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may day
Get Ready. Working Class Will Reclaim May Day in 2028
To reshape the economy into one that works for the benefit of everyone — not just the wealthy — we need to reclaim our country’s history of militant trade unions.
May 01, 2024
Members of the United Auto Workers courageously fought corporate greed at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis last fall during the historic six-week Stand-Up Strike. Because of their determination and commitment, we won record contracts with the Big Three automakers.
After decades of falling behind, UAW autoworkers are finally moving forward again.
We made a lot of ambitious demands at the bargaining table. One in particular may not have gotten the same attention as the reinstatement of cost-of-living adjustments or the reopening of the Stellantis assembly plant in Belvidere, Ill. — but it could also prove transformational: We aligned our contracts to expire at midnight on April 30, 2028.
We are fully preparing to strike on May Day 2028, which is critically important for several reasons.
We are fully preparing to strike on May Day 2028.
The first is that, to reshape the economy into one that works for the benefit of everyone — not just the wealthy — we need to reclaim our country’s history of militant trade unions that united workers across race, gender, and nationality.
May Day has its roots right here in the United States — in 1886, in the streets of Chicago, where workers were organizing and fighting for the 8-hour workday. This demand was met with brutal resistance by employers, who used both vicious mercenaries and the police to violently suppress mass protests led by unions. A bomb exploded in Chicago’s Haymarket Square during a clash between workers and police on May 4, 1886, killing several police officers and others.
The result was a sham trial, and seven labor leaders were sentenced to death.
The cause of those Haymarket Martyrs became the cause of the working class around the world, and May 1 became an international holiday commemorating the fight of workers everywhere to reclaim their time and the value of their labor.
Now, about 138 years later, May Day is celebrated as an official holiday in countries from Argentina to South Africa to Sweden to Hong Kong, just about everywhere — except its country of origin.
That’s not a coincidence. The billionaire class and their political lackeys have done everything they can to white out the true history of the working class in our country.
The billionaire class and their political lackeys have done everything they can to white out the true history of the working class in our country.
They want us to believe that corporate bosses gave workers decent wages, benefits and safer working conditions out of the goodness of their hearts. That justice and equality for people of color, for immigrants, for women and for queer communities were gifts benevolently handed down from above.
But we know the truth. Every law passed, every union formed and contract won — every improvement made at the workplace — has been won through the tireless sacrifice of the working class.
But if we are to truly reclaim the power and importance of May Day, then it can’t be through empty symbolism. It must be through action.
We wanted to ensure our contracts expired at midnight on April 30, 2028, not as a symbolic gesture, but as a rallying cry. We’ve asked other unions to join us in setting their contract expiration dates to May Day 2028 in hopes the labor movement can collectively aspire to building the power needed to change the world.
We form unions in our workplaces because we know we have far more power together than we do as individuals. What is true for workers in one workplace is true for workers across all workplaces. When unions organize together across industries and countries, our power is exponentially amplified. The fact is: without workers, the world stops running.
If working people are truly going to win on a massive scale — truly win healthcare as a human right, win pensions so everyone can retire with dignity, win an improved standard of living and more time off the clock so we can spend more of our time with our family and friends — then unions have to start thinking bigger.
I’ll give you an example.
We form unions in our workplaces because we know we have far more power together than we do as individuals. What is true for workers in one workplace is true for workers across all workplaces.
Last summer, during the lead-up to the contract expiration at the Big Three, I had the opportunity to meet with Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien at their headquarters in Washington, D.C. During our conversation, he pledged that no trucks driven by Teamsters would deliver parts to struck Big Three facilities.
The power of UAW autoworkers withholding our labor during the Stand-Up Strike was massive. But with the Teamsters supporting our fight, refusing to deliver parts to Big Three facilities, we had even more power. It created another headache for the Detroit automakers. It created more pressure on the Big Three to settle.
Now, imagine that type of worker solidarity on a much bigger scale.
And because corporate greed doesn’t recognize borders, neither should our solidarity. In the UAW, we’ve seen firsthand how companies pit workers against one another. Workers in Michigan are pitted against workers in Alabama, workers in the United States are pitted against workers in Mexico, workers in North America are pitted against workers in South America.
