May Day Actions. Sacramento

 

Mayhaps: May Day and the Rebirth of Labor’s Imagination Labor

 Mayhaps: May Day and the Rebirth of Labor’s Imagination

Apr 20 

Written By Fred Glass

 

For many years I taught labor history at night to working students at City College of San Francisco. Since Bay Area workers and their unions had carried out two consequential general strikes (San Francisco in 1934, and Oakland in 1946), each semester I assigned my pupils an essay question:  Is it possible—or even desirable—for our region’s workers, if faced with oppressive circumstances, to replicate those feats today?

My students’ essays appeared along a range of responses between two poles. On one end, no, not possible, even if desirable, due to changed conditions like suburban distances between home and workplace, along with the decline of union density. On the other, yes, both desirable and possible, because new communications technologies allow ideas and organizing to spread rapidly online, and labor’s steep decline means that workers are angry enough to make it happen. Few students in either camp thought it would be an easy lift, reflecting a general sense of limited horizons for labor-led progressive change in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

The 1946 Oakland General Strike was the very last one American workers had managed to put together, literally a lifetime ago. But metaphorically, post-January 23, 2026, we might now be onto a new calendar. In the wake of the powerful “No Work, No School, No Shopping” day that erupted in the Twin Cities, alongside a steady drumbeat of growing demonstrations and electoral successes against the Trump regime, there’s wind in the sails for mass action on May Day 2026.

Just in my neck of the woods many events have already taken place, and more are on the boards, combining planning, training and coalition building for that once-unpopular holiday, officially observed in one hundred or so nations across the globe but not in the country that birthed it. I hear from a friend in Minneapolis that he’s been going to meetings attended by hundreds of people dedicated in a serious way to making May 1 another day of action. 

We shouldn’t underestimate the significance of what happened January 23. In the midst of a brutal occupation by poorly trained, heavily armed troops operating with seeming impunity on behalf of their fascist mission of ethnic cleansing, the ordinary people of Minneapolis organized themselves to defend their streets, their democratic rights, their immigrant neighbors, and their idea of a decent society to demand “ICE out!”. Somewhere around 75,000 people showed up on a cold Minnesota winter day to freeze the gears of the local economy and the occupation. 

It was pretty close to a general strike, and unlike all the other dozen-plus city-wide general strikes in American history it was waged not around an economic struggle between workers and bosses, but on behalf of a political idea, more like what happens every so often in other countries. Which is very much in the spirit of May Day.

Tools are there to be found

Doing such things will not suddenly become easier. The Minnesota circumstances are unique, with an unprecedented level of assault running into a recent baseline increase in labor-community alliance and activism. The ICE invasion reignited the embers of powerful alliance-building and union contract victories that peaked in 2024. But every city has its own local history, culture and traditions of collective action, and despite the diminished capacities of the labor movement, the tools are there to be found—providing they are sought out seriously.

One hurdle is the legitimate fear of labor leadership over legal consequences for calling a general strike, forbidden by the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a federal legislative backlash by the Republican-controlled Congress against the 1946 strike wave. Unions can be fined and labor leaders jailed for overtly calling for sympathy strikes. Thus while mostly supportive behind the scenes, unions were muted in their participation in the May 1 2006 “Day Without Immigrants” demonstrations and the November 2011 “Day of Action” in Oakland that shut down the docks and shuttered many businesses in support of Occupy Oakland’s call for a general strike. 

 

Read more. 

https://www.californiadsa.org/news/mayhaps-2026apr

 

May Day Organizing. National Education Committee

 solidarity and to push for progress.

Across the country—from fruit fields in California to classrooms in Chicago, from kitchens in Queens to loading docks in Atlanta—working people are rising up. NEA members are joining other laborers, parents, education workers, immigrants, students, and neighbors demanding stronger, safer, and more dignified communities. 

NOT Business As Usual.  NEA Community Organizing Kit. 

 NEA Toolkit: https://www.nea.org/mayday-toolkit.

