Paul Goyette
A Chicago Teachers Union march during contract negotiations in November 2024.
Nikki Marín Baena thinks we could all stand to think bigger.
“The mistake we progressives make over and over again is that we talk about only what’s wrong instead of asking people to imagine what this country could be,” Baena, co-director of a North Carolina-based immigrant and worker rights advocacy organization called Siembra NC, tells The Progressive. “May Day 2025 is an opportunity to do that.”
On Thursday, May 1, hundreds of planned actions ranging from letter writing campaigns to organized rallies will take place in recognition of May Day, which is recognized in many countries as a national holiday in celebration of the international labor movement. Baena plans to attend a rally at the North Carolina state capital in Raleigh, where Siembra NC will join with labor organizations, grassroots advocacy groups, and progressive activists to, according to the lead organizing website, “[demand] a country that puts our families over . . . fortunes, public schools over private profits, health care over hedge funds, housing over homelessness.”
“We want workers to connect to each other,” Baena says. “We want to uplift their stories and their calls to action and encourage more people to get involved in opposing anti-worker agendas.”
The national day of action planned for Thursday is a result of grassroots organizing that began in March 2025 in Chicago, according to Jackson Potter, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union. At an organized event over several days, representatives from more than 200 groups from twenty-seven states—including some of the nation’s largest labor unions, progressive groups such as Move On and Indivisible, and a wide range of advocacy organizations—convened to plan a working class response to the crises brought on by President Donald Trump’s administration and build progressive organizing power.
“This will be a prominent show of resistance to President Donald Trump’s anti-labor, anti-civil rights, and anti-immigrant agenda,” Potter says.
May Day 2025 seeks to build upon the outpourings of mass resistance to the Trump agenda seen at the Hands Off Day of Action and the 50501 protests—whose organizing coalitions, Potter says, have exchanged organizing ideas with the May Day organizers—and to expand these movements to new audiences.
What makes the May Day event different, according to Potter, is that May 1, despite the day’s identification with the labor movement internationally, is an ordinary workday for many U.S. workers. “So instead of people showing up for a rally on Saturday and then going out to lunch,” he says, “we want to show that ‘business as usual’ is no longer going to be tolerated, and that people will disrupt the workday and even take time away from work to participate. Some unions may be taking a strike day.” The intended message, Potter says, is that “workers are what make the economy run, not billionaires.”
Crucially, a significant number of May Day events will be organized under the banner of Bargaining for the Common Good, a labor negotiation strategy in which unions partner with community organizations to make demands that go far beyond union members’ wages and benefits to include social justice issues such as affordable housing, access to good quality health care, immigrant rights, and environmental concerns. This approach has served as a unifying idea behind successful teacher labor actions in Chicago, St. Paul, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.
“We see this as an opportunity for hundreds of thousands to say there is a common cause to defend labor, immigrant, and civil rights, and then go on the offense,” Potter says. “We don’t want to go back to what was. We don’t want a country where only half the people have access to affordable health care, where immigrants live in constant fear, where school children are segregated, and where workers don’t have the right to organize.”
Organizing with the strategy of Bargaining for the Common Good also allows organizers to raise the prominence of public education, and other social justice issues, in the anti-Trump movement After all, public education, which touches nearly every American who either has attended public schools, enrolled their children in public schools, or paid taxes to support public schools, is a highly intersectional issue that can unite the various factions that oppose the MAGA agenda.
Indeed, the two national teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, are helping to organize the May First actions. So is the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), whose National Coalition director, Moira Kaleida, says May Day 2025 is an opportunity for progressive groups of all kinds to learn from each other and collaborate.
Within the labor rights arena, Kaleida explains, public education intersects most obviously with the rights of working educators and other school staff. But by using the Bargaining for the Common Good approach, education and labor organizers can make connections among the many progressive factions present in their communities.
“There has been a lot of work done nationwide to show what labor and community coalitions can look like,” she says, “and the idea is getting more recognition from labor and political leaders.”
For example, Kaleida says the synergy between education and immigrant rights organizing has played a role in resistance efforts in both Los Angeles and upstate New York, where schools and communities worked together to protect the rights of immigrants when Trump’s immigration officials threatened undocumented students and their parents. A similar collaboration contributed to the recent successful opposition to legislation drafted in Tennessee that would have challenged the Constitutional right of immigrant students to attend public schools.
“In all of these cases,” Kaleida says, “educators are on the frontline to protect the rights of immigrant children.”
Organizers of May Day 2025 are all too aware of the more establishment-leaning Democratic Party strategists who have called on opposition to the Trump Administration coming from the left to “roll over and play dead” and downplayed these outpourings of resistance as “a rhetorical exercise.”
However, Potter contends that “the spark for a populist opposition movement to Trumpism has to start somewhere. [May Day 2025] is an opportunity to state what a democracy for workers would be. It’s an opportunity to turn the tide.”
Kaleida says that the day’s events will serve as a “structure test” in a much longer effort to bring movements together, both to engage more people and to develop strong messaging and tools for resistance.
While Baena also concedes that progressive change will take a long time, she says she is inspired by what happened in Colombia, where her family emigrated from to the United States. “Colombia elected a leftwing president in 2022 after more than sixty years of rightwing dominance,” she explains. “But it didn’t happen all of a sudden. In 2019 and again in 2021, there were general strikes over taxation and other economic issues. And out of these general strikes the momentum built into a massive turnout for the left in the presidential election. May Day is an opportunity to build a movement like this.”