It’s a simple game. Companies shift production — or threaten to shift production — to locations where the labor is cheaper, the environmental regulations more lax, and the tax cuts and subsidies are greater.
A united working class is the only effective wall against the billionaire class’ race to the bottom. For the U.S. labor movement, that means grappling with some hard truths. Like the undeniable fact that it is impossible to protect American jobs while ignoring the plight of everyone else.
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There’s been talk about a “general strike” for as long as I’ve been alive. But that’s all it has been: talk.
If we are serious about building enough collective power to win universal healthcare and the right to retire with dignity, then we need to spend the next four years getting prepared.
A general strike isn’t going to happen on a whim. It’s not going to happen over social media. A successful general strike is going to take time, mass coordination, and a whole lot of work by the labor movement.
As working people, we must come together. We can no longer allow corporations, politicians and borders to divide us.
It’s time we reclaimed May Day for the working class.
That’s what our May Day contract expiration is all about.
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May Day May Have Been Obliterated from US History, But Its Legacy Continues
Progressive economic ideas have been on the whole an anathema to the U.S. political establishment and violence against labor militancy has always been the norm for almost all of the country’s political history. Nonetheless, the U.S. labor movement has not yet been defeated.
May 01, 2024
May 1st is International Workers’ Day and was established as such in celebration of the struggle for the introduction of the eight-hour workday and in memory of Chicago’s Haymarket Affair, which took place in 1886. May 1st is celebrated in over 160 countries with large-scale marches and protests as workers across the globe continue to fight for better working conditions, fair wages, and other labor rights. International Workers’ Day, however, is not celebrated in the U.S. and has in fact been practically erased from historical memory. But this shouldn’t be surprising since U.S. capitalism operates on the basis of a brutal economy where maximization of profit takes priority over everything else, including the environment and even human lives.
Indeed, the U.S. has a notorious record when it comes to worker rights. The country has the most violent and bloody history of labor relations in the advanced industrialized world, according to labor historians. Subsequently, unionization has always faced an uphill battle as corporations are allowed to engage in widespread union-busting practices through manipulation or violation of federal labor law. The recent activities of Amazon and Starbucks speak volumes of the anti-union mentality that pervades most U.S. corporations. Accordingly, unionization in the U.S. has been on decline for decades even though the majority of Americans see this development as a bad thing.
The backlash against unionization and worker rights in general in the U.S. also takes place against the backdrop of an insidious ideological framework in which it has been regarded as a self-evident truth that individuals are responsible for their own fate and that government should not interfere with the free market out of concern for social and economic inequalities.
While May Day may have been formally obliterated by the powers that be from U.S. public awareness, the labor movement is still alive and kicking.
Social Darwinism first appeared in U.S. political and social thought in the mid-1860s, as historian Richard Hofstadter showed in his brilliant work Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915, but it would be a gross mistake to think that it ever went away. The conservative counterrevolution launched by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s and refined by Bill Clinton in the early 1990s aimed at bringing back the loathsome idea that the government should not interfere in the “survival of the fittest” by helping the weak and the poor. Progressive economic ideas have been on the whole an anathema to the U.S. political establishment and violence against labor militancy has always been the norm for almost all of the country’s political history.
Long before the movement for an eight-hour workday in the U.S., which can be largely attributed to the influx of European immigrants mainly from Italy and Germany, radicalism had set foot across a number of post-colonial states. Rhode Island, often referred to as the Rogue Island, had one of the most radical economic policies on revolutionary debt, which was wildly popular with farmers and common folks in general, and experimented with the idea of radical democracy. At approximately the same time, Shays’ rebellion in Massachusetts was also about money, debts, poverty, and democracy. Naturally, the elite in both states pulled out all stops to put an end to radicalism, and the pattern of suppressing popular demands has somehow survived in U.S. politics across time.