Timothy Snyder : Super Power Suicide.

substack.com/pub/snyder/p/superpower-suicide?

https://superpower-suicide?open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/superpower-suicide?

War and AI; Bernie Sanders

 

Choosing Democracy.blogspot.com

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May Day Mobilization -NEA

 A step toward unity. 

May Day is 10 days away. From coast to coast, working people are already building something powerful. NEA has been working to bring activists together. State affiliates are mobilizing. Local leaders are organizing actions from the ground up. More than 880 events are already planned in every state across the country. This is how power grows. Not handed down, but built together. On May 1, educators and our allies will show up everywhere—standing together for public schools, for our students, and prioritizing workers over billionaires. We are not asking for attention. We are showing where the power already is: in the people who teach our kids, support our students, and hold our communities together.

Find an action near Sacramento!  ➤

There are rallies, marches, teach-ins, and community events planned from Fresno to Philadelphia. Find out where to get plugged in. If there's not an event near you, there’s still time to organize one. We'll even provide you with a toolkit to get started. This is our moment to step in, step up, and build the kind of power that will make a difference in the lives of educators and students. Be part of May Day! In solidarity, The NEA EdActionTeam Get involved in a May Day action!  ➤

A Day Without Immigrants + Sacramento

 

Friday, May 1 @10am: NorCal Resist 20th Anniversary of A Day Without Immigrants march and rally. Gather at Southside Park at 10 am. The event will include a rally at Southside Park, a march to the John Moss Building, as well as an art action with community speakers, musical performances, and food and beverages with NO ICE!

Call them detention centers or concentration camps -- whatever you call them, they’re inhumane, morally bankrupt, and political liabilities. Trump's trying to expedite construction of new camps, but because of the public outcry, he’s hoping to keep the whole business out of the headlines.

So let’s get loud about it. Let’s start with some facts and context.

Detention expansion is key to Trump’s goal of one million deportations. Last week, we finally got the Department of Homeland Security’s 161-page 2027 budget proposal. In it, DHS brags about a record-breaking 440,000 deportations last year, and promises to more than double that to one million of our neighbors deported annually. 

Deportation camps are central to how they get there. DHS itself says the new camps are “critical to meeting…[the] tasked goal of arresting and removing one million aliens per year.” Detention Watch Network’s toolkit explains that the agency is looking to construct a couple dozen to house upwards of 10,000 people each, often for months on end in cramped and horrific conditions.

These camps are moral abominations. Since Senator Jon Ossoff started an investigation into ICE’s camps last year, he's received more than a thousand “credible reports of human rights abuses": mistreatment of pregnant women, separation of children from parents, physical and sexual abuse, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions. One grim statistic captures the scale of this horror: The death rate in ICE detention is increasing. In 2026, we’re seeing an average of more than one death every week.

These camps are also a political liability for Trump and his allies. The regime is trying to keep the escalation quiet because the more people hear about these camps, the more they oppose them. That backlash is a real problem for the GOP.

The peak number of detentions in US history came on January 24, the same day DHS agents murdered Alex Pretti for exercising his First Amendment rights to defend his neighbors. Public opposition exploded, the political winds shifted, and Trump made a tactical retreat. After their defeat in the Twin Cities, the White House advised Republicans to stop talking about mass deportations, and the number of detainees has dropped -- but the DHS budget proposal makes clear the regime still plans a massive escalation. 

Grassroots activists are throwing sand in the gears, though, successfully rallying public opposition to the camps, including in red states. We’ve seen successful grassroots and legal campaigns in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah, Texas, Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, Maryland, and Michigan -- in Tennessee, the opposition of GOP candidates for governor and two dozen local GOP officials successfully killed a project. 

On April 25, we're making a big stink. On Saturday, we’re joining Detention Watch Network and other partners on a national day of action against these camps. The regime can try to dramatically increase construction, but they can’t make us be quiet. As long as we have First Amendment rights, we intend to use them in defense of our neighbors. Read on for more ways to stand Indivisible with your community.

