⛓️MAY DAY STATEMENT 2025⛓️
HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WORKERS’ DAY FELLOW WORKERS!
As Eugene Debs once said, “May Day belongs to the working class and is dedicated to the revolution.”
Today is a celebration of us, of all the beautiful working people who toil on this Earth, of our creativity, ingenuity, and international solidarity. Today is of our side of the story. Today is of the love we hold for Mother Nature and all living creatures with whom we share this planet.
Today is of remembrance and of our martyrs. Today we hail the red flag, the banner of working people throughout the world. This flag will one day wave high up above the ramparts of capitalism and its crisis of fascism. As these two protean specters loom over us, the dark shadow cast by the short reign of Capital continues to suffocate any viable chance of a livable future on this planet.
Fellow workers, it is imperative that our collective history is preserved and uplifted, our shared memory and legacy of struggle protected, to know who it is we follow, their sacrifices, their nameless faces, their faceless names, the joy and the pain.
May Day is a symbol of nature’s annual rebirth, of revolutionary renewal, and serves as a reminder that the historical roots of our international collective struggle are stained crimson red with the blood of workers whose footprints we follow today, and whose spirits and triumphs fill and guide our hearts towards victory in this protracted class war.
Us wobblies have a saying: “we never forget and we never forgive.” Each and every May Day we take pause and remember what we are fighting for: material gains on our shop floor today, and for tomorrow, the eventual devastation of the global capitalist system, wage slavery, and all its bloodthirsty tentacles. “May Day reminds us: the working class has always fought back. In a time of rising repression, worker solidarity isn’t nostalgia—it’s survival.”
Just as the world watched the Haymarket martyrs and labor leaders convicted and murdered by the state not for their actions, but for their political and ideological beliefs, the world is watching as the state disappears anti-war and pro-Palestinian organizers like Mahmoud Kahlil, union organizers like “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino, as well as unleashing a racist deportation apparatus on all vulnerable immigrant workers including our union siblings, Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Lewelyn Dixon.
Organized labor must make a powerful stand against the disappearing and abduction of our fellow workers. These attacks are an attack on the entire working class.
The IWW has a proud and storied history of standing in solidarity with undocumented workers, and we continue this unabated work of our political ancestors. We demand immediate amnesty and legal status for all immigrant workers in this country, the immediate closure of all immigrant detention centers, and the tilling of a new future without harmful, violent, inhumane borders. The IWW has been organizing food workers since before World War I, a long history punctuated by striking blueberry pickers in Michigan in 1964 to the first Starbucks union election win NYC in 2004. Our wobbly ancestors were not only organizers, they were poets, artists, hoboes, song writers, and public speakers. This union has always been a rowdy, red rebel band of labor at war with Capital and intent on winning workers’ autonomy, self-organization, and proletariat cultural diversity.
Fellow Workers, this is for all the restaurant workers and food caretakers across the world who are currently feeding the gluttonous rich who inhabit our cities, the workers who, as we speak, are scrubbing toilets, sweating in front of a red hot range, those sick at work because our industry refuses to provide us with sick leave, to all those who couldn’t afford to take today off, a paid vacation with their loved ones only a dream.
This is for every restaurant worker lost to COVID during the pandemic. This is for every fast food worker making $7.25 an hour. This is for who, despite the theft of inadequate poverty wages, feed and serve, whose labour & dedication are the crux of Michelin star reputations. This is for the migrant and immigrant workers who run every kitchen in this city and serve in the shadows of racial capitalism. This is for the workers who make the chemical products used to clean our stations, and for the workers who deliver our clean linens and towels every week. This is for the workers who grow and harvest the produce and raise the animals destined for our kitchens, your plates, and the plates of politicians to whom the city is simply a twisted playground. Similarly chained by wage slavery, our destinies as workers remain bound together.
We stand in unwavering solidarity with the courageous workers organizing at five iconic, upscale DC restaurants with Unite Here Local 25: Patis, St Anselm, Le Diplomate, Rasika, Modena (Mo-day-nah). Y’all have sparked the beacon of hope and possibility, and your actions will improve the workplace conditions and raise standards for all restaurant workers in this city.
But what is just as impactful is that you have proved the conditions of our work can be changed and placed directly into our control through love and solidarity and direct action with our coworkers. I cried tears of joy when I heard the news, and I can’t remember the last time that happened. And it is just the beginning.
So on this International Workers Day, from the Haymarket tomb to the imperial core, this politician’s playground— we demand an end to labor peace, we rebuke this long accepted armed truce, the meager concessions this current administration throws to business unions veiled in populist language.
We remember that withholding our labor is the most powerful weapon the working class possesses. We remember and embrace our anti-capitalist union traditions, our steadfast antifascist traditions, our traditions of militant solidarity with all working people and the Earth.
There is hope for a brighter future for everyone of us as we dedicate ourselves to these actions that will build tomorrow. We will fight them everywhere and we will win. This will be our finest hour.
I’ll end with black anarcho- communist and Fellow Worker Lucy Parsons words spoken on a may day not so long ago:
“Today we march, we send our greeting upon ocean’s waves, we send them continent to continent, we send our friends across the ocean and all climes and countries: We are with you. Our hearts throb. The working class throughout the world, proclaim the doom of capitalism and wage-slavery.”
Solidarity forever! 🚩🏴🚩
(END)