Thousands have joined an economic blackout for International Workers’ Day, as part of 3,500 “May Day Strong” events across the country. Organizers have called for “no school, no work, no shopping”, with walkouts, marches, block parties and demonstrations held outside of institutions such as the New York Stock Exchange.
On Friday afternoon in Manhattan, protesters from the youth-led Sunrise Movement chained themselves to the front of the stock exchange while more sat blocking the exits to the property. They were joined by about 100 protesters before being arrested and removed about an hour later. A small crowd remained, playing music and chanting: “Tax the rich!”
Sunrise protesters also led demonstrations in other cities that ended in arrests. In Portland, they occupied a Hilton hotel lobby where Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials were allegedly staying, and in Minneapolis, six Sunrise protesters were arrested for blocking a bridge.
Meanwhile, several San Francisco city officials were arrested during a protest at San Francisco international airport in support of the airport workers’ union picketing over wages and ICE’s presence in airports.
May Day has been an annual day of protest for the labor movement, and this year many active movements converged to demand no ICE and no war, and taxing the rich. The May Day Strong coalition includes labor unions, immigrants rights groups, political organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, and the organizers behind the No Kings protests.
Earlier this morning, a group of Amazon workers, Teamsters and local politicians marched from the New York public library’s main branch to Amazon’s nearby corporate offices to demand the corporation cut its contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the DHS. In the nation’s capital, protesters with the organization Free DC shut down intersections across the city, holding handmade banners reading “Workers over billionaires” and “Healthcare not warfare”.
Healthcare workers with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Chicago marched on an Amazon warehouse, carrying a giant sign of owner Jeff Bezos’s head. A group of protesters in Memphis, Tennessee, blocked the entrance to Elon Musk’s xAI datacenter by lying in the streets.
As the day went on, protests and marches – full of union workers, mariachi bands, students, teachers, politicians and more – commenced from the midwest to the west coast. Photos and footage of crowds filling streets in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Madison, Wisconsin, and Raleigh, North Carolina, spread on social media. So did protests in towns from the Village of Oak Creek, Arizona, to Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Frederick, Maryland.
Friday’s economic disruption builds on a similar coordinated effort out of Minnesota in January, when tens of thousands of Twin Cities residents took off from school and work to flood the streets in protest of federal immigration agents storming the city.
Leah Greenberg of Indivisible, one of the main organizations behind No Kings, described the May Day economic blackout as a “structure test” for the movement.
“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,” she said. “It’s important as it builds muscles towards greater non-cooperation.”
Teachers and students across the country also led the charge. In Portland, several hundred attendees joined a teachers’ union rally. High-schoolers in Kansas City walked out of school to join the Missouri Workers Center and the Sunrise Movement Kansas City at a protest. And thousands of teachers and protesters marched through downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, in what local outlet the News & Observer reported may be “one of the biggest labor actions in the state’s history”.
At least 22 North Carolina school districts closed over teachers taking off work to join the “Kids Over Corporations” march.
“As educators, we feel a very real accountability to the young people in the families that we serve,” Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union and Illinois Federation of Teachers, said earlier this week. “We want to connect people not just to the affordability crisis but the crisis of our institutions being marginalized in this moment and the impact on our young people.”
Sanshray Kukutla, a student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and an organizer with the campus’s Sunrise Movement chapter, helped coordinate a local walkout for students, teachers, workers and residents. “We’re taking collective action to send a message to the billionaire class: it’s our labor, our spending and our participation that keeps the whole system running, and if we don’t work, they don’t have profits,” said Kukutla.
Amid the school walkouts, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, condemned Chicago’s civic day of action on X, formerly Twitter, calling it a “dereliction of duty”.
Organizers say the day of action is an effort to build toward a general strike, which was effectively outlawed through the 1946 Taft-Hartley Act and has not happened in the US since. As a workaround, Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), has called for unions to work toward a general strike on 1 May 2028, by having existing union contracts expire in unison.
