CHICAGO—With mass rallies nationwide growing by the day and enthusiasm rising, activists and planners for May Day 2026 are already distributing tool kits, giving advice, and urging people nationwide to join the pledge: “No work! No school! No shopping!” Organizers hope to bring much of the economy to a halt.
But while the activists pumped people up in a nationwide Zoom call on April 9 and a Chicago Teachers Union press conference the day before, some leaders already look beyond May 1, and specifically to the November elections.
“There are almost 4,000 events already on the map,” said Ash-Lee Henderson, organizer and moderator of the weekly Thursday evening calls for activists. “We need to take the fateful next steps in our cumulative power to shake the economy. Whatever you can do, do it.”
Henderson and other speakers on the call warned, however, that the radical right and their political representative, and especially President Trump, wouldn’t just sit back and watch the protests, however much their mouthpieces—such as Trump’s press secretary—belittle the millions whom organizers believe will turn out on May 1. They’d stage unspecified counteractions, the speakers warned.
So the coalition, via social media and its May Day Strong website, will host 75 planning sessions after the mass May Day marches through and beyond Labor Day, preparing not just for protest but to register to vote and to protect the both the right to protest and the right to vote. The website also has tool kits.
“What we do on May 1 will prepare us for November,” Henderson said. And she added, many of the leaders will not be the adults, though they have more experience, but politically aware high school and middle school students concerned about their futures and the nation’s future.
Four of them—two from the Twin Cities and one each from Chicago’s Little Village and from Mather High School—told the Zoom session what motivated their activism. The common thread was they personally saw repression, especially by Trump’s invading ICE agents against their friends and neighbors. The students withheld their last names.
Clover, a sophomore at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, determined to act “after ICE brutalized my peers” and after Jan. 12, the day a Border Patrol agent murdered Veterans Administration registered nurse Alex F. Pretti. “We organized a walkout at our school in a week, got the word out on social media, and the adults provided the safety guards.” Together, tens of thousands of people shut the Twin Cities down.
“When the ICE raids started, I saw brave, confident people become weakened and terrified,” said Amari, the Mather High senior. She didn’t know how to bring them aboard, whether she should risk being turned down if she lobbied them to stand up and act.
“I called my grandmother,” heir to a family tradition of progressive activism, “and she said it’s better to be turned down loudly than to watch them [her neighbors] suffer in silence.” It took a week’s worth of messages on social media, but Amari and other activists mobilized 1,000 Mather students for a walkout. Teachers cheered them on.
“A lot of us are speaking up now because we are the future leaders who are going to be running this country,” said Lia, the senior from Little Village, a largely Latino neighborhood. “Chicago is a diverse city, and they’re trying to take that away from us,” she added of the Trump regime.
She also had a blunt message for those who are still sitting on the sidelines: “It may not happen to you today, but it’ll happen to you tomorrow. If you do not fit their ideal of an American, you’re not wanted here.”
CTU’s press conference focused more on May Day itself, fitting since that union, Local 1 of the Teachers/AFT, was the first union local in the U.S. to vocally and publicly endorse the May Day shutdown.
Their event included a parade of union speakers at the CTU podium at its Northwest Side offices and a staffer interviewing people, including local politicians, on the street. CTU speakers made clear that May Day would go beyond opposing Trump, by slamming his policies and his political and corporate backers, too. Late on April 10, CTU issued a schedule for May Day.
May Day participants will meet at their kids’ schools starting at 8 a.m., on May 1, followed by “regional civics lessons and actions” from 9 a.m.-noon, before the march downtown begins at Union Park on the Northwest Side. Mayor Brandon Johnson has made May Day a holiday, allowing for wider participation. The CTU and several of its sectors, plus the Chicago Federation of Labor, will head the union participants.
Others are Jobs With Justice, the Service Employees, the United Electrical Workers and their grad student unit at Northwestern University, National Nurses United, the Postal Workers, and the Government Employees. Numerous political and civic groups, such as Indivisible, will join them.
“Millions of people—families, students, workers, and educators—plan to make May 1st a powerful day of standing up for democracy, standing up to tyranny, and the next step in civil society to reclaim our country from the authoritarian billionaire in the White House,” CTU said in a statement.
“I’m tired of the way our resources are being spent by our government,” an unidentified male teacher said in one of the series of videos of CTU’s press conference. “Every day they’re spending $1 billion fighting this war in Iran—and dropping bombs on schools.” One bomb killed at least 165 students in a girls’ elementary school.
“Right now we’re seeing all across our nation, corporations, millionaires, billionaires, oligarchs who want to buy our elections,” another teacher said. “They also want to buy our schools. So it is important to stand up to them and say, ‘We are not for sale, and our schools are not for sale, and our cities are not for sale.’”
“This generation of oligarchs is following the same playbook to get richer” which their forbears did in the Gilded Age, said Jill Manrique, executive director of Chicago Jobs With Justice. Meanwhile, “working families struggle to keep a roof over their heads. They’re suffering every day under the oppression of corporate greed. Just like in 1886, we have to say, ‘That ain’t right.’”
A National Nurses United member discussed how Trump’s Medicaid cuts affected her facility, Stroger/Cook County Hospital. It receives just over half of its revenue from Medicaid patients, and the Trump-GOP “big beautiful bill” last July cut Medicaid by $900 billion nationwide over a decade. The money will go “for tax cuts for the rich,” she said.
The U.S. health care system “is already in dire straits,” she warned. “We are unable to give patients the care they deserve in a system that’s run for profit. These Medicaid cuts will have staggering consequences,” she predicted. That’s why the NNU members will be marching on May Day, she said.
“We need to make sure that our voices are being heard, that we’re not shopping, that we’re not going to work, that we’re not going to school—that people understand that when we withhold our labor, we can make an impact” said Alderman Jesse Fuentes of the 26th Ward.
“Millionaires and billionaires don’t keep the world turning,” he said in a reference to Trump’s corporate backers. “We do. And May Day is also an opportunity to show that ICE can no longer terrorize our communities.”
Democratic U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez of Chicago called May Day “a perfect opportunity to say ‘No work, no school, no shopping.’ When we mobilize and organize, we can make sure every single elected official across the country hears from us directly. We need to do everything in our power to protect ourselves and to protect our communities, whether it is protection from ICE, protection from war, or protection from billionaires.”
“The history of May Day is alive today,” added State Rep. Lilian Jimenez, D-4th District. Chicago workers founded May Day in 1886, but Jiminez, like others, took this year’s observance beyond workers’ issues.
“May Day is anti-war,” Jiminez declared. “May Day is anti-genocide. May Day is pro-worker.”
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