Portside

People organize in nearly 1,000 cities with focus on rallying against Trump administration and ‘billionaire profiteers’

Why the work of the 2025 Labor Organizers of the Year is so critical.

By 1891, May 1st demonstrations for a shorter workday had become an international and regular practice, becoming also a call for universal peace and a celebration of working class power.

May Day will be a national demonstration that will polarize today’s struggle not along resentful, racist lines of immigrant vs. “native”, but along the class-struggle lines of workers vs. billionaires.

Rendering collective bargaining inapplicable to the vast majority of federal workers, combined with the administration’s other attacks on the civil service, would leave the federal workforce in its weakest position in a century.

In 1970, US postal workers won collective bargaining rights with an illegal strike. If lawsuits to stop Trump’s attacks on the federal workforce fail, that kind of militancy may be the only way for federal workers to retain their own union rights.

“They’re all part of the same industry. It’s not necessarily who is taking jobs from whom, it's the same industry. No one is stealing from anybody. There’s shrinkage on both sides of the border.”

Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s chief of staff issued the warning as department employees have spoken to the news media about harms they see resulting from the dismantling of their agency, which enforces laws guaranteeing workers’ rights.

In the first 100 days of his second term, Trump has hurt working people and the economy over 100 ways.

Workers have a long and storied history of resisting attempts to pit them against each other. We found examples specific to Minnesota’s labor movement, which has a militant legacy that can be learned from today.