May Day Was a Reminder That We Make the World Run
It wasn’t just a day of protest, boycott or celebration—May Day showed that we, the workers, are all on the same glorious team.
Hamilton Nolan
May Day is for the workers. In some beautiful future, every worker will get May Day off. One day. But not yet. For now, it can also serve as a day when you remember the workers who are still working, and think about how you could make their lives better.
On my way from Brooklyn to the May Day rally in Washington Square Park yesterday, I saw all the people working who make New York City work. The Mexican construction crew sitting in a line against a concrete wall on my block, covered in dust, taking a break from building the building across the street. The woman selling them lunches out of a big plastic cooler. The woman pulling hot metal trays out of the steam table at the restaurant on the corner. The women with paper masks on at the nail salon on Flatbush Ave. That place is cheap, so they can’t be making much.
The man with the apron stacking avocados outside the fruit stand. The aggrieved checkout clerk at the Duane Reade who becomes the convenient target for the rage of customers mad that all of the detergent is locked up and the staff is too small so there’s always a long line. The guy chopping jerk chicken with a cleaver at Peppa’s. The bus driver (union) pulling up at the corner of Parkside as an elderly woman cusses about how slow the bus is. The barista at the coffee shop, trying to remember to smile.
The woman in the booth at the subway station (union). The guys in orange vests picking their way down the subway tracks to fix things (union). And the subway driver! (Union). Without them we don’t get to where we need to go.
The World’s Funkiest Guitarist playing for tips on the West 4th Street A train platform. He’s at work. The cops (union). The guys making falafel in the falafel spot. The guys making pizza in the pizza spot. The guys making turkey sandwich — cheese, mustard, mayo, lettuce, tomato, onion — at the bodega. The guys unloading band equipment outside the Blue Note. The chess hustlers banging timers for $20 a game. The people selling dosas from the strictly vegetarian cart. The tarot reader. The $5 portraits girl. The guy who looks like a child psychiatrist sitting at the card table with a sign that says How Do You Feel. The immigrant mother with a toddler on her back selling gum and candy out of a box. Everybody. The workers! They were still working. All the rest of us were marching for them.
It was beginning to get warm. The sky was powder blue and cloudless. It was almost too nice to think about revolution. But not quite, of course. Not on May Day. Thousands were out in that park, including hundreds of Laborers, Locals 78 and 79, all in their neon orange union shirts, all having a fine time, half listening to their various business agents who took the stage. Hearing these guys talk transports me, mentally, back to the 1950s, when New York City was crowded with burly trade union guys who ran their little sliver of the city with an iron fist. “They consida collective bargaining a threat ta national security. I say collective bargaining is a threat to a dictata!” said one local’s business manager. “If I had one dolla I couldn’t put one dolla next ta that dolla unless I put labor in the equation!” said another.
In the American imagination at large, this particular demographic barely exists anymore: multiracial, multigender, hard wearing people, people who build things for a living with the sunburns and muscles to prove it, a little macho, a little swaggering, union to their tip toes, who will come all the way downtown from Queens and stand in a big crowd of kiddie communists to tell the damn “Dictata” to keep his grubby hands off our collective bargaining. While political consultants slot everyone here into their predictive analytic machines and try to match them with the proper messaging stereotypes, the reality is that these are some of the people that unions help to live decent lives, and so they will show up (with some prodding from the union) to be a living show of force for the value of unions themselves.
Such a satisfying scene. A sledgehammer to all of the ways that idiot pundits talk about politics in our idiot country. All of these Laborers with neck tattoos and shades, smoking little cigars, picking up their free t-shirts from the LIUNA booth sporting a retro Knights of Labor sign that said “AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL.” Their DJ played Michael Jackson and Soulja Boy and made everyone dance much more easily than the self-consciously Left Wing music that would be played later on.
