May Day Was Even More Important Than You Think
On May 1, organizers reported over 5,000 May Day Strong actions across the country — the most widespread distribution of U.S. May Day actions ever. Numbers are interesting — but they’re not nearly the whole story here. Because this May Day was even more important than you think.
With No Kings, millions were activated into the streets. May Day had
another goal in mind — to stretch our mass mobilization skills to
include more, to quote Martin Luther King Jr., “creative tension.”
The need for escalation became all the more urgent in light of the
MAGA Supreme Court’s ruling eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, the
legal crown jewel of the civil rights movement. This heavy blow is aimed
at the most reliable voting bloc for a just democracy in America —
Black voters. So, in response, we have to return to risky tactics that
wage struggle for our democracy.
So in New York, protesters with the Sunrise Movement shut down entrances to the New York Stock Exchange — a daring tactical escalation. In Raleigh, North Carolina, 20 school districts closed
for the largest statewide teacher rally since 2019. In each of the
thousands of May Day protests, people spoke to specific local conditions
— North Carolina ranks 43rd in average teacher pay — but tied to the
overall frame of workers over billionaires.
At Kent State University in Ohio, students honored previous generations who braved bullets, standing in the rain and wind to protest the closing of DEI offices and scholarships. They were part of the fast-moving and underreported growth of students organizing against this regime: Sunrise estimates 100,000 students participated in this weekend’s May Day strikes.
It’s important to note what we saw. Escalated tactics were trialed —
this wasn’t just sign-waving. The May Day Strong coalition was also
consciously moving in a unique formation with National Nurses United,
AAUP, NDWA and dozens of local unions, including SEIU, AFSCME and UNITE
HERE locals, joining with the likes of Indivisible and 50501.
But perhaps most importantly and consequentially, it was a structure
test for future economic disruptions. In a structure test you’re testing
to see who is with you — who is ready to move and who just says they’re
ready to move. So in real time we get to assess which groups are ready
for further boycotts, strikes and other kinds of economic disruption.
These tactics are important to build up for because they are not
symbolic, but have a material impact on the authoritarian regime.
As a wise group, this coalition was testing what capacity we have for
this kind of collective power. And that capacity was significant (with
room to grow!). All consciously organized by a group that has a vision
for building to rolling, wildcat and general strikes.
Finding the right yardstick
One of the hazards of living under an authoritarian attempting to
consolidate power is that most of our victories will not come from
government interventions. As civil resistance scholar Hardy Merriman has observed,
we are facing a leader who can wake up each morning and do something
terrible — kidnap Nicolás Maduro, fire competent federal workers, bomb
Iran, cancel contracts, tear down part of the White House — and in the
immediate term, we are not able to stop it.
Therefore “Did we stop him today?” cannot be our yardstick for growth — though obviously, it is an ultimate aim.
So May Day did not stop the Iran war, despite May Day Strong’s strong
antiwar demand. It did not fulfill its goal of taxing the rich or
guarantee that Trump will honor the “hands off our vote” demand. That’s
not the right yardstick.
A different yardstick could be numbers. But of course No Kings blows that out of the water with an impressive 8 million people taking action this March.
But No Work, No School, No Shopping is not sign-waving — it’s economic pressure. In preliminary data from the event,
89 percent of participants refused to shop that day, 14 percent didn’t
go to school and 32 percent participated in “No work.” We’re now
expanding our ability to materially disrupt the regime.
Yes, we need to go further. Yes, we need more than one-day actions.
Yes, we need many more groups to participate, but critics don’t make
movements — doers do. And the doers were off doing a lot of things.
They were turning out for public demonstration in small towns where showing up at all takes courage. Towns like Idaho Falls, Idaho, Lewisburg, West Virginia and the ranching town of Dillon, Montana.
In San Francisco, as elsewhere, protesters were arrested doing direct action, among them elected officials
(and several vying for office). In their case, they blocked the airport
— the site of a recent high-profile confrontation with ICE forcibly
detaining a woman and her child. While being arrested, Sanjay Garla, first vice president at SEIU United Service Workers West, said, “It’s a good day for the movement. ICE out of SFO!”
