May Day rallies sweep US, demanding reforms for working-class rights

The events, organised as part of an initiative called May Day Strong, were inspired by economic boycotts following ramped-up immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the deaths of US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January.

The events are broad in scope but are overall efforts to protest government policies that prioritise the ultra-wealthy over working-class people.

May Day Strong has a broad set of demands, including “tax the rich” and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — a call that comes as Republicans voted on Wednesday on a budgetary measure that would fund the agency under the Department of Homeland Security.

It also calls for ending war and “expanding democracy”, according to a statement from the group.

While the tent is broad in nature, organisers stressed that it is a result of a wide set of challenges facing the US worker.

“Since Inauguration Day, corporate billionaires and the Project 2025 agenda have driven attacks on our rights and freedoms, including by targeting workers based on how we look, the language we speak, or the work we do, and undermining our First Amendment rights and our freedom of association,” New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO President Brendan Griffith said in a statement to Al Jazeera. Project 2025 is a conservative initiative that was laid out by the Heritage Foundation before the 2025 presidential election and was aimed at reshaping the US federal government and consolidating executive power, among other agenda items.

May Day Strong says the overall mission of its rallies is to put “workers over billionaires”, and has lined up broader economic boycotts in several cities, including Los Angeles, Boston, and Atlanta.

The push for increased worker protections comes after a wave of actions in the last year by the administration of US President Donald Trump that have stripped away many of those protections, including for federal workers.

Earlier this year, the administration reclassified thousands of federal workers as “at-will” employees, which, as a result, makes it more challenging for civil servants to appeal dismissals.

Trump also made cuts to staffing at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), including Gwynne Wilcox, who had been appointed to the board by former President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

In March 2025, the Supreme Court declined to intervene in the firing. By cutting staffing, the NLRB, which is the federal agency where workers file complaints against their employers to investigate unfair labour practices, is operating at a limited capacity.

Trump also rolled back policies that protect workers from unsafe AI development that disadvantages workers. A Biden-era executive order required the Department of Labor to ensure that employers were transparent about how they use AI, that AI should enable workers and complement their work, and that resources be provided to upskill workers during AI-related job transitions.

A report from Goldman Sachs published earlier this month found that AI has wiped out an average of 16,000 jobs per month in the past year.

Trump also rolled back protections aimed at preventing workplace discrimination, including weakening enforcement of requirements that employers maintain affirmative action standards, as well as cracking down on private sector diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programmes. Big-box giant Target was one such firm to roll back its DEI programmes, leading to widespread boycotts in 2025. Companies, including Amazon and Goldman Sachs, also scaled back DEI efforts.

The White House claimed the initiatives provided preference based on race and/or gender.

There have also been cuts to safety standards at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), an agency under the Department of Labor. Among them was an executive order to end the implementation of new safety standards, including proposed mandatory heat safety protocols for workers that included mandatory rest breaks and water.

In April, the Trump administration proposed $47m in cuts to the agency for the 2027 fiscal year, which begins in October. While the White House can propose a budget, Congress ultimately decides funding.

But erosions to OSHA are nothing new. Since the group began releasing its report 35 years ago, the agency’s budget has been slashed by 10 percent, 26 percent for full staffing, and the number of inspectors is down 16 percent, according to AFL-CIO’s Death on the Job report (PDF) published earlier this week.

On the wage front, in the early days of the Biden administration, the White House was unable to deliver a key promise to raise the federal minimum wage.

That was blocked by a Democrat who voted against raising those wages — then-Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who sided with Republicans against raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Although Biden was able to raise the federal minimum wage for federal contractors, Trump rescinded that in 2025.

While states have higher minimum wages, the federal minimum wage has not increased since 2009, and sits at $7.25 per hour. The increase, which happened during the first few months of the Obama administration, was passed several years earlier, in 2007, by Congress, when Democrats held a majority in both the House and the Senate.

The rallies range in size and scope. In North Carolina, educators are calling for increased public school funding, with more than a dozen school districts across the state closing in solidarity.

In New Orleans, nurses are calling for better wages and fairer contracts, as are students at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

In New York, rallies called on e-commerce giant Amazon to drop its contracts with ICE. ICE uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud storage and in September, ICE bought $25m in cloud services from Amazon.

On Friday afternoon, hundreds of workers representing 70 groups rallied in New York’s Washington Square Park. The crowd was filled with workers wielding plethora of signs calling to tax billionaires and others calling for a ‘living wage’.

Guadalupe Sosa, a street vendor who represents a union for street vendors, was one of the demonstrators out on Friday.

“Like my parents, thousands of other immigrants migrated here. And we are the workers who wake up every morning and make sure that this city runs. We are the workers that for many years have been ignored,” he told Al Jazeera.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also addressed the rally, saying, “I would not be standing in front of you as the mayor of our city were it not for the support of working people. ”

“There are over 3,000 actions planned in over 40 cities, where unions, allies, community organisations, and other advocates are locking arms with workers across the country to protest policies, actions, and tactics aimed at disempowering working families, squelching their voices, trampling on their rights, and scaring them into submission,” Jennifer Abruzzo, former general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, told Al Jazeera.

“We are showing our power and acting in unity over common cause. There is tremendous strength in numbers.”

The history of May Day, or International Workers’ Day, dates back to the late 19th century, when workers in the US began fighting for an eight-hour workday. The biggest demonstrations were in Chicago.

Tensions boiled over when a labour rally turned violent in 1886. A bomb was thrown at police, and in retaliation, officers shot at rallygoers in Haymarket Square, in what later became known as the Haymarket Affair.

Labour organisations mark the day in solidarity with workers who push for labour reforms.

The US does not recognise May Day as an official holiday, and instead marks Labor Day, which is in September, as the official day celebrating the US labour movement.