Workers Defy the Billionaire Takeover on May Day

A guide to May Day 2025 actions.

LUIS FELIZ LEON  APRIL 30, 2025

This story will continue to be updated as May Day actions unfold. Click here to read the latest. 

In Chicago, the teachers union will lead a march starting at 11a.m. in Unity Park.

This story will be updated as May Day actions take place.

Where are the pitchforks? President Donald Trump’s administration has declared open season on the working class. Its henchmen have unleashed kidnappings by state agents, worksite raids that spread terror and stifle workplace militancy, massive federal layoffs, funding cuts with devastating consequences and attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as efforts to eliminate collective bargaining rights wholesale. The array of assaults may appear dizzying, but that’s by design: Confusion, division, fear and hopelessness are classic boss tactics, intended to silence dissent and chill organizing. We’re now seeing them on a national scale, as Trump and his cronies work to consolidate power while handing out tax cuts for billionaire pals and giving corporations carte blanche to fleece the public and the services they depend on (including access to medical care). The end game is oligarchy.

Amid the fear and uncertainty, the organized working class, comprising 14 million union members, has largely been quiet or focused on their individual fights. But the scope and horror of attacks on workers have jolted unions to consider new tactics and forge new alliances.

A May Day Strong coalition of over 200organizations, including major national labor unions and hundreds of community organizations, is planning 1,273 mass mobilizations, from strikes to sit-downs to rallies, across 1,031 cities and towns nationwide on International Workers Day, May 1. Among the anchoring organizations are the Chicago Teachers Union (which first brought groups together), National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Communication Workers of America, Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and United Electrical Workers, as well as the Sunrise Movement, the Center for Popular Democracy, Indivisible, and a panoply of other issue-based organizations, from Palestine organizing to reproductive justice to immigrant rights.

Participants will raise the unifying banner ​“For the Workers, Not the Billionaires,” a nod to the populist message of Occupy Wall Street in 2011, when thousands of people turned out to denounce bankers for the taxpayer-funded bailout.

“For many of the organizations involved with May Day mobilizations, this is the first time we are working outside of our union sector or region, and alongside federal government and private sector locals, with the participation of national community networks and their local affiliates,” wrote Jackson Potter, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, in Convergence magazine. CTU is one of the main conveners of the May Day Strong Coalition. The national day of action, Potter continued, “ us new partners to map geographies that have burgeoning union organizing campaigns, nodes of production where workers have disproportionate power, and community forces willing to throw down to defend our democratic rights and institutions.”

In some instances, unions are linking preexisting struggles against billionaire employers, whether university systems, hospitals or the superrich, and tying them to the broader class-wide assaults Trump has turbocharged in his 101 days in office. In others, community organizations and unions are testing out new alliances to bridge specific campaigns to a broader class-struggle orientation that positions working-class people as the countervailing power to billionaire rule. Will this be a dress rehearsal for possible general strike in May 2028? It’s all premature to say in these whirlwind times. But one thing is for sure: Working people will be flexing their collective muscles in a range of arenas in class struggle, from saving Medicaid to standing up for federal workers, nurses, immigrants and any human being whose rights are being trampled on by Trump and his minions. 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. 

In Chicago, the site of the 1886 Haymarket affair that sparked the May Day holiday, the organizing got started with an in-person convening in March, followed by online meetings that drew thousands of participants. The CTU, Arise Chicago and dozens of other labor unions and community organizations will lead a march at 11a.m. from Unity Park to Grant Park. The action not only honors the pitched battle for an eight-hour day in 1886, but also the 400,000-person march on May 1, 2006 to defeat a measure criminalizing undocumented immigrants. A loose coalition of immigrant rights organizations in Chicago is organizing one-day strikes, distributing letters through social media and other channels reminding workers of their right to withhold their labor to protest unfair labor practices at their workplaces.

Minnesota will have a full day of actions, including a rally of airport workers at 12 p.m. to stand up to Trump and Musk as well as to corporations like Delta, Uber, Lyft and the Metropolitan Airports Commission. Anchoring organizations include local immigrant rights groups and SEIU Local 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, the Flight Attendants, the Machinists, Teamsters Local 120, and AFGE. Later at 5 p.m., a unity rally at the state Capitol is expected to draw tens of thousands, and will include liberal anti-Trump groups like Indivisible. 

In Philadelphia, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will headline a hundreds-strong rally at City Hall with local labor and immigration-rights leaders. In New Orleans, hundreds of registered nurses at University Medical Center will go on strike as they negotiate for a first contract.

California will see some of the largest actions. Twenty thousand healthcare, research and technical workers across the University of California system have timed their unfair labor practice strike for May 1. Their union, UPTE of Communications Workers Local 9119, is striking because UC announced a systemwide hiring freeze on March 19, 2025, using Trump’s threatened cuts as cover, without giving the union notice or an opportunity to bargain. 

UPTE President Dan Russell, who was elected as part of a reform slate in 2021, says the University of California is ​“using the political climate as an excuse for the behavior that they had already been exhibiting … which is refusing to bargain in good faith to address the staffing crisis, and just continuing to commit, you know, one unfair labor practice after another.”

AFSCME Local 3299, representing more than 37,000 patient care workers across the same UC system, also plans a walk-out on May Day over similar illegal hiring freeze allegations. ​“The University of California sits on $10 billion in unrestricted reserves,” says Todd Stenhouse, spokesperson for AFSCME 3299. ​“It has routinely handed out raises of 30-40% to its growing legion of Ivory Tower elites, chancellors and the like. It provides them low-interest home loans. They can use them to buy second homes. And all the while the front liners, the people that answer the call button, people that are sweeping the floors, people that are serving the food right, are struggling like never before to make ends meet.

“International Workers Day is a time for workers to celebrate the ongoing struggle, but it is also a time to reclaim our voice in a very uncertain time against employers who, frankly, don’t know what it means to walk in our shoes.”

At noon, the expected 60,000 will swell in number as other unions join in solidarity rallies across California, including the United Auto Workers 4811, UC-AFT 1474, Teamsters Local 2010, and the California Nurses Association. There’s also a planned teach-in at 1:30 p.m.

In Georgia, the Union of Southern Service Workers is planning a march on Atlanta City Hall alongside partnering organizations, including the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Atlanta Jobs with Justice, United Campus Workers, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights and the Indivisible Project. Planned stops include an immigrant detention center and a local OSHA office.

Katie Giede, an 11-year server at Waffle House and member of the Union of Southern Service Workers, said she would be marching to take on billionaires like Waffle House boss Joe Rogers III. Last year, she and her co-workers pressured their employer to raise wages from $2.92 to $5.25 hourly in two years across most markets.

LUIS FELIZ LEON is an associate editor and organizer at Labor Notes.