fitting. May Day, as the national workers’ day, was crafted in Chicago almost 150 years ago and became a centerpiece for workers’ causes, from the 8-hour day of the 1880s to the Protect The Right To Organize Act today.
“In recent years, May Day has become a powerful National Day of Action uniting labor, educators, students, and immigrant and community organizations to demand public schools over private profits, people over billionaires, and democracy over authoritarianism,” CTU said. It endorsed those goals and more.
“Our union has never stood on the sidelines in moments of local or national crisis…Defense of public education from cuts and privatization, defense of our communities from federal occupation, defense of our union rights, and the defense of democracy itself are inseparable.”
The organizers of the Zoom session understand those points, too.
“We reject this attempt by Donald Trump and his cronies to remake the country in the image of the billionaires,” declared Chris Dole of the Professional and Technical Engineers, who moderated. “Not only should there be no kings, but no billionaires.”
“We have no choice,” said NNU’s Turner, RN, an intensive care nurse in a Twin Cities hospital. Minnesota, in general, and the Twin Cities in particular, have been a top focus of Trump’s domestic repression by vicious and violent ICE agents.
Turner said May Day wouldn’t just focus on domestic issues, but also slam Trump’s war on Iran, his military aid to Israel for its murderous war on Gaza, his kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and his continuing embargo of Cuba. “And we need to abolish ICE,” Turner declared.
“I’ve seen war in Minneapolis,” where Trump’s agents “abducted hospital patients” and murdered VA worker—and unionist—Alex Pretti, RN, and local observer/activist Renee Michelle Good, she said.
Trump “is funneling money to Big Tech, defense contractors, and ICE while destroying health care” for millions of people, Turner declared. “At the bedside, we see working people suffering.”
Lauren Chua of the 3,000-member United Electrical Workers Local 256 in Boston says her local, which represents graduate student workers like herself, is reaching out to 30 progressive groups to activate their members for May Day. “Trump said he wants to send Iran back to the Stone Age. We won’t stand for that,” said Chua.
Local 256 achieved a recent mass movement success at MIT—Chua’s campus—against Trump. The regime’s Education Department is trying to force right-wing ideology onto universities nationwide, via a manifesto crafted by a Manhattan billionaire, and the threat of yanking millions of dollars in federal grants to schools that refuse it.
Some universities, notably Columbia, knuckled under. But on the deadline day at MIT, Local 256 presented petitions with hundreds of signatures against Trump’s dictates—and held a press conference. The university’s president sent word that she rejected Trump’s ultimatum.
Marcia Howard, president of the Minneapolis Union of Educators, focused on Trump’s destruction of educational opportunities, especially for students of color. Catering to his MAGA legions, who hate public schools and their students, and his own prejudices, Trump has almost demolished the federal Department of Education. He’s even evicting its remnants from their D.C. building.
“This idea of being on American soil and being educated—they’re looking to overturn that,” Howard said of Trump and his right-wing followers. ICE agents assaulted her members.
“Greg Bovino,” whom Trump sent to “calm” the ICE-caused battles in the Twin Cities, assaulted one of her members in her own school’s yard, Howard explained. Then Bovino demeaned his victim on social media. Other ICE agents “threw flashbang grenades into educators’ cars—cars with families and children in them.”
“They are targeting folks who are trying just to make a living. So May Day Strong is a clarion call so we can build up muscle memory” to keep going and defend workers, Howard stated. Especially at the polls this fall.
“Donald Trump will put his minions at the polls to try to prevent people from voting,” thus ensuring his hand-picked followers win. “We have to make a stand and show those people our power, not just in May but in November as well.”
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