Without Political Education, Progressives Will Lose the War for Democracy

By Fouzia Chaparro-Bencheikh

May 15, 2026

Source: Convergence

Image via Convergence

Democracy is under attack in our schools—but political education can equip us to defend it and build something stronger.

Prager U, despite its name, is not a university. It is a conservative media organization that produces slick, ideology-driven videos designed to attract young people to the right, and it’s now in American classrooms. The Guardian reported in April that as teachers adopt its free lesson plans and the White House actively boosts its content, Prager U has become one of the most effective platforms for delivering right-wing political indoctrination directly to students. 

This didn’t happen overnight. In September 2025, NPR reported that the Department of Education began partnering with conservative organizations—including Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation, and the America First Policy Institute—to design new “patriotic civics content,” despite federal law prohibiting government-directed curricula. The same administration revived the 1776 Commission, first created in 2020 to counter the racial justice uprisings and the 1619 Project. The 1776 Commission sought to recast American history as a patriotic narrative while erasing the realities of slavery and systemic racism. We are watching a coordinated effort to turn civic education into a pipeline for political obedience—and it is already in the classroom with American students.

Leftist movements committed to progressive change must meet this moment by building a national movement for political education. Political education, the process of learning that develops critical consciousness, shared analysis, and collective strategies for social change, is essential not only for countering the right’s co-option of civics, but for building a democracy capable of transformation rather than mere survival. 

Political education has long been a practice among community organizers, and now it must extend far beyond activist circles. Unlike civics, which stops at explaining institutional structures and memorizing events, political education equips people to uncover the root causes of the issues we collectively face today. It interrogates power: who benefits, who is harmed, and how we can act together to build a just society. We need more spaces—in classrooms, online, and in the community—where people can engage with this deeper learning. At its core, political education builds a justice-oriented civic identity rooted in equity, solidarity, and collective dignity. It counters political obedience with political agency by developing the courage and capacity to practice democracy as a path toward collective liberation.

How We Build Political Education Ecosystems

To counter authoritarianism and build a more democratic society, political education must be constructed as coherent ecosystems rather than a set of isolated efforts. What follows is a roadmap for constructing political education ecosystems that operate across schools, philanthropy, communities, and media, ensuring that learning, analysis, and collective capacity reinforce one another. This approach treats political education not as an accessory to democracy, but as one of its essential conditions. The proposal below is to both strengthen each ecosystem and connect them so that what educators build in schools informs what organizers develop in communities, what movement journalists amplify reaches philanthropists who fund it at scale, and what funders resource flows back to the people doing the work.

Students, Educators, & Schools

Students, educators, and schools are critical actors in building political education within a broader democratic ecosystem. However, we must acknowledge that educators across the nation face growing scrutiny and even legal risk for teaching contested histories or engaging students in discussions about race, power, and social justice. In this context, the task is not simply to adapt, but to act collectively to integrate political education into curricula under constraint. 

Educators can embed political analysis in how they frame history, design lessons, and facilitate dialogue, even when explicit language is limited. Students can organize peer learning spaces, lead discussions, and build collective understanding beyond the formal classroom. Schools and educational communities can support this work by creating protected spaces—through extracurricular programs, partnerships, and community-based learning—where political inquiry and civic participation can continue. When these efforts are coordinated, political education becomes a sustainable practice that persists even in hostile conditions, and continues to cultivate democratic agency.

There are already examples of this work taking shape. The Chicago Teachers Union has developed classroom resources and campaigns, such as its Lessons for Resistance series and May Day teach-ins, that connect labor history, social movements, and contemporary politics. National unions have also invested in this approach: the National Education Association’s EdJustice initiative provides educators with training and resources to analyze structural racism in education and advocate for more equitable school systems. Beyond unions, organizations such as the Zinn Education Project bring educators, students, and families together through workshops, curriculum, and campaigns that connect historical understanding to present-day struggles. Youth-led groups such as Students Engaged in Advancing Texas further demonstrate how political education can translate into civic action, organizing students to advocate for policies related to mental health, financial literacy, free expression, and student representation in school governance. Together, these efforts show how schools and educational communities can serve as anchors of political education: connecting learning, analysis, and collective action.

Communities & Movements

Communities and movement builders play a critical role in sustaining political education, particularly as formal institutions become increasingly constrained by political surveillance, censorship, and hostility toward dissent. As spaces for open political expression narrow, political education must be cultivated through distributed, community-rooted practices that do not rely on institutional permission. The task is to intentionally build and connect outside formal institutions, both online and in person, into a shared ecosystem of learning and action.

These spaces, including community study groups, political schools, popular education circles, and digital commons, should not function as isolated efforts or individual platforms (which they often do today), but as coordinated sites of collective learning where people develop shared analysis, build relationships, and move toward organized action. Strengthening political education in this context means linking these efforts through collaboration, shared curricula, and ongoing exchange. Doing so allows decentralized spaces to reinforce one another rather than remain fragmented.

There are both contemporary and historical examples of how community-led political education functions as movement infrastructure. Organizations such as the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction in Philadelphia and the Center for Political Education in San Francisco bring participants together for sustained study, collective analysis, and organizing practice, building the relationships and political clarity needed for action. These efforts build on a longer tradition of movement-based education. Institutions such as Brookwood Labor College, which trained labor organizers in the early 20th century, and its successor traditions, such as the Highlander Research and Education Center, demonstrate how political education has historically been used to develop leadership, strengthen organizing capacity, and advance social movements. In a moment marked by political disillusionment and social isolation, these models offer a path forward: political education as a shared, collective practice that reconnects people to one another and to the possibility of transformative change.

Independent Media

The media ecosystem, especially independent and social media, may be the most powerful pillar for normalizing political education as an everyday practice. Mainstream media rarely name power structures or offer structural analysis of why things are the way they are. Independent journalists, educators, and organizers have stepped into that gap, using podcasts, newsletters, and social media platforms to reach millions with the kind of contextualized, movement-grounded analysis that formal institutions either can’t or won’t provide. When this work is at its best, it reframes rather than simply informs. It gives people a way to understand their material conditions, situates current events within longer political histories, and connects individuals to collective structures where that analysis can deepen and lead to action. Progressives must recognize independent and social media as political education infrastructure, and invest in building it with the same intentionality they bring to other organizing spaces. 

We saw this during the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020 and continue to see it in the context of the ongoing Palestinian genocide, where individuals have provided real-time political education at scale. Some have built sustained platforms dedicated to this work. Organizer Kelly Hayes, through her podcast Movement Memos and newsletter Organizing My Thoughts, offers political education grounded in movement strategy, helping audiences connect current events to organizing practice. At a different scale, political commentator Hasan Piker uses livestreaming to reach millions, integrating political analysis and historical context into accessible commentary that introduces broad audiences to structural analyses of power. Hasan connects his audience to political candidates running for office, including now New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rae Chen Huang, and Chris Rabb, and to movement organizing, using his platform to mobilize audiences from political education into direct participation in electoral and grassroots campaigns.