Memphis showed up boldly. They now face the triple threat of an
ongoing National Guard deployment, new redistricting due to the Supreme
Court ruling and an enormous Elon Musk xAI data center. Protesters
blocked the entrance to Musk’s Colossus I supercomputer, with its
massive turbines polluting air and water.
“We want xAI to turn the turbines off,” protester Jasmine Bernard
told Channel 3 news in Memphis. “We know the consequences of xAI being
here far outweigh any benefits that somebody may be able to conjure up.”
In city after city, protesters were making visible the story of how
billionaires are wrecking our lives — and making clear that we’re not
going to put up with it.
In Washington, D.C., people blocked numerous intersections, demanding core values of democracy: no more attacks on workers, peace and the long-delayed D.C. home rule. Keya Chatterjee of Free DC explained where the escalation is headed in an AFSCME press release:
“Millions of people across the country rose in solidarity today and
that’s what it’s going to take to end this regime and their attacks for
good. The next step is to flex our economic muscle.”
And if you hadn’t heard much about May Day in your community, obviously that means there’s more to do. But also it’s a good sign, as it means people outside your immediate circle were organizing and moving things. If you’re reading this and realize you’re not yet in the boat, join May Day Strong’s list so they can reach you as they plan what comes next.
May Day Strong proved the organizing phenomenon that getting people
in motion is difficult, but once people stay in motion, getting them
into greater motion becomes easier. And that is a different kind of victory, measured by different instruments.
The research on what actually determines success in civil resistance makes a stark point: 83 percent of successful anti-authoritarian campaigns win when they have strong participation of labor — without labor, the percentage that wins plummets to 29 percent.
May Day Strong put together one of the widest coalitions yet: a mix
of national and locals of National Nurses United, AAUP, NDWA, NEA, AFT,
SEIU, Chicago Teachers Union, Starbucks Workers United, the United
Electrical Workers, and APWU, alongside Indivisible, 50501, DSA
chapters, immigrant rights organizations, and hundreds of local groups.
All under a broad set of sensible demands:
- Tax the Rich: Our families, not their fortunes, come first.
- No ICE. No war. No private army serving authoritarian power.
- Expand democracy, not corporate power. Hands off our vote.
Movement research is also very clear on another point: Movements that wage economic disruption succeed at dramatically higher rates than those that stay in the realm of courts, elections, rallies and petitions alone.
That’s why testing out the operational capability of days of “No
Work, No School, No Shopping” is critical. It may be needed in the
future if there are attempts to steal elections or other inflection
moments — so it’s important for us to get in shape now.
It’s worth recalling this particular tactic’s history and what happened in Minneapolis.
Minneapolis gave us the blueprint
Operation Metro Surge placed
3,000 armed, masked federal agents throughout Minnesota, leading to ICE
agents killing Renée Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. Families hid.
Children were afraid to go to school. ICE agents unleashed chemical sprays on students and staff.
Out of that terror, something else was born. Unions, faith leaders
and community organizations made a call: Jan. 23 would be a day of “No
Work, No School, No Shopping.” We, as workers and students and
consumers, would use our power to stop business as usual.
The day started at a negative 40 degree wind chill. Despite that,
over 100,000 people showed up in the streets. Notably, the action was
backed by the executive board of the Minnesota AFL-CIO. Subsequent
polling found that nearly one in four Minnesota voters either participated or had a loved one who did.
At the AT&T call center in the Twin Cities, “they only have about
20-30 people, out of over 100, who are still working,” Lori Wolf, a CWA
Local 7250 member, told Labor Notes.
Across many sectors — SEIU 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, ATU bus drivers,
IATSE stagehands, AFSCME municipal workers and OPEIU office workers — people made the choice to stay home.
I have written extensively about the “pillars of support”
as a way to understand authoritarian power — the institutions whose
cooperation an authoritarian needs to govern, and whose withdrawal of
cooperation can crack that power open. On Jan. 23 in Minneapolis, we saw
pillars from media to small businesses crack — not break, but crack —
across almost every dimension at once.
