This story was updated with May Day actions.
At 6:30 p.m. on May Day, hundreds of unionized hotel, food service and casino workers in Philadelphia participated in a civil disobedience action, sitting down in the entrance to the main highway that runs through the center of the city. Among the participants were the Aramark stadium workers with UNITE HERE Local 274 who struck last year and won a $6-an-hour raise for the lowest-paid workers.
As the motivation for the sit-down, Local 274 cited the cost of-living crisis Trump and Elon Musk have exacerbated as they lay waste to government programs and social services.
Shafeek Anderson, a seven-year worker at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown, said he was motivated to participate because of the spiraling cost-of-living crisis and its impact on his co-workers, many of whom are low-income single parents struggling to make ends meet.
“We can’t really make a living wage, and we can’t live a life where we can actually flourish,” says Anderson. “I’ve seen a lot of my co-workers talking about the struggles that they have in their day-to-day lives, the prices of things being unaffordable.”
This was Anderson’s first civil disobedience action, and he said it was “nerve-wracking. But at some point, you’re gonna have to fight for what you believe in.”
They were among hundreds of thousands who demonstrated or took action for May Day 2025.
May Day arrived in the time-honored tradition of strikes. As the Trump administration and the billionaire class threaten to shred the fundamental right to collectively bargain, one of the most important front lines is defending that right against the tyrannical depredations of powerful employers.
More than 57,000 workers with AFSCME 3299 and UPTE-Communications Workers Local 9119 representing workers across the University of California system are on strike in response to what they say are illegal hiring freezes. Both unions are fighting for more staffing. Sonya Mogilner, a clinical social worker at University of California Davis Medical Center, says her caseload is up to 120 patients at a time.
Nearly 1,000 Lockheed Martin workers in Colorado and Florida walked out on a strike over alleged unfair labor practices during contract bargaining as the United Auto Workers members seek to negotiate higher pay in the face of the company’s billions in profits.
And hundreds of nurses in New Orleans with the National Nurses United are striking today as they negotiate for a first contract amid safety concerns they attribute to understaffing. “They have spent millions and millions of dollars just trying to break our spirit and break us down, but it’s honestly really only empowered us more,” says nurse Hailey Dupre.
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.
Where are the pitchforks? 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.
May Day Strong
A May Day Strong coalition of over 200 organizations, including major national labor unions and hundreds of community organizations, planned 1,273 mass mobilizations, from strikes to sit-downs to rallies, across 1,031 cities and towns nationwide between May 1 and May 3. 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 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 on May 1, International Workers Day, Potter continued, “[gives] 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.
Chicago
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 led a march at 11 a.m. from Unity Park toward 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.
Many of the signs and chants at this year’s march called back to those 2006 protests, demanding an end to deportations and respect for the critical contributions of immigrants. Arturo Huizer, a meatpacking worker and union rep for UFCW 1546, told In These Times, “I am out here for workers rights, immigrant rights, to make sure our members are not deported.”
The city’s labor and immigrant rights groups marched alongside protesters decked out in keffiyehs, with one common chant ringing out, “From Palestine to Mexico, border walls have got to go.”
“I’m out here on International Workers Day standing with immigrants and with Palestine, demanding the freedom of Mahmoud Khalil and other students and activists kidnapped by ICE,” said Nazek Sankari, co-chair of Chicago U.S. Palestinian Community Network, to In These Times. “I’m out here for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, an immediate arms embargo, an immediate end to the genocide.”
“Palestine is a labor struggle, an immigrant struggle, a feminist struggle,” said Jinan Chehade, who was marching with American Muslims for Palestine. “We are standing in solidarity as one, saying we will not be intimidated.”
A loose coalition of immigrant rights organizations in Chicago organized a one-day strike for May 1, 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.
Hearkening back to the role that Spanish-language media, particularly radio, played in driving turnout in May Day 2006, an apparently A.I.-generated video calling in Spanish for immigrant workers in construction and food service sectors to turnout for May Day 2025 made the rounds online and via group texts. The video shows placards reading, “We’ll resist because our dreams don’t fit within their walls! We work here! We live here!”
Martin Unzueta, executive director of worker center Chicago Community and Workers’ Rights, estimates that some 50,000 participated.
Rank-and-file Teamsters Local 703 member Angelica Campa says she and her co-workers at the Anthony Marano Company, a major produce distributor in the Chicago area, took the day off to participate in May Day actions. “We are going through difficult times, and now more than ever we need to strengthen the bonds that unite us as a community,” she said to In These Times in Spanish.
“As active members of this country, we want to reaffirm that we are here, working with dedication and commitment,” said Campa. “We are a fundamental part of the workforce that drives the economy and contributes to the development of this nation. Today we will raise our voices not only to demand respect and recognition, but also to remember that together we are stronger.”
Minnesota
Minnesota planned 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.
Philadelphia
In Philadelphia, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) headlined a rally at City Hall with local labor and immigration-rights leaders. A few hours later, a labor and community coalition held a sit-down action on highway I-676, the site of police using tear gas against protestors during the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising. The coalition behind the action included UNITE HERE Local 274, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFGE District 3, AFSCME District 47, Teamsters Local 623, various SEIU locals, the Federal Unionists Network, the Democratic Socialists of America and Make the Road Pennsylvania and other immigrant rights groups.
New Orleans
Nurses at University Medical Center in New Orleans went on strike today as they negotiate for a first contract. In 2023 UMC became the state’s first private-sector hospital with a nurses union, but it also has a more ignominious track record of being called out in the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s 2025 Dirty Dozen report on unsafe employers. Incidents ranging from assaults on nurses to guns left in restrooms have been a galvanizing issue for union members.
Nurse Hailey Dupre says more recruitment and retention would help alleviate the stressors leading to workplace violence. “If we have safer patient ratios, then we can give better care to our patients,” she explains.
“And they’re not getting agitated because they’re waiting on their pain medicine.”This May Day, the UMC nurses want to build on progressive discipline and metal detectors they’ve already won in previous organizing escalations. “Whenever we show that we are still united and we are willing to go without pay and fight for what we deserve, we really do see a difference at the bargaining table,” says Dupre.
Florida, Colorado and Connecticut (UAW)
Nearly 1,000 United Auto Workers members in Denver and Orlando, Florida walked out at Lockheed Martin, the country’s largest defense contractor, in a strike coinciding with today’s nationwide May Day actions. The unfair labor practice strike comes after Lockheed Martin “refused to present a fair economic proposal” in contract negotiations, according to the union. The UAW says the company has made $24 billion in profit and paid its CEO $66 million over the last three years while refusing the union’s demands for a higher pay scale; workers currently start at $15 an hour. Workers also want recognition of Veterans Day as a holiday. More than 2,000 UAW marine drafters at General Dynamics in Groton, Connecticut, were also prepared to strike for the first time in 40 years; they are demanding pensions for all.
“May Day was never just a celebration, a rally, or a march,” wrote UAW President Shawn Fain in The Nation magazine today. “It was also a day for strikes — for economic action at the workplace and beyond that would keep corporate America in check, and keep workers’ strike muscle strong.”
California
California will see some of the largest actions. Twenty thousand healthcare, research and technical workers across the University of California system 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. Members of UPTE have also been working under an expired contract since last October.
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 walked 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,” Stenhouse continues.
At noon, the numbers will swell 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.
Georgia
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 $7.25 hourly in two years across most markets.
Luis Feliz Leon is an associate editor and organizer at Labor Notes.