At the same time, individuals are organizing hyperlocal political education initiatives—such as teach-ins, study groups, and community forums—and, in moments of crisis, building rapid-response networks that combine education with action. Organizers like Flor Martinez (@FlowerinSpanish) demonstrate this bridge in practice, using her Instagram account to educate audiences about the conditions undocumented farmworkers face while mobilizing mutual aid and organizing efforts. Together, these efforts show how individuals can transform political education from isolated acts of learning into a shared culture that strengthens alignment, participation, and collective power.

The Movement Media Alliance, a coalition of independent, movement-aligned newsrooms including Prism, Scalawag, and Convergence Magazine, where this piece is published, represents one of the most promising examples of this work taking institutional form. These outlets share a common editorial commitment: treating readers as actors in collective change rather than passive consumers of information. That commitment is political education. Movement journalism, as the Alliance defines it, helps communities learn, make informed decisions, expand their solidarities, and share solutions to the issues most affecting them. It starts from lived experience, builds shared analysis, and points toward action. This is the same arc that popular education demands, and the kind of contextualized, power-conscious journalism that shifts how people understand the terrain they are organizing in. 

Philanthropy

Philanthropy plays a decisive role in determining whether political education remains fragmented and under-resourced or becomes a durable feature of democratic life. In a political landscape where public institutions are constrained and movements are often forced to operate defensively, funders must treat political education as core democratic infrastructure, not as a peripheral or short-term intervention. This requires a shift from episodic funding toward long-term, flexible investment in grassroots-led political education embedded within organizing. Funders must be willing to support the full ecosystem outlined above—educators, community-based “third spaces,” and individual-led initiatives—while also resourcing the connective tissue that links them, such as curricula, convenings, and leadership development. This means funding political education as a practice that builds critical consciousness, collective analysis, and organizing capacity over time.

There are already models that demonstrate what this support can look like in practice. Organizations such as the Highlander Research and Education Center have long combined foundation support from institutions like the Ford Foundation and The Chorus Foundation with alternative revenue streams, including earned income from royalties on movement-linked cultural assets such as the song “We Shall Overcome.” The Highlander Center reinvests resources back into the ecosystem by funding fellows to implement community projects and by serving as a fiscal sponsor for smaller organizations. 

Other organizations, such as the Center for Political Education and the W.E.B. DuBois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, demonstrate the importance of diversified support models, including foundation grants, fee-for-service income, and fiscal sponsorship models. Together, these efforts show that true political education is not a one-off program, but an ongoing process that builds leadership pipelines, strengthens organizing capacity, and deepens democratic participation. Philanthropy’s role is not to reinvent this work, but to fund it at scale and sustain resources through multi-year grants, fellowship funding, fiscal sponsorship, and capacity building resources that allow political education initiatives to grow, experiment, and endure. 

The type of philanthropic investment has historical precedent at scale. The London School of Economics was founded in 1895 by members of the Fabian Society, a group committed to advancing socialist aims through research, reform, and education rather than revolution. The New School for Social Research, launched in 1919, was founded by scholars who were pushed out of Columbia for opposing the US entry into World War I, and was funded by philanthropists such as Hiram Halle and the Rockefeller Foundation. The New School became a haven for Jewish and radical academics fleeing Nazi Germany. They started as investments by progressive funders on the idea that political education belongs at the center of public life, even if both institutions have since drifted from those foundational politics.

What Now?

No single pillar of these ecosystems can carry this work alone. Not schools operating under legal threat, not community organizations stretched thin, not independent media running solely on reader subscriptions, not philanthropists funding in isolation. Political education becomes the cornerstone of democracy only when these actors work together and treat it as infrastructure rather than a one-off program. The right figured this out decades ago. Prager U was built through sustained investment, coordinated strategy, and a clear theory of change about who shapes the next generation’s political imagination.

Progressives have the theory but are missing the sustained will to match it with resources and coordination at scale. The ecosystems that further political education exist, but are isolated from one another. The work now is to connect them through shared political education curricula, coordinated convenings, cross-sector relationships, and philanthropic investment that flows across all four pillars rather than into any one of them alone. The alternative is a generation educated in obedience, and a democracy that survives in name only.

This article was originally published by Convergence; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Fouzia Chaparro-Bencheikh

Fouzia Chaparro-Bencheikh is a political educator, writer, and founder of The Torch and The Table, a consulting practice dedicated to building political education as democratic infrastructure. Her work explores how shared analysis, learning ecosystems, and movement strategy can strengthen democratic life and collective power. She has led leadership and movement-building initiatives across 17 countries.

PHOTO ESSAY

On May Day, Farmworkers and Their Children Defy Poverty and Deportations

Hundreds of farmworkers, students and community activists make their voices heard

By David Bacon

May 8, 2026

Source: Barn Raiser

Strawberry workers and supporters march through Santa Maria on May Day demanding a living wage and an end to immigration raids and deportations. Jorge Ruiz, right, beats a bucket drum on the march. (David Bacon)

SANTA MARIA, CALIFORNIA—Juana’s words echo in my mind as I pull off Highway 101 into downtown Santa Maria. Juana is a strawberry picker in a strawberry town. Santa Maria, along with Oxnard to the south and Salinas to the north, is one of three towns on California’s central coast, all in valleys, that produce 80% of all the berries picked and sold in the United States.

I wondered if I would see her at this year’s May Day march, but I doubted I would. May Day comes at the beginning of the picking season, when families feel their poverty the sharpest, after winter months when they’ve had no work.

“We have to save to pay the rent during the winter. If we don’t, we don’t have a place to live,” she told me two years ago. “During those five months there are always bills we can’t pay, like water. By March there’s no money at all, and we have to get loans to survive.” Loans come from “friends” who charge 10% interest. “Plus, I have to send money to my mama and papa in Mexico. There are many people depending on me.”

A banner says, “Without the Workers There is no Santa Maria.”

I drive down Broadway, the street that bisects Santa Maria, to its intersection at Main St. in downtown. These street names seem like quintessential small town America, but today they’ve lost some of that white bread feel. Taquerias line the streets, serving mole, tlayudas and other food from southern Mexico. Botanicas half-hidden in the back of strip malls do a good business with Mixtec and Triqui indigenous farmworkers. These little shops sell herbs and traditional remedies that many depend on when they get sick. They’re recommended by the curanderas and practitioners who’ve brought the ancient culture of indigenous medicine from Oaxaca to California’s central coast.