Over 1,000 businesses closed. The faith pillar moved, activating new
national networks, with over 700 faith leaders participating and roughly
100 arrested
in an action at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport,
blockading the departure lanes used for deportation flights. Across the
country, police — long a backbone of state enforcement — began to break
ranks, with chiefs
publicly condemning ICE tactics and others moving beyond words to
support legal distance from rogue, unaccountable and untrained agents.
Minneapolis Federation of Educators showed up in force with their sea
of blue hats — while the following week, University of Minnesota
students called for a nationwide walkout. Tens of thousands of students
were activated, and they helped spark thousands of largely unreported
protests by students nationwide.
This was not a spontaneous eruption. It drew on networks built after the murder of George Floyd, labor councils shaped by years of relationship, and immigrant rights organizations that had been organizing long before most people noticed. What Minneapolis gave us was not just inspiration. It was a blueprint — and a question. Could it spread?
A structure test
Much of the country does not have the resources, history of
organizing and relatively healthy movement ecosystem that Minnesota has.
We need more practice moving in more unity with each other.
In that sense, this May Day was what unions call a structure test. A structure test is not an action you take because you’re ready. It is an action you take to find out whether you’re ready — and where you’re not.
In labor organizing, a structure test is any ask you make of people
that is deliberately lower-stakes than the final big ask. It’s designed
to reveal the real shape of your organization: who will put their name
on a petition, who will wear a sticker to work, or who will attend a
public meeting, before you ever ask anyone to walk a picket line. “In
the lead up to today’s most successful strikes,” wrote the great Jane McAlevey,
referring to historic 2018 teachers’ walkouts, “countless structure
tests are conducted in advance of knowing a workplace or workplaces are
actually ready to strike to win.”
Her model of building to win requires doing small tests to both exert
power and to identify organizing weaknesses. Each May Day locale
hopefully is doing a debrief to assess what networks were activated.
Nationally we can see groups who came on board and did turn out, and
others who did not.
“We are asking people to take a step into further exerting their
power in all aspects of their lives — as workers, as students, as
members of local organizing hubs,” Leah Greenberg of Indivisible told The Guardian. “It’s important as it builds muscles towards greater non-cooperation.”
A structure test is very different than wishful thinking (“why can’t
everyone just do a general strike?”) — it is testing the capability of
institutions and their resolve. It is the practice of honesty about
where you are. It is the act of asking, in public and under conditions
of real pressure: Who is actually with us?
That question, asked in thousands of cities on May 1, is the most
important thing that happened that day. Not because we have the final
answer. But because now we know more about the shape of the answer than
we did on April 30.
Power, unity, leadership: an honest accounting
Researchers often converge on some key measures to assess movements resisting authoritarianism: unity, planning and nonviolent discipline.
The scale of coordination — thousands of events, major national
unions, official city holidays in Chicago, teacher actions statewide in
North Carolina, airport actions in the Bay Area, nurses on strike in New
Orleans — represented unity and planning, in a real and measurable
expansion of what this movement can do.
“The way we build power is by flexing power,” said Martha Grant, one of the May Day Strong organizers.
In Chicago, the birthplace of May Day, the Chicago Teachers Union
recently won the concession that all public school children learn about
May Day, creating what CTU president Stacy Davis Gates called
“academic freedom for all of us to understand where our empowerment
comes from.” Thousands rallied at Union Park alongside a day of economic
blackout with SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana, Indivisible Chicago
and the Chicago Federation of Labor.
There are real tensions in any broad front. There are more groups that need to be brought in. And because institutions like unions have been so gutted, there are many more individuals that need to be connected, too — hence one reason organizers created “Strike Ready” to capture individuals wanting to participate who weren’t connected to some of the big organizations.
In Minneapolis this January, what was most striking was not the
headline number but the distributed leadership underneath it: union shop
stewards who had built trust over years, faith leaders who had
organized their congregations, neighborhood organizers who knew every
door on their block.