The pattern of suppressing social and political movements from below continued well into modern times. The Red Scare, climaxed in the late 1910s on account of the Russian revolution and the rise of labor strikes and then renewed with the anti-communist campaign of the 1940s, played a crucial role in the establishment’s fervent dedication to crushing radicalism in the U.S. and putting an end to challenges against capitalism.
In light of this, it is nothing short of a shame that May Day has been all but forgotten in U.S. political culture even though the day traces its origins to the fight of American laborers for a shorter workday.
Last year, after marching on May Day with thousands of other people in the streets of Dublin, one of the questions that was posed to me was how could it be that International Workers’ Day is not celebrated in the U.S. I am still struggling to come up with a convincing explanation, as may be evident from this essay, but Gore Vidal was not off the mark when he said, “we are the United States of Amnesia.”
Nonetheless, the U.S. labor movement has not yet been defeated and is surely not dead. In spite of the bloody suppression and the constant intimidation over many decades, the U.S. labor movement has made its presence felt on numerous historic occasions, from the Battle of Cripple Creek in 1894 and the 1892 Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania to being behind the historic 1963 march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and continues doing so down to this day. Scores of victories for the working class were achieved last year—and all against prevailing odds. Moreover, in 2023, labor strikes in the U.S. jumped to a 23-year high and some of the largest labor disputes in the history of the U.S. were also recorded last year.
So, while May Day may have been formally obliterated by the powers that be from U.S. public awareness, the labor movement is still alive and kicking. Even a small victory is still a victory, though time will tell of the historic significance of each step forward. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the unionists, socialists, and anarchists that made Chicago in 1886 the center of the national movement for the eight-hour workday had foreseen what the impact of their actions would be in the struggle of the international labor movement for democracy, better wages, safer working conditions, and freedom of speech. All these social rights have been amplified over time, though much remains to be accomplished and the struggle continues.
But this is all the more reason why we must not forget—and indeed celebrate every year with marches and protests—May 1st.
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How to the Labor Movement Can Make the UAW’s 2028 General Strike Dream Come True
This could be the beginning of the most exciting resurgence of American organized labor power in a century. Or, it could just be a tweet.
Nov 12, 2023
The labor movement is a capricious friend—it hands out heartbreak as much as it hands out joy. But every once in a while, it is able to wave a triumphant flag and give us all a glimmer of what its potential could truly be.
The recently concluded UAW strike offered just such a moment. It wasn’t just the contract agreements themselves, which were a material success, but also the union’s public call for movement-wide coordination to build the possibility of mass action around the May 1, 2028, expiration of the next auto contracts.
“We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own so that together we can begin to flex our collective muscles,” the UAW declared on October 29.
This is a powerful, national union with more than 400,000 active members, fresh off winning a consequential industrial strike, that is shining the Labor Movement Bat Signal high in the sky and beseeching its peers: Join us!
This could be the beginning of the most exciting resurgence of American organized labor power in a century. Or, it could just be a tweet. What happens in the coming months will determine which of those things is the case.
The general feeling of a labor power resurgence since the pandemic has been fueled by a procession of high profile wins: The Starbucks and Amazon union drives, the massive organizing on college campuses, the friendly Biden administration and its uniquely pro-union NLRB, the historically high favorability of unions in public opinion polls, the periodic mini-strike waves at a variety of fed-up workplaces. This year, we have seen a trio of actions—the Teamsters backing down UPS with a credible strike threat, and the successful WGA and UAW strikes—that show what can be won with the power of strikes at a larger scale.
All of this is encouraging. All of this is evidence of a real shift in public sentiment. All of this, however, does not add up to a robust and lasting change in the balance of power between capital and labor. Right now, what we have are a bunch of discrete occurrences, a bunch of data points that amount to proof of potential.
There are two things that will determine whether or not this promising moment leads to a true, historic revival of the labor movement. The first is easily measurable: union density. Barely 1 in 10 American workers is a union member today. Despite all of the wins just mentioned, that number has not risen in the wake of the pandemic. The primary thing that unions need to do today is to organize more union members. Without this, organized labor is a walled and shrinking garden, rather than a legitimately expansive force for society-wide change.