But many families also like them because they’re cheaper than drugstore medicine. They don’t require going to a hospital or clinic for a prescription. That means people don’t have to put their names into a computer system that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) might be able to access while looking for targets for deportation.

A different take on MAGA: “Mexicans Ain’t Going Anywhere.”

The state has pioneered Covered California, which provides medical insurance to undocumented people and those who can’t pay. But the regulations that go with federal funding mandate that information collected from patients be provided to the federal government. No one knows who can access what in the days of DOGE, and ICE has been very active in Santa Maria.

Poverty creates a need to work, and fear of ICE makes workers want to keep their heads down. Their kids, too, feel the economic pressure and the fear. But this year, like last year, it is the younger generations who show up to march, defend their parents and lift the spirits of their friends. They don’t lose money by taking time from work. Many who were born here should have not fear of ICE, although in these days of racial profiling that’s no guarantee.

Young people hold up their banners.

Wearing her No ICE button and carrying a gigante on a pole. Gigantes are big globes or puppets carried in dance festivals in Oaxaca, now endowed with a political message.

“What About Us?”

Lorena on the bullhorn.

“ICE Out of 805.” 805 is the area code for Santa Maria and the central coast.

Masks like this have become a custom in popular culture after they were first adopted by wrestlers in

The coastal fog of the early morning has burned off, but the wind makes it hard to carry the gigantes and globos—paper mache figures on poles that are a hallmark of Oaxacan dance festivals. The march kicks off in a huge parking lot in front of J.C. Penney’s. Lorena, a local student, is on a bullhorn, leading chants that defy ICE. First, she sets up the crowd with “Say it once, say it twice/We will not put up with ICE!” And then asks, “What do we want?” “Justice!” the crowd answers. “When do we want it?” “NOW!”

Lorena had walked out of Pioneer Valley High at lunchtime. When I ask if she is worried about retaliation, she gives me a puzzled look. “I mean, what is there to be worried about?” she says. “It’s something that everyone should be proud of, and it’s nothing you should be ashamed about, and we should do it without fear.”

Lorena speaks to the crowd on May Day.

I ask how people at school feel about the threat of ICE deportations and the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “One of my closest friends told me she was really scared of everything happening,” she says. “So I helped get her resources and calm her nerves.” She continues:

But a lot of people at school are going through the same thing. They have the red cards that say their rights and everything, but they still live in that fear that they’re going to get home from school and their parents aren’t going to be able to get there. Some have siblings and they worry who’s going to take care of them, let alone how they’ll take care of themselves. And it’s a struggle because these are teens.

The boisterous May Day march snakes down Broadway, with several hundred chanting farmworkers, students and community activists. Signs defying ICE are the most common, but homemade placards, many illustrated with strawberries or workers’ families, also take aim at low wages. According to a recent report, Beyond the Cycle of Survival, issued by a coalition of farmworker advocates, California produces $60 billion of agricultural wealth every year, with the labor of 900,000 farmworkers. Nevertheless, “Farmworker wages are unlivable and inequitable,” it says. “Median crop farmworker wages are about $17 per hour in California while median annual salaries are only $15,000—far below what is necessary for the state’s high costs of living.”

Lorena calls out to friend in a lowrider to join the march.

Those wages are paid overwhelmingly by corporate farms. The report notes: “Non-family farms and large-scale family farms make up 21% of all California farms, yet they generate 92% of the state’s total agricultural production value. Meanwhile, small farms produce just 4%.”

For Jorge Ruiz, one of several workers who left jobs to march, poverty was the motivator. He and his wife pay over $2,000 a month for a small apartment shared among five people. She works in the grapes and strawberries, while he does landscaping. This year he told his boss that people across the country were not working on May Day. “And he said yes, it’s okay, just bring some papers to say what you’re going to do and all that.” Twelve of his coworkers didn’t work on May Day.

Jorge Ruiz chose not to work and went to the march instead.

While his boss sounds reasonable, Ruiz wasn’t any less angry about the money. “What they pay us is not enough,” he says. “The bosses demand the work, but they don’t want us to raise our salary.” That pressure kept most workers on the job, he says, but often with conflicting feelings. He says:

Leaving would be a considerable sacrifice. If we miss a day of work, the check goes down, and then it is difficult for us. But we also want to raise our voices so they can hear that we have the right to be paid better. Many people are afraid of being absent, but if we don’t raise our voices, it won’t change. We have to come together so that they listen to us.

Lorena’s friend Cesar Vasquez, another youth activist, helped organize school walkouts last year and wants the movement around May Day to go beyond just hating poverty and Trump. “We paint the problem as the current president, but we fail to recognize that the deportations and the violations of human rights were happening before too,” he says. “We have to understand the system is the problem, and the focus should be bringing the power back to the people.”

Cesar Vasquez speaks to the crowd.

Vasquez is more than just brave words. After May Day in 2025, he built a Rapid Response Network to defend against ICE, which grew from 50 people to 1,200 today in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties. Even white people, he says. “Right after the murder of Renee Good and Alex Preddy, the white man and the white woman that have historically been at the top of America’s power chain, recognize that anything can happen,” says Vasquez. “Now we are seeing people show up that look like them, because they recognize that after me and my family, they are next.”

Kids march with their parents.

Hearing this wasn’t such a surprise. The central coast of California is sometimes called Reagan Country, and its political class still leans right, compared to Los Angeles and San Francisco. I worked here in the mid-1970s as an organizer for the United Farm Workers (UFW). While growers ran the town in an above-board way, Santa Maria had a core of radical workers who would have recognized Cesar Vasquez as a brother.

I knew I was home when I first visited a family of UFW activists we called “de hueso colorado,” or “to the red marrow of their bones,” which meant they were union supporters to the core. As I walked in their door a huge portrait of Che Guevara looked down at me from the living room wall.

The valley here saw big strikes by the UFW in the early 1970s, and we organized union elections after California’s farm labor law passed later that decade. Indigenous Mixtec workers from Oaxaca organized their own union and struck the strawberries in 1998. Work stoppages were common at the start of each year’s picking season, until the current wave of immigration raids made them dangerous for workers.

Defying Reagan Country’s right-wing reputation, this year May Day marches expanded into two more central coast agricultural towns. North of Santa Maria is Paso Robles, home to high-end wineries and a growing population of workers. To the south, Lompoc is home to Mexican flower harvesters—one of the few places in the U.S. where flower cultivation hasn’t been relocated to South America.

Lorena.

In the 1940s Lompoc was a tiny town with card rooms patronized by single Filipino farmworker men living in labor camps. Today, flower pickers are almost entirely Mexican. But whether for Mexicans or the Filipinos who came before them, May Day is familiar from home—it is a workers’ celebration.