May Day 2026 built some of that model into its design, encouraging
people to register their own events and lead their own actions. But we
also know that thousands of communities had nothing on the map: places
where the networks are thin, where people are activated and angry but
not organized. That gap is the next frontier. The work of the next
months is not another rally. It is building into those communities —
finding the people who will knock on the next door.
We are training for something larger
May Day 2026 was, in the language of Freedom Trainer’s Community Strike Readiness workshops,
not just a day of action. It was one structure test — because we have
some big inflection moments coming up. Perhaps the biggest test of this
year may be preparing for enforcement of election results — something
that the tactic of the strike is well suited for.
A general strike is not a valve we can just turn on and off. It
requires groups ready to move in formation with each other — and May Day
Strong is positioning itself to be the entity that tells us it’s time
to strike if the election is stolen. This is critical.
Cliff Smith, a Roofers Local 36 official and May Day Strong organizer in Los Angeles, said plainly
what many are saying privately: “We should not depend on the November
midterm elections to provide us with any solutions to this problem. We
should have contingency plans in the event that there are not free and
fair elections.”
Of course, between now and the election we need a lot more public
action and pressure. And the civil disobedience that May Day Strong
incorporated is crucial.
This is just a beginning. The May Day Strong campaign is hosting dozens of planning and debrief sessions and turning its attention towards defending the right to protest, right to vote and the right to have a free and fair election.
May Day 2026 wasn’t perfect — but it was a real exercise of power. We
learned where we stand, not in theory but in motion. The muscles are
there — maybe stiff, maybe uneven — but real, alive and ready to grow
for more escalation, more economic disruption, more clarification of the
billionaire opponents who are threatening the existence of all of us.
That matters. Now we just have to keep building on it.
A Few Words on May Day from a Radical Welfare Queen
Well, folks, it’s that time of year again. The birds are a-chirping, the flowers are a-blooming, and Trotskyites and Stalinists alike are falling head-over-heels in love with the working man like it’s the very first time.
That’s right, dearest motherfuckers, it’s May Day! That blessed of holidays when even the bougiest of leftists can be caught waxing philosophic about the glories of a carefully organized proletariat and as usual, just because they’re a tad bit obnoxious doesn’t mean that my comrades are wrong.
The few privileges that American workers have left in this miserable dystopia we call a country were paid for with the blood of wild, wild unions who literally went to war with entire armies of heavily armed Pinkertons and federal Gestapo. I’m talking real-deal working-class arsonists who shot it up and got shot up in downright suicidal attempts to organize the poor into voluntary direct democracies capable of holding their own in what once vaguely resembled a free market in this nation.
Mainstream shitlib hagiographers will tell you that FDR delivered us from the Fritz Langian sweatshops of the Gilded Age on a silver platter. Don’t fucking believe it. The eight-hour workday and the five-day workweek are the bruised fruit of wildcatting anarchists and communists with guns, and the New Deal declawed them by federalizing the whole goddamn operation and turning thriving workplace democracies into corporate boards with labyrinthine bureaucracies and CEOs pulling down six figures without ever having to break a sweat.
I have the full respect for America’s largely forgotten labor martyrs of a ferociously neurodivergent autodidact, and I very strongly believe that words like ‘Haymarket’ and ‘Ludlow’ should be as synonymous with American history as genocide and apple pie. I just tend to feel a tad bit left out of all the proletarian festivities due to the fact that I am unemployed, never have been employed, and am in all likelihood largely unemployable.
A Freudian alphabet of syndromes and disorders from PTSD to DID left me high and dry in the poorly paid purgatory of federal disability by my thirtieth birthday, and my history of switching personalities every time I have to alter my schedule leads me to believe that I’ll probably be here until the American Empire finally freezes over.
I have spent plenty of time beating myself up over these hard swallowed truths, partially because even what passes for the left in this country is still enslaved by the Protestant work ethic that weighs every individual’s sense of self-worth by the volume of the sweat on their brow, but also because I am a committed anarchist who doesn’t even believe in taxes, not even if those IRS pilfered dollars keep me off the streets.
