Chicago Teachers Are Making This May Day Count

This May Day, workers, students, and families across the country are set to turn out in the thousands or even millions to make their voices heard against the growing power of the billionaire class.

May Day, often referred to as International Workers’ Day, has a long legacy in the labor movement. In the late 1800’s — an era of extreme wealth concentration much like our own — American workers organized a general strike on May 1st demanding an eight-hour workday. After a wave of violent state and police repression of labor epitomized by the 1886 Haymarket Affair in downtown Chicago, May 1 was enshrined as a celebration of the working class.

This year, organizers are hoping to expand the scope of the day of action into a broader movement against corporate power and the start of a longer organizing process.

Inequality.org spoke with Jackson Potter, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, about their plans and hopes for this year’s May Day.

For people who don’t follow labor or politics closely, what do you want them to understand about what is happening this May Day?

May Day has always been International Workers Day, and this year it is something more. On May 1, workers, students, and families across the country are going to march, rally, and in many cities, refuse business as usual entirely, no work, no school, no shopping, to show this country what it looks like when working people decide not to show up for the people who profit from our labor.

The reason for that is straightforward. Working people are already being forced to choose between food on the table and medicine on the shelf, between paying rent and keeping the lights on. At the same time, resources that should be going to schools, housing, and health care are being diverted to pay for billionaires’ fortunes and arming federal agents to attack our neighbors. People are fed up, and they have every right to be. May Day is the moment when that fed-up energy takes a coordinated form.

The Chicago Teachers Union voted to make May Day a civic day of action. What does that mean, and why did CTU decide to do it?

It means that on May 1, instructional time in Chicago public schools will be devoted to civic engagement, with buses being provided for students who want to attend the rally, discussions in classrooms, and educators and students participating in the kind of collective action that we spend all year teaching young people about in the abstract.

Teaching students what civic action looks like requires more than textbooks. It requires educators who are willing to model what it looks like to stand up when the stakes are real. We teach about the eight-hour workday, about the labor movement, about the history of people organizing to change what was considered politically impossible, including the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, when on May 2, 1963, young people left their classrooms and helped force the country to confront injustice.

This is not a new idea for CTU. When Rahm Emanuel tried to turn our 300-page contract into a 50-page document and close 50 schools in Black communities, we did not just file grievances. We organized parents, students, and community members and fought back. May Day is that same tradition applied to this moment.

You have watched the Department of Education be systematically dismantled over the past several months. What does that mean concretely for public school students and teachers?

We have seen this before. In Chicago, we watched the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club publish a report calling for 100 charter schools in the city’s Black communities, and watched Democratic and Republican mayors alike implement it. Closing 200 schools over two decades. The research has been clear for years that school closings destabilize communities, increase violence, and produce no educational gains. None of that stopped it. What stopped it, finally, was organized power. It was parents, educators, and community members who refused to accept that their schools were expendable.

The dismantling of the Department of Education is the same agenda, scaled to the national level. It is not about improving education. It is about transferring public resources to private operators. And the response has to be the same, organized power at every level.

How do attacks on public education, the threat of undermining elections, and an illegal war in Iran connect? Are these separate fights or the same fight?

They are the same fight, and understanding that is essential to building the kind of coalition that can actually win.

Think about who benefits from the war in Iran. Oil companies that invested $75 million in Trump’s reelection are collecting tens of billions in extra revenue from the price spike. That money does not go to schools, or health care, or housing. It goes to executives and shareholders. Meanwhile, working families are paying more for gas and groceries, and the U.S. Postal Service has proposed a fuel surcharge on package deliveries because of war-driven oil prices. The war is not separate from the affordability crisis, it is one of its causes.

The attack on elections follows the same logic. When working-class communities cannot vote, the people making decisions about school funding, about ICE operations, about war, do not have to answer to them. The corporate oligarchy did not start with Trump. It was built over decades by Democrats and Republicans alike who put the interests of billionaires before workers. Protecting free and fair elections is not a procedural question. It is a question of who has power over the decisions that determine whether working families can survive.

Workers are already stretched thin by the affordability crisis. How does the war in Iran make that worse?

The connection is direct and it is not complicated. When U.S. oil companies are generating an extra $63 billion in revenue because of war-driven oil prices, that money comes from somewhere. It comes from every working family filling up a gas tank, every small business paying more for deliveries, every school district paying more for transportation. The war is a wealth transfer from working people to the top of the income distribution, and it is happening in real time.

The three demands of May Day Strong are not random. Tax the rich, no ICE and no war, expand democracy. They fit together because the same billionaires driving authoritarianism are the ones profiting from federal contracts, war spending, and the suppression of wages and unions. You cannot address the affordability crisis without confronting the concentration of wealth and power that is producing it.

What are you seeing on the ground heading into May 1? What does it look like when labor and community organizations actually move together?

The school district has officially made May Day a civic day of action. The labor movement has called for an economic blackout. That kind of alignment does not happen automatically. It is built through years of relationships, through showing up for each other’s fights. In Chicago, the CTU has been in relationship with immigrant rights organizations, with tenant organizing groups, with community organizations in Black and Latino neighborhoods for a long time. Those relationships are what make it possible to move together at scale.

Nationally, more than 500 labor and community organizations have come together under the May Day Strong coalition. That includes National Nurses United, SEIU, UNITE HERE, and hundreds of others. As many as 3,000 events are anticipated across all 50 states. This is not a moment. It is a movement that has been building.

What do you want someone reading this to do on May Day and after?

Show up on May 1. Find a march or rally in your city. If there is not one, organize one. The May Day Strong website has a map.

But the more important answer is what comes after. May Day is not the destination, it is a test of the infrastructure we are building. After May Day, go back to your workplace and organize your union. Connect with the community organizations in your neighborhood. Find out what your local school board is doing about funding, about ICE in schools, about the resources your students need. Run for something. Support someone who is running.

The corporate oligarchy did not get here overnight and it will not be dismantled overnight. What has always changed the balance of power is workers and communities moving together over time. That is what we are building. May Day is where we show what that kind of power looks like.