I don’t think people forget the May Day ideas they’ve grown up with. I didn’t see Juana this year in Santa Maria. She may have been working, or thought coming to a march might risk getting picked up by ICE. But I did see the generation that people like Juana have helped raise. These young people know the hardship of living with poverty wages and the work that exacts a terrible physical toll.

May Day is growing. The youth who’ve grown up here want it. The day offers them the chance to defy danger, to get angry and call out for a better system guaranteeing a better life.

All images copyright David Bacon

This article was originally published by Barn Raiser; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

David Bacon

David Bacon is a photojournalist, author, political activist, and union organizer who has focused on labor issues, particularly those related to immigrant labor. He has written several books and numerous articles on the subject and has held photographic exhibitions. He became interested in labor issues from an early age and he was involved in organizing efforts for the United Farm Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, the Molders' Union and others.

May Day Demonstrations Worldwide Condemn US-Israeli War on Iran, Champion Workers

“Working people refuse to pay the price for Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East,” said the European Trade Confederation.


Demonstrators join a demonstration for International Workers’ Day on May 1 2026, in Madrid, Spain.
(Photo by Fernando Sanchez/Europa Press via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
May 01, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

May Day demonstrations across the world on Friday denounced the US-Israeli war against Iran, which has caused a global energy crisis that is disproportionately harming working-class people.

Among the earliest May Day demonstrations took place in the Philippines, and a video published by The Associated Press shows protesters clashing with police near the US Embassy in the capital city of Manila.

While many demonstrators held signs that referenced local issues, American foreign policy was also a major focus of the protesters, as marchers in Manila carried a large banner that read, “Down With US Imperialism.”

Josua Mata, leader of the SENTRO umbrella group of labor federations, told The Associated Press that the war with Iran was a central focus of protests because of the impact it’s had on energy costs.

“Every Filipino worker now is aware that the situation here is deeply connected to the global crisis,” Mata explained.

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto attended a May Day rally held in the capital of Jakarta, where Jakarta Globe reported that he announced a host of worker-friendly policies including plans “to build daycare facilities for workers’ children and accelerate the construction of at least 1 million homes.”

France 24 reported that hundreds of demonstrators in Istanbul, Turkey were arrested after attempting to march to the city’s iconic Taksim Square, which police had sealed off.

The Turkish Contemporary Lawyers’ Association (ÇHD) said on Friday afternoon that at least 350 demonstrators in Istanbul have been detained as a result of the protests, with hundreds more potentially in custody.



May Day demonstrations are also taking place across Europe, with many demonstrators blaming US President Donald Trump’s war for the deterioration of workers’ living standards.

The European Trade Union Confederation, which represents 93 trade union organizations in 41 European countries, released a statement declaring that “working people refuse to pay the price for Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East,” adding that “today’s rallies show working people will not stand by and see their jobs and living standards destroyed.”

Trump is also facing protests at home, with more than 4,000 “May Day Strong” events planned across the United States.

Daniel Bertossa, general secretary for Public Services International, said this year’s May Day demonstrations are providing a desperately needed backlash to power grabs being made by the global billionaire class.

Bertossa pointed to the US-Israel attack on Iran, as well as Trump’s repeated threats to invade Greenland, as key turning points that have pushed workers to organize and fight back.

“Rising living costs caused by the war are now driving anger among working-class people and producing a rare and powerful moment to connect and educate,” said Bertossa. “Fascists don’t have the answers to the economic pain they exploited to get elected—international affairs impact us all—and international working-class solidarity matters.”

Bertossa added that “May Day is a vivid reminder that working-class politics is not a spectator sport,” and “we have never won by watching, waiting, or relying on great power leaders to gift us our future.”

May Day - International solidarity

Friday 1 May 2026

Oleksandr Kryselov and Leila Al-Shami “Internationalism Is Not a Luxury, but a Survival Mechanism”, practical solidarity “Swedish Dockworkers Against Russia’s and Israel’s Wars”, solidarity from below “Against defeatism disguised as radicalism”. The Palestinians’ long struggle by Roland Rance “Marking the 50th Land Day”, Mohammed Harbi on the Algerian fight for independence ““In Algeria, what is fundamental is the state” ”, Badrul Alam on “The Role of CPB-ML Since August 5, 2024: A Marxist-Leninist Analysis”. Alex De Jong reviews “Searching for international solidarity”, a Filipino Maoist’s memoir.

‘A Moment of Reckoning’: 4,000+ May Day Demonstrations Across US

“During the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations, we showed what we’re against. May Day is the day we’re making clear what we are fighting for,” 

Demonstrators attend a May Day rally marking International Workers' Day in New York, on May 1, 2026.
(Photo by Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)

id one organizer.


Stephen Prager
May 01, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


In thousands of locations across the United States, workers and students are taking off from work and school and swearing off shopping on Friday as part of a national May Day protest.

May Day Strong, a coalition of activist groups and unions organizing the events, said more than 4,000 actions, from marches to pickets to displays of peaceful civil disobedience, were underway.






It is yet another nationwide display of coordinated resistance to the Trump administration’s agenda, including its war in Iran and its use of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to attack immigrant communities, issues that were at the forefront of March’s “No Kings” protests.

Six young protesters with the Sunrise Movement were taken into custody after blocking a bridge in Minneapolis in what they said was an act of “nonviolent noncooperation” to “stand up to the war in Iran and against ICE terrorizing our neighbors and our cities.”

Dozens more Sunrise protesters in Portland held a sit-in in the lobby of a Hilton hotel that was housing top officials with the Department of Homeland Security, leading to eight arrests.

“It’s May 1st, it’s workers’ day,” one of the protesters was recorded saying while being led away by police. “Don’t forget that you have power.”

In New York, over 100 activists lined up outside every entrance to the New York Stock Exchange in downtown Manhattan, banging drums and chanting “No ICE, no war!” where they were met by a flood of cops.



In the spirit of May Day, a global day of solidarity among workers, Sulma Arias, the executive director of the social justice organization People’s Action, said Friday’s “Workers Over Billionaires” protests are just as much about confronting injustices as about building an alternative.

“During the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations, we showed what we’re against. May Day is the day we’re making clear what we are fighting for,” Arias said. “We are for affordable housing for low-income people. We are for free healthcare for all. We are for utility laws that ensure every home stays warm in the winter and cool in the summer at costs that a person on a fixed income can afford. We are for the right to a fair and equal vote for Americans from every race and in every state. May Day is our day to assert and defend our rights.”

“They want us afraid. They want us divided. But on May 1, we refuse.”

Despite claims by President Donald Trump that the US is entering an economic “golden age” under his leadership, a Gallup poll released this week found that 55% of Americans said their finances were getting worse, the highest number ever recorded in more than 20 years of polling, and even higher than in the doldrums of the Great Recession.



