Americans are fed up with an establishment that has abandoned the working class. It’s time to organize for change
O
n Friday, more than 3,000 May Day protests will take place across the United States – more than double last year’s number. Workers, students and families are calling for a strike: no school, no work, no shopping, and an end to billionaire rule. I’m headed to the streets with members of my own union, the United Auto Workers, in New York City.
Americans are fed up – and not just with Donald Trump. People are angry at a Democratic party establishment that has abandoned the working class, that treated the labor movement like a turnout machine instead of the pillar of democracy it is, that funded a genocide in Gaza while ignoring a cost of living crisis, and that took its own base so completely for granted that it pushed millions out of the political process entirely.
History tells us not to be surprised. One hundred and forty years ago, workers across this country walked off the job with a single demand: an eight-hour workday. It sounds modest now. At the time it was so radical that it provoked riots, mass demonstrations, and the execution of union organizers at Haymarket Square in Chicago. The people who fought for that demand faced a robber baron class – JP Morgan, Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel – that had bought the government, militarized the police, and was perfectly willing to let workers die to protect their profits. There was no political establishment coming to save them. They won because they organized, sacrificed and refused to go home.
