Reflections on May Day 2025
Photo of May Day in Los Angeles courtesy of Chris K.
[A slightly different version of this article was published on May 1 in Jacobin.]
“With our comrades we remember recent victories, and we mutter against, and curse, our rulers. We take a few minutes to freshen up our knowledge of what happened there in Chicago in 1886 and 1887 before striding out into the fight of the day.”
—Peter Linebaugh, “A May Day Meditation”
When my children were little in the late 1990s, we attended an annual May Day event in verdant Tilden Park, near our home in Berkeley. Each year a flyer, resplendent with Walter Crane illustrations, would appear in our mailbox inviting us to come celebrate. I have no memory of how we got onto the mailing list, but I recall how much my kids loved arriving in the meadow, lining up with dozens of other families, and marching around the perimeter of our “commons” behind banners and signs, before participating in a kid-led theatrical presentation featuring authority-defying woodland peoples and a cruel but eventually vanquished evil overlord.
This mashup of “green” and “red” May Days—the celebration of spring renewal dating back to time immemorial, and the more modern promotion of workers and class struggle—is typical of the dialectic that has animated the holiday in various times and places. This year’s May Day is leaning more toward red.
On April 5 an estimated three million people around the country served notice that their “consent of the governed” was not available to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their fascist billionaire cabal. The turnout for the hastily thrown-together “Hands-Off” demonstrations—more than a thousand events in all fifty states—surpassed organizers’ predictions and ramped up expectations for the next big day of action, which happens to be May 1, International Workers Day.
A confluence of tributary factors is building attention for this year’s May Day. Beyond its traditional significance in worker solidarity, and as a display of resistance to the current extreme right wing agenda, May Day 2025 offers the opportunity to lay down a marker toward a formidable goal: the challenge issued by United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain to the rest of the labor movement to line up union contracts for expiration on May 1, 2028 as a platform for mass strikes to follow. As Fain put it, “We want everybody walking out just like they do in other countries.”
The history
Although celebrated in more than one hundred countries, May Day has never been an official holiday in the United States, the country of its origin. The explanation lies in a complex history encompassing the vast differences between what workers want and what capitalists are willing to part with. Jacobin has published many articles over the years on that history, so I’ll just briefly summarize here and point you for details toward my documentary video, We Mean to Make Things Over: A History of May Day.
In 1884 the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor, decrying the inhumanity of workers’ lives crushed by too many hours of work and too little time for rest and play, passed a resolution stating that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1 1886”. Another resolution encouraged all labor organizations to vote for a general strike on that date in support of the eight hour day. After determined organizing, a third of a million workers downed tools on the big day, with decidedly mixed results.
Chicago saw the greatest manifestation of worker power. But following police violence that resulted in fatalities, a protest demonstration was held in Haymarket Square on May 4. Here an unknown perpetrator threw a bomb, precipitating a police riot in which several more people were killed. The city’s employers and government unleashed the nation’s first red scare, targeting the most effective immigrant worker organizers. It ended in the kangaroo court conviction and hanging of four leaders, the murder or suicide of one more in his cell, and continued imprisonment of three others. Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, after examining the matter, pardoned and freed the prisoners, declaring their trial a miscarriage of justice.
The cause of the Haymarket martyrs was embraced by the newly formed Socialist or Second International, which in 1889, meeting in Paris, designated May 1, 1890 as a day of remembrance and called for a worldwide demonstration for the eight hour day. Initially there was no mention of establishing a workers’ holiday. Yet, in country after country for decades, workers’ movements pushed employers and governments to recognize May Day as a paid holiday and to establish the eight-hour day as the workplace standard. At times, the May 1 movement was met with bloody repression. In some places, it took a general strike to win the holiday and the eight-hour workday.
The first May Day demonstrations in 1890 fell on a Thursday, stimulating a conversation that’s recurring now: should workers leave work (strike) to aggressively support the cause? The Socialist International left that decision up to its affiliated parties in each country, depending on their assessment of the conditions under which they operated. The results varied from Vienna, where on May 1 a general strike shuttered the city, and some sixty rallies combined to form a march of one hundred thousand; to London, where a non-striking “May Day” was moved to May 4, a Sunday, unleashing an unprecedented demonstration of three hundred thousand.
In the United States the AFL decided against a repeat of 1886. Instead the most prepared union, the Carpenters and Joiners, led the way and struck for the eight hour day. Other unions and allies provided as much support as they could, while planning that each May Day following another union would go out and take its turn. Ten of thousands of carpenters earned an eight hour day through these actions in 1890 (although the victory was rolled back by the economic depression later in the decade).
Within a few years, following the Homestead Steel Strike in 1892, and in the midst of the Pullman strike in summer 1894, in which workers were killed by police, the national guard and armed thugs employed by the railroads, President Grover Cleveland thought it might be prudent to let a little steam out of the class struggle pressure cooker. He signed a bill proclaiming the first Monday in September a holiday celebrating the contributions of workers to America. This bill made no mention of the eight-hour day or the repression of the workers’ movement. Under these circumstances Labor Day was, in effect, an employer-friendly substitute for May Day.