A coalition of labor unions across several major cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, has coordinated what has been called an “economic blackout,” which includes avoiding buying from private sector retailers.

“When we say ‘workers over billionaires,’ ‘billionaires’ is not just this amorphous figure, right? They’re real people,” said Jana Korn, the chief of staff for the Philadelphia Council AFL-CIO, in an interview with The Real News Network. “In Philadelphia, we’re kind of a poor city. We don’t have that many billionaires, but we have one. The CEO of Comcast is the only billionaire that lives in the city.”

“So why should we, as a city, accept that they take and take from us? And then with that money, what do they do? They donate to Trump’s ballroom project,” she continued. “People in Philadelphia are struggling... Our transportation system barely works. We’re at risk of having 17 schools close down this year.”

Some labor organizers have described economic boycotts, undertaken as part of prior mass protest movements against the second Trump administration, as an act of building strength for something larger, such as a future general strike.

“I think really for us in the labor movement,” Korn said, “[the boycott is] about how do we build the capacity to really disrupt, to strike when necessary, to shut things down when we have to. And that’s something that we have not been called to do as a labor movement in a very long time.”



Other unions have used May Day to confront their own employers directly. In New Orleans, hundreds of nurses at University Medical Center announced that they were beginning a five-day strike after attempting to negotiate a contract for more than two years.

In New York City, Amazon workers unionized with the Teamsters assembled on the steps of the public library before marching to Amazon’s corporate offices to demand the company cut its contracts with ICE, which has used its cloud computing services to target immigrants, including some Amazon workers and contractors.

Matt Multari, who has worked as an Amazon driver for a year and a half, told Mother Jones that he joined the protest to “demand the one thing that’s worth fighting for in this life: respect.”

Masih Fouladi, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, said, “May Day is a moment of reckoning.”

“Immigrant communities—from farmworkers in our fields to nurses in our hospitals, from refugees fleeing war to families who have built their lives here for generations—are under siege,” she said. “They want us afraid. They want us divided. But on May 1, we refuse.”

“Workers and immigrants—documented and undocumented, native-born and newly arrived,” she said, “will stand together in the streets because we know the truth: there is no workers’ rights without immigrant rights, and there is no justice for working people here while our tax dollars fund devastation abroad.”

May Day 2026: What Kind of Nation Will This Be?

This year’s May Day rallies go beyond workers’ rights.


People take part in May Day rally and march in New York City to protest the Trump administration, New York, U.S., May 1, 2025.
(Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Peter Dreier
May 01, 2026

Common Dreams

Unlike the rest of the world’s democracies, the United States doesn’t use the metric system, doesn’t require employers to provide workers with paid vacations, hasn’t abolished the death penalty, and doesn’t celebrate May Day as an official national holiday.

Outside the US, May 1 is international workers’ day, observed with speeches, rallies and demonstrations. This year, millions of workers in Europe, Asia and Latin America will take to the streets to demand higher wages, better benefits and improved working conditions.

Ironically, this celebration of working-class solidarity was started by the US labor movement and soon spread around the world, but it never earned official recognition in this country.

This year, on the heels of the three massive nationwide “No Kings” marches and rallies, millions of Americans will join forces, in thousands of cities and towns, in May Day Strong events.

The May Day Strong organizers hoping to bring Americans together to challenge the billionaires, big corporations, and the Trump administration, who have manipulated the rules to lower living standards, attack immigrants, undermine democracy, and direct tax dollars for wars rather than meeting human needs. It will be a day of rallies, marches, teach-ins, labor actions, and a refusal to participate in business as usual—because, as the organizers say, “when those at the top rig the system, collective action is how we set it right.”

Organizers expect over several thousand nonviolent actions across the country. The broad coalition behind the protests include major unions, civil rights, reproductive justice, environmental, immigrant rights, and faith groups, and tenant and community organizations, as well as Indivisible and Democratic Socialists of America.

The protest is inspired by the large day of action on January 23 that shut down much of Minneapolis by asking people not to work, shop, or attend school that day to challenge ICE’s occupation and its illegal actions (including murder) against immigrants and activists.

But the May Day Strong leaders are not calling for a general strike to shut down the economy. That tactic—allowing unions to strike in solidarity with other unions’ strikes—was banned in 1946 when Congress passed the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act over President Harry Truman’s veto. Even so, organizers view this year’s May Day events as a dress rehearsal something close to a general strike in 2028, in anticipation of the presidential and mid-term elections, but that would require the participation of many large unions who may not believe they and their members are prepared for such a militant action or the possible political backlash by the Trump administration and by voters if employers threaten to fire workers for engaging in an illegal strike. In addition, as Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch noted, “How many people would need to stop shopping to make a noticeable dent in the nearly $3 billion per day Americans spend?”“

But another massive national day of protest this May Day could help inspire voters to oust more Trump Republicans in November, give Democrats a majority of seats in both the House and Senate, and lay the groundwork for a more progressive policy agenda if the Democrats take back the White House in two years.

In doing so, they will be honoring the original May Day, which was born of the movement for an eight-hour workday. After the Civil War, unregulated capitalism ran rampant in America. It was the Gilded Age, a time of merger mania, increasing concentration of wealth and growing political influence by corporate power brokers known as Robber Barons. New technologies made possible new industries, which generated great riches for the fortunate few, but at the expense of workers, many of them immigrants, who worked long hours, under dangerous conditions, for little pay.

As the gap between the rich and other Americans widened dramatically, workers began to resist in a variety of ways. The first major wave of labor unions pushed employers to limit the workday to ten hours and then later down to eight hours. The 1877 strike by tens of thousands of railroad, factory and mine workers—which shut down the nation’s major industries and was brutally suppressed by the corporations and their friends in government—was the first of many mass actions to demand living wages and humane working conditions. By 1884, the campaign had gained enough momentum that the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor adopted a resolution at its annual meeting, “that eight hours shall constitute legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.”

On the appointed date, unions and radical groups orchestrated strikes and large-scale demonstrations in cities across the country. More than 500,000 workers went on strike or marched in solidarity and many more people protested in the streets. In Chicago, a labor stronghold, at least 30,000 workers struck. Rallies and parades across the city more than doubled that number, and the May 1 demonstrations continued for several days. The protests were mostly nonviolent, but they included skirmishes with strikebreakers, company-hired thugs and police.

On May 3, at a rally outside the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company factory, police fired on the crowd, killing at least two workers. The next day, at a rally at Haymarket Square to protest the shootings, police moved in to clear the crowd. Someone threw a bomb at the police, killing at least one officer. Another seven policemen were killed during the ensuing riot, and police gunfire killed at least four protesters and injured many others.