In solidarity,

Ezra Levin 
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible

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Your weekly to-dos

1. Keep telling Congress: Trump's war has to end. Despite his erratic announcements of victory/ceasefires/imminent war crimes, Trump's war on Iran grinds on, at the expense of thousands of lives across the region, the wholesale disruption of the world economy, and soaring costs for Americans. We must meet Trump's incompetence and inconsistency with a steady determination of our own to neither give up nor give in. Tell your Members of Congress: Either they do all they can to end the war that Trump and Israel launched, or the blood is on their hands, too. After sending an email via the above link, please call your representative and your sena

I had conversations with high schoolers and retirees alike who were looking to get into organizing for the first time. There was urgency in those conversations. There was clarity, and resolve — but also hope, and joy. A sense that it is we, together, who make our futures. That no one is coming to save us, and that this is not a cause for despair, but for action. We alone are responsible for our democracy. We alone can build a future of dignity, peace, and abundance for all the people of this city and state.

No Kings was not the struggle. It was a place to meet, to count ourselves, to feel in our bones that we are not alone. The struggle is what comes next: in your union, in your neighborhood association, in your DSA chapter, in your school board meeting, in the conversations you have with your coworkers about why things are the way they are and how they could be different.

May Day and A Day Without Immigrants

 

May Day and No Kings 2026 A Day Without Immigrants  by Harry Targ  This year May Day will continue the historic mass mobilizations for social and economic justice of recent historic No Kings rallies. The original May Day was designed to remember the May 1, 1886 rally in Chicago for the 8-hour day. At that rally more than 300,000 workers from 13,000 businesses walked off their jobs to demand justice for workers.  At a subsequent rally two days later at another rally an unknown person threw a bomb, violence broke out, police and others were killed. Anarchist leaders of the rallies, the Haymarket Martyrs, were charged with the violence, which they had nothing to do with. Subsequently eight martyrs were convicted, four of whom were executed for crimes they did not commit. Three years later, a federation of socialists workers, the Second International, declared May 1 an International Workers Day to remember the Haymarket Martyrs and at the same time to continue to rally for worker rights, from social and economic justice to ending war. Almost 70 countries around the world honor May Day as an official holiday today, and workers in many more countries celebrate the day and workers’ rights even though it is not an “official” holiday. Today working people, most of the population of the United States, still need social and economic rights, labor rights, and would benefit from dramatic cuts in military spending and increases in social spending. As a result, millions of people in the United States have marched and rallied for social and economic justice, defending democratic institutions, and against wars in recent No Kings rallies, the most recent being March 28. Given the threats of fascism at home and world war overseas, activists are asking “What do we do now?’ One answer is to step up the militancy while honoring May Day, the International Workers Day. ​“Coming off the heels of the massive energy from the No Kings mobilizations, people are ready to take action and keep fighting for a democracy of, by, and for the people,” says Indivisible Co-Founder Leah Greenberg, whose organization started the No Kings protest.  On May 1, Indivisibles will be joining people across the country with a clear message: we demand a government that invests in our communities, not one that enriches billionaires, fuels endless war, or deploys masked agents to intimidate our neighbors.”  https://paydayreport.com/no-kings-organizers-pivot-to-may-day-general-strike/ As Ralph Chapin. the lyricist of the industrial Workers of the World wrote in 1915 in the workers' anthem, “Solidarity Forever”: “In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. For the union makes us strong”

Trump is in Trouble

 Heather Cox Richardson. Letter from an American.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-10-2026?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-10-2026?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

There is a great deal of important organizing in defense of democracy going on including the mass marches and hundreds of local actions of March 28.  The next mass national action is scheduled for May 1, 2026. These events offer opportunities to connect with new people and groups, to deepen their engagement, to advance the advocacy for democracy within these movements and to build cooperative relationships between national and local resistance.