However, the hindsight of recent rounds of trauma therapy has brought me to a few startling conclusions that feel downright revolutionary and have led me to put down the flail and consider the very real possibility of a May Day free from guilt and self-flagellation.
The biggest revelation is that I am not rendered unemployable by chronic fatigue and social anxiety alone. My inability to live a nine-to-five existence comes from the fact that I am literally triggered by wage slavery. To put it in the simplest terms available, work in the modern context feels way too much like the child abuse I endured at the hands of the Catholic Church and to put it even more bluntly than that, I quite simply can’t take orders from some adolescent despot in a stupid hat without feeling like I’m going to get raped all over again.
While this reaction may be extremely traumatic, it also can’t be discounted as totally irrational, either, when you consider the level of sexual abuse that trans women like me experience on the job if we’re even “lucky” enough to get employed in the first place. The only thing sicker than how quickly a mild-mannered, middle-management drone delves into downright sadomasochistic behavior once afforded even the slightest amount of power is how willing we all are to put up with it for even the meagerest of paychecks.
My complex PTSD and dissociative identity disorder simply make me chemically incapable of putting up with being some superior wage slave’s plaything and they should probably be grateful that I’ve given up on trying, considering that Mona, my alter defined by my long-repressed rage, is a corpse-painted, drenched lesbian separatist who would gladly feed anything with a hard-on its own teeth like a buffet of blood-flavored Chicklets.
This isn’t to say that I’m incapable of labor. That too has very recently been made bluntly apparent to me. I just can’t cope with it being organized by anyone other than me.
Since my found family’s homestead burned to the ground this February, I have found myself hustling as a Times Square Mack possessed. Bouncing through personalities like a one-girl Bowie tribute band and practically crashing my shitty Ford Taurus through Friend’s Meeting Houses to sell perma-guilty, white liberal, church ladies on saving our farm, one nickel at a time.
I nearly ended up swallowing my tongue in the process, and even my own people have politely asked me to shut the fuck up about it, but I also raked in more money in six weeks than most adolescent despots in stupid hats make in six months. All while still managing to publish one of these crazy gonzo tirades each week. So, where the fuck do I punch that card at?
We as a species have allowed a cheaply manufactured master class of managerial Nazis to dictate the very definition of what we consider to be work for way too long, and tragically, even large segments of the radical left have fallen hook, line, and sinker for this grift. Any form of mass labor should be organized democratically to ensure the market remains free for everyone who participates in it, but I can’t help but to feel like we are all doing ourselves a great disservice by failing to even question the value of mass labor itself.
Mankind spent 99% of its existence in the so-called Stone Age. During this time, human beings existed in small tribal, nomadic, and largely matriarchal societies defined by the primitive grind of hunting and gathering. But historical studies have also shown us that these supposedly savage ancestors of ours spent less time working and more time relaxing largely due to the simple fact that they didn’t define their interpretation of wealth by the sheer volume of the things that they possessed but by the amount of time they spent doing the things they loved with the people that mattered.
I’m not necessarily telling the world to go back to that. I’m not Tyler fucking Durden or even John Zerzan here. I fully accept the fact that you can’t put the shit back in a donkey. But I also feel very strongly that human beings were not meant to spend eight hours a day or more in a fucking cubicle the size of a prison cell or putting together boxes of frivolous nonsense on an assembly line in some so-called fulfillment center.
Maybe certain kinds of labor shouldn’t even exist. Maybe we should start organizing consumers so that their existence becomes irrelevant to ours. Maybe victims of systemic child abuse should unionize and demand reparations from tax-exempt churches and overzealous teachers’ unions. Maybe we should all spend at least a few hours of every May Day discussing what the word labor even means to us, and more importantly, what it should mean.
Just a few thoughts from the hardest-working welfare queen in show business. Catch you in the soup lines, working class heroes. That’s where we’re all heading.