After a controversial investigation, seven anarchists were sentenced to death for murder, while another was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The anarchists won global notoriety, being seen as martyrs by many radicals and reformers, who viewed the trial and executions as politically motivated.

Within a few years, unions and radical groups around the world had established May Day as an international holiday to commemorate the Haymarket martyrs and continue the struggle for the eight-hour day, workers’ rights, and social justice.

In the United States, however, the burgeoning Knights of Labor, uneasy with May Day’s connection to anarchists and other radicals, adopted another day to celebrate workers’ rights. In 1887, Oregon was the first state to make Labor Day an official holiday, celebrated in September. Other states soon followed. Unions sponsored parades to celebrate Labor Day, but such one-day festivities didn’t make corporations any more willing to grant workers decent conditions. To make their voices heard, workers had to resort to massive strikes, typically put down with brutal violence by government troops.

In 1894, the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, went on strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company to demand lower rents (Pullman was a company town that owned its employees’ homes) and higher pay following huge layoffs and wage cuts. In solidarity with the Pullman workers, railroad workers across the country boycotted the trains with Pullman cars, paralyzing the nation’s economy as well as its mail service. President Grover Cleveland declared the strike a federal crime and called out 12,000 soldiers to break the strike. They crushed the walkout and killed at least two protesters. Six days later, Cleveland—facing worker protests for his repression of the Pullman strikers—signed a bill creating Labor Day as an official national holiday in September. He hoped that giving the working class a day off to celebrate one Monday a year might pacify them.

For most of the 20th century, Labor Day was reserved for festive parades, picnics and speeches sponsored by unions in major cities. But contrary to what President Cleveland had hoped, American workers, their families and allies, found other occasions to mobilize for better working conditions and a more humane society. America witnessed massive strike waves throughout the century, including militant general strikes and occupations. These included a general strike in Seattle in 1919, the 1934 San Francisco general strike, led by the longshoremen’s union; a strike of about 400,000 textile workers that same year; militant sit-down strikes in 1937 by autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, women workers at Woolworth’s department stores in New York, aviation workers in Los Angeles, and others, and the largest strike wave in US history in 1946, triggered by pent-up demands following World War Two.

May 1 faded away as a day of protest. From the 1920s through the 1950s, radical groups sought to keep the tradition alive with parades and other events, but the mainstream labor movement and most liberal organizations kept their distance, making May Day an increasingly marginal affair. In 1958, in the midst of the cold war, President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 as Loyalty Day. Each subsequent president has issued a similar proclamation, although few Americans know about or celebrate the day.

Since 2001, American unions and immigrant rights activists have resurrected May 1 as a day of protest around both workers’ rights and immigrant rights. That year, millions of people in over 100 cities—including more than a million in Los Angeles, 200,000 in New York and 300,000 in Chicago—participated in May Day demonstrations.

The huge turnout was catalyzed by a bill, sponsored by Representative James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and passed by the House the previous December, that would have classified as a felon anyone who helped undocumented immigrants enter or remain in the United States. Since then, immigrant workers and their allies have adopted May Day as an occasion for protest.

In 2006, organized launched a protest they called “A Day Without Immigrants,” which was also termed the “Great American Boycott.” In many cities, workers refused to go to work, high school students walked out of their classrooms and into the street, while consumers shut down businesses that depended on immigrant workers.

In 2017, activists organized another “Day Without Immigrants” protest to dramatize the importance of immigrants to the American economy and protest Trump’s plans to build a border wall and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. The organizers called for immigrants and allies not to go to work, to avoid spending money, and keep children home from school.

“It was mostly immigrants who led the first May Day movement for the eight-hour day. Now a new generation of immigrant workers have revitalized and brought May Day back to life,” observed California State Senator María Elena Durazo, the former head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

Although the labor movement fell on hard times starting in the 1950s, it nevertheless helped guarantee that more Americans would share in the nation’s post-war prosperity and join the middle class. Moreover, the civil rights, feminist, environmental and gay rights movements, and the more recent immigrant rights movement, drew important lessons from labor movement tactics and built coalitions with organized labor to advance their goals.

America is now in the midst of a new Gilded Age with a new group of corporate Robber Barons, many of them operating on a global scale. The top of the income scale has the biggest concentration of income and wealth since 1928. Several decades of corporate-backed assaults on unions have left only six percent of private sector employees with union cards, down from about one-third of all workers in the 1950s. More than half of America’s 15 million union members now work for government (representing 33 percent of all government employees), so business groups and conservative politicians, including Trump, have targeted public sector unions for destruction.

Despite this, we’ve seen a recent resurgence of activism among rank-and-file workers at fast-food chains, Starbucks, Amazon, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, Volkswagen, Boeing, Trader Joe’s, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Chipotle, Disneyland, Kaiser Permanente, UPS, Uber and LYFT, REI, film companies and TV studios, meatpacking companies, major hospitals and universities, school districts, and other employers. They have waged strikes, walkouts and union recognition campaigns to win better pay and working conditions.

Public opinion in solidly behind these demands. The decline of union membership is not due to Americans’ opposition to unions. A recent Gallup poll found that 68% of Americans support unions. Support is particularly high among Americans between 18 and 34 years old, 72% of whom embrace unions as a vehicle to address economic inequality and workplace problems. About two-thirds (64%) of Americans think the federal minimum wage—which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009—should be increased to $17.

The biggest obstacle to a union resurgence is federal labor law. American workers understand that employers resort to a variety of antiunion tactics—including firing employees illegally—to thwart unionization efforts. And there’s the rub. Americans have far fewer rights at work than employees in other democratic societies. Current federal laws are an impediment to union organizing rather than a protector of workers’ rights. The rules are stacked against workers, making it extremely difficult for even the most talented organizers to win union elections. Under current law, and with Trump stacking the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union members, any employer with a clever attorney can stall union elections, giving management time to scare the living daylights out of potential recruits.

This year’s May Day rallies go beyond workers’ rights. They will focus on issues like stopping the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration, protecting Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on, fully funding public schools, healthcare, and housing for all, and stopping the attacks on communities, including policies that target immigrants and people of color. It will also build momentum for a large-scale voter mobilization effort to elect liberals and progressives in the November mid-terms.

“It isn’t just about immigrant rights. It isn’t just about workers’ rights on the job or even about raising the standard of living for all workers,” said Durazo. “It’s about what kind of country we want to be.”

Peter Dreier
Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College. He joined the Occidental faculty in January 1993 after serving for nine years as Director of Housing at the Boston Redevelopment Authority and senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn. He is the author of "The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame" (2012) and an editor (with Kate Aronoff and Michael Kazin) of "We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style" and co-author of "Baseball Rebels: The Players, People and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America" (2022).
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May Day: Day One of a Mass Youth Uprising

This system is not made for everyday working people, and the only way we can change things is if we start disrupting the status quo.