I was standing up on a bench to get an elevated view of things, and sitting right below me was an elderly Black man with a pilled-up green union beanie on his head, with stooped shoulders and a skinny neck and white hairs sprouting from his chin. And sitting right next to him was a portly older white man with white hair, a pink face and sweat running down his arms. And both of them were wearing t-shirts demanding workplace safety. Now, here were two guys who looked about as unlikely to hang out in the same place as you can get. Two old retired working guys who you would look at and assume left work and went in the opposite direction, to the most opposite places you could find. Yet both of them were out here in the name of Workplace Safety. Sitting next to each other on this beautiful day listening to music they didn’t know.
I don’t want to make too much of it — I’m sure they both have other interests beyond workplace safety, and entire rich inner lives that might still be at odds with one another in some respects — but the fact is that they both ended up right there, on May Day. That’s what a union gets you. Everybody out there together for something bigger than their own narrow little preferences. It shouldn’t be such a rare thing but the modern world can make it feel like it is. That makes it feel all the more moving.
The circle was even wider than that. A skinny NYU kid with a lip ring and a t-shirt that said “TROTSKY” wandered amid the gruff Laborers. So, too, did a flamboyantly gay kid with eye shadow and belly bared beneath a purple half-shirt. Waltzing through the scene were 19-year-old models who had strolled up from Soho and old hippies in Free Cuba buttons and midtown doormen in 32BJ SEIU gear and hotel workers waving Hotel Union placards and prim women dressed in the crimson robes of characters from the Handmaid’s Tale standing next to corn-rowed women in orange LIUNA hoodies who were desperately, helplessly dancing to “Man in the Mirror.”
We were all out here, because this is what the labor movement is: a thing that says we all have something in common. Despite what the world might tell you. You hang out here for a while and you start to think: All that stuff about how demographic is destiny and we’re all on competing teams who hate and fear each other is bullshit, man. Here we are! All of us! Different people coming together. Not on some cartoon, “We Are The World” shit, but being in one place for a common cause, while all still being ourselves. It still exists. And then you can grasp quite easily why anyone whose business thrives on division would not want the labor movement to exist.
The fringe Marxists were out there selling the Workers Vanguard paper with the headline, “Want Socialism? Fight Mamdani.” And Mayor Zohran Mamdani was also there himself, on stage, speaking about how much he values New York City’s unions. The labor movement’s unifying power cannot be crushed to earth by the right nor the ultraleft.
All of this in New York City was but one of many, many May Day rallies all across this great land. Serious ones. In Chicago, organizers forced the schools to declare May 1 a day of civic action. In San Francisco, they swarmed the airport, and in Manhattan they targeted the Amazon offices. Thousands of teachers marched in North Carolina, and thousands of students walked out all over the place. There were more than 4,000 May Day demonstrations nationwide, according to May Day Strong organizers. That’s a lot. That’s enough that if you hear anybody say, “People should do something,” you can say to them, fairly, “They did. Did you?”
One thing you can take away from May Day is anger — anger at capitalism, at imperialism, at oligarchy, at President Trump, at inequality, at union-busting, at war, at The Way Things Are Going. This sort of anger is legitimate and is, indeed, the fuel for change. It deserves to be nurtured and channeled and to find its expression in the streets and in politics.
But I have to admit that my takeaway from yesterday was not anger. Perhaps because of the weather, but more, I think, because of the people. The glorious tableau. Everybody! Together! And for who? Not for a game or a concert or a celebrity that we all worship. For us. For the workers. For you and me and the other people stuck stacking the avocados and driving the trains.
It was a reminder that this thing — we all have it in common. We aren’t all the same but we are, in this sense, all on the same team. The team of the people. The fact is that the majority of us are on this team, and the only reason it doesn’t always feel like it is that the handful of people on the other team have invested a lot to make us forget it. If everyone would turn off the TV and put away the internet and go outside and see the May Day rally, a lot of the poison we call politics would be purged, naturally, like a sweat lodge for our national identity.
This ain’t patriotism, baby. It’s the labor movement. Something better, for you and me and all of our friends, everywhere.
This story was first posted at How Things Work.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
