Thousands rallied in the shadow of Philadelphia City Hall listening to Senator Bernie Sanders (VT), local labor leaders and immigrant rights groups at the AFL-CIO’s For the Workers, Not the Billionaires May Day Rally. With organized labor and the National Labor Review Board under attack by the Trump administration, May Day in 2025 could be the start of a new moment.
May Day in the United States has long taken a back seat to the official workers holiday, Labor Day, in September. Like the creation of many American holidays, it’s steeped in blood and compromises. The short version is that President Grover Cleveland set it up as way to cover for his violent repression of May Day protests and the Haymarket riots in Chicago when the labor movement in the U.S. and internationally was more militant – and successful.
Someone who knows labor history better than most, Senator Bernie Sanders, took the stage early in the program to a roar of applause from the assembled Pennsylvanians.
“May Day, as you know, it was established way back in 1886 and workers and stood up to their very powerful forces and said, you know what? We don’t want to be slaves,” said Sanders.
As Republican states like Florida and Arkansas chip away at child labor laws, Sanders also reminded everyone that it was the labor movement that took those issues on as well in the 20th Century.
The word “oligarchy” has gotten back in American’s vocabularies thanks to Bernie’s “Fighting Oligarchy Tour.” Over the last several weeks he’s spoken in several states like Colorado and Nevada with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallying progressives and those angry that the Democratic Party isn’t doing enough to fight against the Trump administration.
“The oligarchs own the economy, they own the media, they own the political process. That’s the reality.” – Senator Bernie Sanders
Former CIA analyst and now U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin is concerned that oligarchy doesn’t play to the non-coastal states. Bernie who has been using that word for decades and is the country’s most popular politician, sees the writing on the wall as we drift towards a government where people are seeing that they are not represented.
But Sanders, like he has for years, made a compelling case as to why the United States is an oligarchy and how this has allowed the rich to get richer while the quality of life for working class Americans has plummeted.
Sanders gave a frank analysis of economic injustice in the country:
“Today in America, one man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 52 percent of American households.
Today in America, working class people live 7 years shorter lives than the rich. Today in America, the top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 93 percent. And CEOs make 350 times more than the average worker.
And here is something that we don’t talk about enough, and it tells us why the American people are furious. Today, the average worker in America, despite a huge explosion in technology and worker productivity, that average worker is earning less money per week in inflation than he or she did 52 years ago. So it’s not hard to understand what’s happened.
Over the last 50 years, the very richest people in this country have become much richer, while 800,000 people today sleep out on the street, and the average worker struggles. So let me tell you something.”
The Philadelphia AFL-CIO in a statement said that the rally was also to “make it clear that an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us; and our solidarity is our strength.”
And solidarity there was, as Trump attempts to use immigrants and deportations as a way to separate working people from each other, the presence of immigrants rights advocates like Eva Bravo of the Movement of Immigrant Leaders (MILPA) was significant. Eva, speaking through a translator, told the rally “All of us here have the same struggle and the same fight.”
She reminded the politicians and business leaders that, “We are the people that keep our country running with our work… many of us work 12 hour days but we are still made to be invisible.”
Nitiesha Oglesby, a Security Officer at University of Pennsylvania and 11 year member of SEIU, reiterated that labor rights and immigrant rights are connected, saying “They want to keep us down and get rid of labor rights breaking our unions and silencing our immigrant workers.”
Jimmy Williams Jr., the General President of IUPAT emphasized that the immigrants rights movement is part of the labor movement. The wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a first year apprentice at the SMART Local 100. “On May Day, as a fourth generation union member, I am Kilmar Abrego Garcia. We all are one…”
Williams Jr. wrapped up the rally with a speech that should worry some of the more comfortable politicians, especially in the Democratic Party.
A fourth-generation glazier, he declared that this May Day should be a bit of an independence day – that the working class “must declare our independence from both political parties.” Insinuating that many in both political parties don’t have the workers best interests at heart, “We have to look and stare down every politician and tell them if you don’t stand with us, we don’t stand with you.”
With that said, he certainly wasn’t joining Teamsters President Sean O’Brien in sucking up to Trump, saying that Trump was supposed to drain the swamp, but he “replaced it with a fucking dumpster.”
Williams also added, before sending everyone off for the march, that Philly is no friend to oligarchs.
“I know that the city of Philadelphia knows how to treat a tyrant, because our history has shown how to treat wannabe kings and tyrants from the day we were founded.”