Students at George Washington University and three other schools in Washington, DC walked out on September 9, 2025 to protest the federal takeover of the district and the deployment of National Guard troops.
(Photo by the Sunrise Movement)

Shradha Bista
May 01, 2026

Common Dreams

Today, for May Day, millions of students, educators, and workers are striking for our education, lives, and futures. This isn’t just a rally or march: Whether it’s shutting down corporate offices or leaving classrooms empty, we’re disrupting business as usual. And, young people are taking the lead.

Today isn’t a one-day strike. It’s day one of a mass youth uprising. Throughout history, we’ve seen students and workers on the front lines of anti-authoritarian movements, catalyzing mass societal action.

In the days leading up to May Day, we’ve seen that we’re already having an impact. In Durham, North Carolina, the Durham Public Schools announced last week that school was cancelled on May 1 because over 1,000 students and staff were projected to walk out of school that day. In Madison, Wisconsin, schools shut down after 70% of staff committed to this national day of action. A dozen more school districts have followed suit.

So when pundits ask, “Where are the young people?” The answer is, May Day. Across the country, people are growing increasingly frustrated with political and institutional leadership that are serving billionaires, not us. While the Trump administration commits war crimes in the Middle East, millions are stripped of their healthcare. While billionaires get handouts to build data centers, they claim we can’t solve our housing crisis. While college football coaches are paid million-dollar salaries, tuition to attend school continues to rise.

This May 1, we will strike in hundreds of thousands. In every corner of this country, you will see students walking out of class and workers striking from their jobs.

It’s extremely clear to young people like me: This system is not made for everyday working people, and the only way we can change things is if we start disrupting the status quo. If we’ve learned anything over the past few months, it’s that when people come together in masses, we are more powerful than the people in power, and we win. Specifically, when people practice mass noncooperation in their schools and cities, they win.

Mass noncooperation is the act of not giving in to their “business as usual.” We hold the power because we make the system run, and we have the power to make it crumble. It means recognizing that the system only functions because of us, and choosing to withdraw that labor, that time, that participation is power we hold. It is not enough to protest on our days off, or repost a social media post. We need workers to stop going to work so billionaires lose money. We need students and educators to stop attending classes to show the power of those empty seats. We need to stop working for a system that is failing us, to show them that we can turn it all around if they keep ignoring our needs.

We’ve seen mass noncooperation work in the past. Earlier this year, after tens of thousands of people went on strike in Minneapolis following the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) commander in the city was removed from his role, and he himself said that the level of noncooperation from Minnesotans was stopping ICE from carrying out its goals. Now, we’re taking that action nationwide.

This May 1, we will strike in hundreds of thousands. In every corner of this country, you will see students walking out of class and workers striking from their jobs. You’ll hear chants and cheers for one another; you’ll feel hope and resilience. And when we do, we’ll show President Donald Trump and his billionaire friends that if they keep going with their agenda, we will stop their regime from operating. If they keep abducting our neighbors, if they keep choosing Wall Street over working people, if they keep starting wars instead of giving us healthcare—the kind of disruption they are seeing today will be a drop in the bucket.

We’re also sending a message to people across this country: We, working people, have the power. We run the economy, we fill the classrooms. If we stop cooperating, the billionaires can’t profit, and the oligarchs can’t rule. We have the power to win what we deserve: a world where we earn a livable wage, breathe clean air, and can afford necessities like education.

Today, on May 1, we say: No work. No school. No spending.


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Shradha Bista
Shradha Bista is a first-year honors student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been a student organizer since high school and organizes with her campus’ Sunrise Movement hub, winning demands like UNC-CH rejecting the Trump Loyalty Oath Compact last fall. Shradha studies Public Policy and Peace, War, and Defense on campus, and she’s excited to see the success of students and workers this May Day and beyond!
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‘May Day Strong’ Shows How Trumpism Changed the Game of Political Action

Action isn’t only about pressuring institutions anymore. It’s increasingly about jamming the system, slowing it down, or breaking its rhythm. In plain terms, we’ve shifted from representative politics toward something more like direct pressure.


Protesters hold signs during the Nationwide May Day Strong Rally, “Workers Stand Up to Billionaires,” on May 1, 2025 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
(Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for May Day Strong)

Brian Hudson
May 01, 2026

Common Dreams


For decades, American politics rested on one big, mostly unquestioned idea: Real change happens through the system. You vote, you lobby, you go to court, you work the parties. Even the biggest protest movements eventually tried to plug themselves back into those official channels. But lately—especially since Donald Trump burst onto the scene—that old assumption has been crumbling fast.

What we’re seeing now, in things like the “May Day Strong” actions, isn’t just more people protesting. It’s a deeper change in how politics actually works. Action isn’t only about pressuring institutions anymore. It’s increasingly about jamming the system, slowing it down, or breaking its rhythm. In plain terms, we’ve shifted from representative politics toward something more like direct pressure.

The key driver here is the collapse of trust in institutions. One of the most striking things about Trumpism isn’t any single policy—it’s the relentless way it attacked the legitimacy of the middlemen: the media as “the enemy of the people,” judges as biased, elections as rigged. These weren’t just throwaway lines. Over time, they sank in and reshaped how a lot of people view the system’s ability to actually deliver.

When folks stop believing the formal channels can handle their grievances, they start looking for other levers. That’s when direct action, civil disobedience, and economic disruption stop looking fringe and start feeling logical.

“May Day Strong” feels like a live experiment. It’s testing how well networked groups can mobilize and whether hitting the economy where it hurts can deliver lasting political leverage. The answers will matter a lot for where democracy goes next.

“May Day Strong” sits right at that crossroads. The call for “No Work, No Shopping” isn’t subtle. It says: If real power flows through the economy, then choking those flows becomes a form of politics. On the surface it seems straightforward, but it quietly rewrites the textbook definition of power.

In the old model, power lived in government buildings and political offices. You tried to influence them. In the emerging one, power is scattered across economic networks and social connections. So the game moves from representation to targeted disruption—from institutional politics to what you might call infrastructural politics.

This isn’t purely ideological. It also grows out of how people actually experience daily life now: gig work, shaky jobs, disappearing benefits, and costs that keep climbing. When the ground under your feet feels unstable, waiting for institutions to fix things starts to feel naive.

So where does Trumpism fit? It didn’t invent this distrust, but it poured gasoline on it. By hammering institutional norms, torching media credibility, and sharpening polarization, it helped create an environment where formal mechanisms look increasingly broken. In that kind of atmosphere, taking it to the streets—or to the supply chains—doesn’t feel radical. It feels like common sense.

