Mayday, Mayday, May Day

Here in Florida, anti-immigrant laws weaponize fear in workplaces and neighborhoods. Attacks on free speech and public education are routine. The category of ​“criminal” expands year after year, absorbing more of our neighbors into a carceral system designed not only to punish, but to discipline labor, suppress wages, and push millions into precarity.

This week, hundreds of us are gathering in Miami for two days of public testimony, training, and action. At the Florida People’s Hearing, residents will speak about the threats facing our communities, like the ballooning cost of living and wages that don’t keep up with it. At the Organizing Revival Bootcamp, we will train in the skills our movements need to win under anti-democratic conditions, from effective organizing conversations that move people along the spectrum of support to clarifying our lanes while surfacing shared demands and red lines.

Those hundreds will then move to action on May Day through two interconnected actions. 

First, we will march with temp workers to demand that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) ensures the billions generated by the FIFA World Cup 2026 are used to protect the temp and subcontracted workers whose labor will power the massive staffing infrastructure behind 78 games across 11 host cities. The action is in partnership with the national Temp Worker Advocacy Coalition (TWAC), anchored by Grassroots Law & Organizing for Workers (GLOW).

Then, we will march with plant nursery workers in support of their Planting Justice campaign—an urgent struggle in the state where thousands of immigrant workers are confronting a profound labor and human rights crisis as they work in plant nurseries that produce nearly 70% of the nation’s indoor foliage for retailers like Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Trader Joe’s.

Both mobilizations are aligned with May Day Strong’s national call to action. Across the country, May Day means rallies, marches, teach-ins, walkouts, and refusals of business as usual: no work, no school, no shopping. When billionaires break every rule, we have the right — and the obligation — to withhold our labor, our spending, and our consent.

We have seen what this can look like in practice. Trump’s Operation Metro Surge sent roughly 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents into the Minneapolis – Saint Paul area beginning in December 2025, unleashing widespread fear, violence, and abuse that targeted immigrant communities, particularly Somali Minnesotans. After the murder of Renee Good by an ICE officer, labor and community organizations called for a statewide political strike on January 23, 2026 — no work, no school, no shopping — and tens of thousands participated despite subzero temperatures while hundreds of businesses closed in solidarity.

Public pressure became impossible to ignore: on February 12, Tom Homan announced the formal end of Operation Metro Surge.

The lesson is not that one strike can change everything, but that disciplined collective action rooted in long-term organizing infrastructure can force political concessions. As Unidos MN Executive Director Emilia González Avalos explained, Minnesota’s movement ecosystem had been ​“populated and pollinated for years” before the January strike, through hyperlocal struggles like defending collective bargaining rights to winning driver’s licenses.

At their best, May Day actions are one moment in the longer-term work: a chance to exercise collective power while building the stronger organizations, deeper solidarity, braver workers, and broader coalitions needed to act together again and again. That is the work needed to impose a new reality on those hostile to working people: organized workers can and will withdraw cooperation and disrupt business as usual.

In most of the world, this kind of coordinated worker power is normal. In France, workers shut down the country for weeks in 2023 to fight pension reform; grève générale is part of basic civic vocabulary, and the tools to call one are kept in working order. In Argentina, trade unions call paros generales multiple times a year, and they pull it off because the practice has been kept in shape across generations. In South Korea, when President Yoon Suk Yeol attempted to impose martial law in 2024, unions helped defeat it by calling a general strike that became central to the fight for his impeachment. In India, where bharat bandhs are a recurring part of political life, an estimated 250 million workers participated in what was widely described as the largest strike in human history in 2020.

Workers in these countries have kept in shape a muscle we have allowed to atrophy. The country that gave May Day to the world has spent the last century forgetting how to use it.

That muscle is being rebuilt right now.

Across the labor movement, unions are aligning contracts, campaigns, and strategy around a longer horizon, while community organizations are moving through May Day Strong to build the trust, shared analysis, and collective courage necessary to act in disciplined alignment. Strategic coordination creates the possibility of power at scale.

For those of us organizing workers at the margins, that also means continuing labor’s unfinished work and fulfilling May Day’s promise by organizing the full working class into a social force — across industry, immigration status, incarceration, and employment structure.

Even with the real victories the labor movement has won, it has not yet fully claimed the workers pushed furthest to the margins. Protections expand for some while excluding others: heat safety for warehouse workers, but not incarcerated workers; union standards in the skilled trades, but not for temp workers.

At Beyond the Bars, we see this every day. We organize with people pushed to the margins of the labor market by the carceral system, denied stability, protection, and too often even recognition that they are workers at all.

Workers over billionaires must mean all workers.

It means the temp worker on probation sent to a construction site under threat of jail. It means the undocumented worker threatened with deportation for exercising their rights on the job. It means the incarcerated firefighter risking their life without basic recognition as a worker.

That has always been May Day’s unfinished call: to forge solidarity across divisions that keep working people fragmented. The Haymarket Affair of 1886 — when immigrant workers laboring over 60 hours a week for $1.50 a day organized for the eight-hour work day and were met with repression, police violence, and execution — exposed how fear, division, and criminalization have long been used to suppress worker power. In honor of Haymarket, May 1 became International Workers’ Day, a tradition of strikes, boycotts, and collective resistance.

Even behind prison walls, that tradition has endured. Incarcerated workers, some jailed for labor organizing itself, have marked May Day through strikes, demonstrations, and prisoner-led actions.

May Day is a living reminder that working-class resistance has always extended beyond any single workplace, industry, or nation.

So this May Day, we honor that history. We celebrate every worker who shows up, every organizer who takes a risk, every person exercising solidarity as a muscle, and every coalition that chooses discipline over fragmentation.

We answer the national call — workers over billionaires — and from Florida, we add our own: all workers means all workers.

For those in Chicago who want to continue the struggle against billionaires and authoritarianism after May Day, please join In These Times for a special event on May 5 at 7 p.m. CST: May Day! What’s Next? There will be a special panel featuring Congresswoman Delia C. Ramirez, In These Times columnist Eman Abdelhadi, CTU Vice President Jackson Potter, UWF member Jasson Perez, and moderated by In These Times Senior Editor Miles Kampf-Lassin. Get your tickets now!