How Organizers Are Building the Infrastructure Behind May Day

On May 1, workers, students, and families across this country will march, rally, and take action together to demand a country that puts workers over billionaires. But a national day of action does not appear out of nowhere. It is built, block by block, conversation by conversation, in the months before anyone takes to the streets.

A few weeks ago, Organized Power in Numbers organizers and volunteers were walking Santee Alley in LA’s Fashion District. Los Angeles is the nation’s garment production capital, home to over 45,000 workers, most of them Latino and Asian immigrants, who take home roughly $300 a week cutting, sewing, and finishing the clothes that stock U.S. stores.

They were there to let business owners know what their rights are if ICE shows up. They explained 4th and 5th Amendment rights in plain terms: the right to deny entry without a judicial warrant, the right not to self-incriminate, and the right to hire legal counsel during I-9 audits. They also helped businesses post signs marking private areas federal agents cannot enter without a judicial warrant.

Most of the people organizers and volunteers talked to were workers. They took the information and wanted to know if other businesses were signing the May Day pledge, a commitment not to open on May 1. More than a few remembered the 2006 shutdown, the Day Without Immigrants, and what it felt like when workers stopped showing up. 

That is what building a movement actually looks like. Not a stage and a megaphone, though we need and will use those too. It is one conversation at a time until workers who have never had a reason to show up start showing up.

That is the work of our national Neighborhood Defense Training program. Every month we run trainings covering constitutional rights to prepare our communities in case ICE shows up at their workplaces. Our organizers are out talking to small businesses and workers, starting the conversations that make mass action possible.

In Bernalillo County, New Mexico — after more than a year of coalition work with local community and labor partners — we helped pass a first-of-its-kind community benefits resolution. Companies that want county tax breaks now have to show what they are giving back to communities: commitments to local hiring, small business support, and environmental protection. Five percent of their tax savings also goes into a community fund for workforce training and local priorities.

In Phoenix, our team spent months in conversations with community organizations, refugee groups, and city staff and council members to strengthen the city’s Community Transparency Initiative. We helped usher through an  ordinance that bans ICE and Customs and Border Protection from staging or operating on city-owned property without explicit approval. It also requires all 15,000 city employees to be trained on what to do if they encounter federal agents, including how to tell the difference between an administrative and a judicial warrant. 

Labor and community organizations working together is the most underestimated force in this movement. The fight for immigrant rights and the fight for worker power are the same fight. The billionaires driving authoritarianism are the same ones fighting unions, suppressing wages, and profiting from the fear that keeps workers divided.

This spring, we ran solidarity schools across the Sunbelt. In Albuquerque, 65 people from 15 organizations and unions showed up the day after the third No Kings Day mobilizations, marking the first time community and labor came together in New Mexico in those numbers. In Phoenix, 35 leaders from four organizations including the Arizona Education Association, AZ AFL-CIO, and Poder in Action gathered for the first-ever labor-community training in the state. We supported a school of 30 in Dallas and anchored our own in Houston.

When the teacher and the warehouse worker and the small business owner are in the same room, learning together, building trust with each other, coalitions stop being a list of organizations on a press release and start being something that can actually move.

As many as 3,000 events are anticipated across all 50 states on May 1, building on more than 1,300 May Day actions last year. More than a dozen cities have announced plans for no work, no school, no shopping. In Chicago, the school district officially made May Day a civic day of action. In Durham, North Carolina, the Board of Education voted to make May 1 a teacher workday, enabling teachers to attend a rally in downtown Raleigh.

May Day is not just a show of force. It is a test of everything we have been building. May Day is how we build the muscle to keep fighting from May 2 onward.

Workers and communities moving together is the only thing that has ever shifted power away from those who hoard it. That is what May Day is for.