Although the Socialist Labor Party, left-led unions and later the Socialist Party and IWW continued on May Day to promote the eight hour day and workers’ holiday, by the turn of the century the AFL fully accepted the non-radical substitute. With the Russian Revolution, Labor Day became a foil in propaganda wars against Communism. After World War II, it devolved still further into a Cold War workers’ holiday. “Labor Day Sales!” advertisements bolstered consumer capitalism’s claim to better serve the working class than Communism did. A nadir of sorts was reached with the redesignation of May 1st as “Law Day” in 1957 by President Eisenhower (although internationally that dubious honor would go to Hitler’s cooptation of the holiday). But a funny thing happened on the way to the death of May Day.
Photo of DSA-LA’s May Day contingent courtesy of Chris K.
The Resuscitation of May Day
After Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign and the explosive growth of DSA, the decades-long freeze on public collaboration between organized labor and the left began to thaw. DSA chapters and unions found they could work together. A rekindled interest in May Day led to collaboration on a growing number of small but feisty demonstrations.
There were other signs of a renaissance of the unofficial workers’ day. In early 2018 my former employer, the California Federation of Teachers, asked me to testify before the State Assembly Education Committee on behalf of a CFT-sponsored bill that proposed making May Day a state holiday. The CFT legislative director told me beforehand that he had asked 39 legislators to carry the bill before one agreed. The bill got through committee but died on the Assembly floor.
The moment that stuck in my mind occurred when I finished my brief history presentation to the legislators. A silence ensued, and lingered on, for close to half a minute. Anyone who has spent time around elected officials knows that silence in front of a crowd is not their default. I surmised that the image in their heads during that silence originated with the evening news they had absorbed each May Day earlier in their lives, when goosestepping Soviet soldiers preceded tanks and missile carriers in their march across Red Square in Moscow. I guessed that the assemblymembers were busy connecting that image with the concept of “re-election”, thus sending them into a moment of quiet contemplation of their futures.
This experience taught me that the recovery from ‘May Day fear’ of union activists post-Cold War and post-Bernie did not extend to elected public officials. Soon my brief legislative committee testimony became a longer talk, which I presented to unions, labor councils, DSA chapters (and like May Day demonstrations, often cosponsored) in April for the next couple years. With COVID’s shutdown, I delivered these talks on zoom, but also worked with a group of talented friends to turn the presentation into a video.
When we returned to public gatherings, the video continued to be screened in the days leading up to May first each year. There was clearly rising interest in the topic. May Day demonstrations were becoming an annual labor-supported event. San Francisco demonstrations and marches, for instance, were jointly called by all five Bay Area labor councils.
This year the UC Berkeley Labor Center showed the video on April 3. The event was cosponsored by East Bay DSA, UC Berkeley YDSA, the Alameda Labor Council and UAW Local 4811, the academic workers union that had waged and won an inspirational statewide UC strike in late 2022. The event included a reception for the art created for the video by Jos Sances, blown up and framed on the Labor Center’s walls, and brief talks by me, Jos and Tanzil Chowdhury, a PhD candidate and a statewide leader of Local 4811. The Labor Center’s event organizers told me they would be very pleased with forty attendees. Ninety showed up.
Tanzil described the work it had taken to make the 2022 strike a success. A new militant leadership of the union (actually three separate units at the time of the strike, merged afterward into one) carefully prepared the members for several years to get to the point where the strike could be successful. He noted that in the current political situation, many people were hoping that Shawn Fain’s date for a general strike on May 1 2028 could be moved up. But his union’s example demonstrated the importance of proper preparation. If it took several years to set up a strike of 48,000, a three-year timeline to build a national general strike of millions did not seem excessive.
The discussion that followed his presentation seesawed between fear that we don’t have three years given the speed at which the installation of American fascism is taking place, and the recognition of how much distance we have to cover before pulling off a successful general strike.
At other screenings since then the conversations have continued to revolve around the question, ‘How do we reasonably get from here to where we need to be as quickly as possible?’
Toward the general strike?
For much of organized labor, May Day 2025 is no longer May Day 1957. Unions like the UAW have learned to surmount divide and conquer tactics utilized against labor, which included the reflexive avoidance of May Day. Shawn Fain’s stated goal of a general strike, and the concrete task of aligning contract expirations to support it on May Day 2028, provides a tangible and highly symbolic process for overcoming working class division. It addresses the desire for action so many are feeling right now, and not incidentally establishes a credible path for the American working class to reclaim May Day.
Going back to May Day’s origins, the state repression of immigrant worker leaders and whipping up of hysterical xenophobia has periodically returned as a “look over there” tactic in times of social crisis, and the current moment is no exception. Historically some unions have turned their gaze away or even cheered anti-immigrant fervor. But today Sheet Metal workers union president Michael Coleman and National Building Trades Council leader Sean McGarvey—not generally considered radical labor leaders—are nonetheless standing up against Trump for the return of union apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose illegal deportation and imprisonment is intended to divide workers and demoralize the immigrant community.
May Day 2025 is also not yet May Day 2028, and it remains to be seen whether we will get there. Labor and community organizing for this May Day contains the seeds for growing another outpouring of anger and determination similar to what we saw on April 5. That’s important. The key to success of the plan for a general strike in 2028 will be found in continuously building the muscles for mass action along the way, which necessitates a sharp focus by organized labor on internal and external organizing for that purpose. We shouldn’t expect this to happen overnight. Labor is not a monolith, and different unions are moving at different speeds toward understanding and acting on the existential peril we face.
Of course, organized labor is not the only factor in resistance to the fascist tide. But the turnout for May Day 2025 will help to show us whether labor is on track to play the role it can and should in the fight.