Still, there’s real tension. Disrupting people’s everyday lives is a double-edged sword. If folks see it as standing up for justice, it can build wide support. If it just looks like chaos that hurts regular people trying to get by, it can spark a strong backlash.

That tension defines politics in this post-trust era. Legitimacy no longer comes neatly from institutions. It gets fought over in public opinion—and more and more, the street has become the arena where that fight happens.

In that light, “May Day Strong” feels like a live experiment. It’s testing how well networked groups can mobilize and whether hitting the economy where it hurts can deliver lasting political leverage. The answers will matter a lot for where democracy goes next.

If direct disruption keeps replacing traditional institutional routes, the line between protest and actual governance starts to blur. Suddenly, the power to halt things becomes its own kind of authority. That opens doors for groups that felt shut out—but it also raises the odds of deeper instability.

At the end of the day, this isn’t simply politics getting more extreme. It’s politics changing its fundamental shape. It’s no longer just a contest to control the institutions. It’s becoming a struggle to control the flows—of information, money, goods, and attention.

Trumpism didn’t create this shift, but it accelerated it. By eroding trust and heating up divisions, it helped make direct action feel less like an outlier and more like a normal part of how politics gets done.

The big question now isn’t how institutions can manage protest. It’s whether institutions can hold onto their central role at all.


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Brian Hudson
Brian Hudson is a political science graduate from Bates College with a keen interest in international relations and global affairs. As a freelance commentator, he provides analysis on geopolitics, international security, and counter-terrorism. His work has been featured on news analysis platforms such as Modern Diplomacy, Eurasia Review, and others.
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Why I’m Answering the May Day Call to Action By Running for Congress

The workers of Uptown and The Bronx have been making the demand for a better life for over a century but Washington has ignored their demands for too long. I’m running to make sure it finally has an answer.


Bronx VA Medical Center nurses hold a demonstration and join other nationwide May Day actions demanding increased Covid-19 protections for nurses and health care workers on May 01, 2020 in New York City.
IPhoto by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Darializa Avila Chevalier
May 01, 2026

Common Dreams

Uptown wakes up before the rest of New York even opens its eyes. Walk Broadway from 125th to 168th, up through Dyckman, as I have, and you’ll see it: The bodega coffee grabbed on the run, the crosstown bus packed before dawn, people clocking into work while downtown is still asleep. These are the people who built our city. Not the CEOs, real estate developers, or the politicians who show up every two to four years with fliers and false promises. The movement fighting for their dignity has always lived here—on these buses and these street corners.

Every May 1, we honor them. May Day, or International Workers’ Day, was created from needless state violence. In 1884, American workers went on strike to win an eight-hour workday. As the deadline approached, a protest in Chicago turned deadly, with police firing into the crowd and arresting seven workers who, after a sham trial, were executed. The bosses thought that would be the end of it. They were wrong. Workers fought for and won the right to an eight-hour workday.

Here in Harlem, Washington Heights, and Kingsbridge, May Day isn’t an abstract history lesson, it’s a mirror. This is a day to honor the transit workers, nurses, teachers, laborers, and caregivers who have always refused to accept less than they deserve and risked everything to fight for a better future for the next generation. They show us what’s possible when working people come together, across generations, race, gender, and culture, and demand a dignified life.

May Day reminds us of something simple and profound: Uptown is a union town. It always has been.

I want to build power for the people on that crosstown bus before dawn who never get thanked for keeping our city running and are told to be grateful for what little they have.

New York, and Uptown especially, has become a stronghold of union power. It was in Harlem, during the Harlem Renaissance, that A. Philip Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—the first Black-led labor union in American history. It was in Washington Heights and Spanish Harlem where Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrant women transformed the garment industry, becoming so essential to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union that by the 1950s, the union published its paper, Justicia, entirely in Spanish. And it was in the Bronx that Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke exposed the Bronx Slave Market, where domestic workers, most of them Black women, were paid as little as 15 cents an hour and subjected to workplace harassment and abuse. Their conditions were so appalling that it sparked city-wide organizing to protect domestic workers. This is my community’s inheritance.

That tradition is still alive in our streets today. In January 2026, 70 years after 1199 Service Employees International Union's historic 46-day strike at Uptown hospitals, hundreds of unionized NY State Nurses Association (NYSNA) nurses walked off the job at NewYork-Presbyterian on 168th Street and at hospitals across our community. They stood on their picket lines from dawn to dusk, through a brutally cold January, fighting starvation wages and conditions so unsafe that patients were being put at risk. After 41 days of striking and organizing, they won. That’s the Uptown way.

From the factory floor to the hospital room to the living room, Uptown is still at the center of the labor movement. I think about this legacy when people ask me why I’m running for Congress. The honest answer is: I’m not sure I had a choice.

When you grow up as the daughter of Dominican immigrants and watch your parents work multiple jobs and come home exhausted, see your neighbors get pushed out, watch politicians blame the vulnerable instead of the corporations robbing them blind, all while sending their tax dollars to drop bombs on babies, you organize and fight back. And eventually, the question stops being why run and starts being how could I not?

Congress was not built for us. It was built to manage us. It was built to keep our labor, our rent checks, and our votes flowing to people who have never had to choose between rent and groceries, all while allowing the people who are the foundation of our city to fall through the cracks. But here’s what the establishment never understood about Uptown and The Bronx: We don’t wait for permission.

That’s the legacy I am fighting to protect in Congress. I am a proud card-carrying United Auto Workers member. I’ve picketed alongside NYSNA nurses on 168th Street and Mount Sinai Morningside. I’ve fought with Student Workers of Columbia to protect their peers from harassment by the university and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In Congress, I will fight to pass the PRO Act so every worker can organize without fear. I will push to fund public housing, cancel medical debt, and end the forever wars that drain our communities to pad the pockets of defense contractors. I want to build power for the people on that crosstown bus before dawn who never get thanked for keeping our city running and are told to be grateful for what little they have. They built New York and deserve everything it has to offer.

May Day is a call to action. The workers of Uptown and The Bronx have been making the demand for a better life for over a century but Washington has ignored their demands for too long. I’m running to make sure it finally has an answer.


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Darializa Avila Chevalier
Darializa Avila Chevalier is a working-class Afro-Latina organizer raised by Dominican immigrant parents. She has spent her life organizing for the people politicians leave behind: she fought to free Abdikadir Mohamed from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention during Trump's Muslim ban, organized Columbia's encampment in solidarity with Palestinians, and stood up for Mahmoud Khalil when ICE abducted him from his apartment. She is a card-carrying member of UAW and a public defense investigator. She doesn't just talk about the movement—she’s helped build it.
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