The second thing is related to the first, but it offers a broader menu for action: We must see some tangible coordination of action across the U.S. labor movement. It is great when one union wins a contract, or organizes an important new company, but those isolated events will not be enough to take on the combined power of trillion-dollar multinational corporations and their political allies. Not even when they involve tens or hundreds of thousands of workers. Big unions, the ones with the most resources, along with whatever non-union groups want to help them, must be able to sit down and plan and carry out big national campaigns together if we want to have any chance at winning the class war. Amazon will never be a unionized company without an enormous, multi-union campaign. Nor will the powerful and wealthy tech industry be organized without an enormous multi-union campaign. We will never achieve the eternal goal of “organizing the South” without an enormous multi-union campaign. Nor will we ever pull off strategic general strikes without an enormous multi-union campaign.
The process of scaling up from some unions making incremental progress to a national labor movement strategically building and exercising labor power wherever and whenever it needs to, all in order to drown the monster of inequality once and for all, will require a whole lot of coordination. That sort of coordination—the sort that happens in service of movement goals, rather than those of individual (and sometimes feuding) unions—really doesn’t happen today.
Ideally, an organization like the AFL-CIO would have begun coordinating such an effort years ago. But they haven’t, and there is little evidence that they will. So unions will have to build these coalitions themselves. And that’s what made the UAW’s public call for other unions to line up their contract expiration dates with theirs so exciting.
This is not some meaningless fringe group. This is a powerful, national union with more than 400,000 active members, fresh off winning a consequential industrial strike, that is shining the Labor Movement Bat Signal high in the sky and beseeching its peers: Join us! If we get ourselves aligned, in four and a half years, we can really put the capitalists in a headlock.
There is much to love about this strategy. It is both powerful and achievable. Lining up contract dates does not require the blood, sweat, and uncertainty of huge new organizing campaigns. It is a way to make existing unions stronger by drawing their influence together into a single point. (Look at the Culinary Union in Las Vegas, currently threatening to strike the entire Las Vegas strip, for an example of what can be won with this tactic in practice.)
There is not a lot of time to waste. But on a more positive note, this is a uniquely plausible opportunity for a historic boost in organized labor power.
Doing this not just in one union or one industry but across many unions in many industries can set the stage for a mass walkout. It can make political power brokers pay attention in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t. It can captivate the public, and draw them into the fight even if they are not union members. It is a real world example of scaling up. It is not just one group of unionized workers making a demand for themselves; it offers the promise of workers in general making demands for the entire working class, backed up by the threat of a general strike. It’s not a dream. It can be done. The UAW is exactly the sort of credible organization that can be the launching point.
What it will take is other major unions taking this call seriously. Most union contracts are three years long, give or take. That means that unions must begin planning for this now. Contracts that are negotiated in 2024 and 2025 need to set their expiration dates for May 1, 2028. Realistically, the UAW and its allies need to convince many of their fellow big unions that this is a real goal within the next six months. There should be furious inter-union lobbying already taking place. The more radical unions, who have an actual vision, should publicly sign onto this plan in the near future, and then they should fan out and try to draw in the less radical unions, by arguing that this action is low-risk common sense. It’s a good argument!
The bigger this gets, the stronger it is, and the more it helps every union. And the more it helps every union, the more leverage it gives this broader coalition of unions to make larger demands that will benefit everyone in the working class, unionized or not. Union leaders need to be made to see the virtues of this argument soon. The case then needs to be made to individual units, and to individual workers, who will have to decide that they want their own contracts to be a part of this strategy.
There is not a lot of time to waste. But on a more positive note, this is a uniquely plausible opportunity for a historic boost in organized labor power. The path to achieving this goal is very straightforward, and there is no part of it that is not within the capabilities of existing unions, their organizing staff, and current members. It does not require finding a huge amount of new resources. It just requires today’s unions to have a little vision, and to be willing to work together.
Sometimes, ironically, those qualities are in short supply in the labor movement. But there is no reason we can’t stop being our own worst enemy, right now. Big things are on the table. Let’s reach out and take them.
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