May Day draws record union crowd in Sacramento

By Lila Swanson

Thousands of union members, immigrants, students and allies took to the streets in Sacramento on May 1, joining tens of thousands more across California in what labor leaders described as the largest International Workers’ Day demonstrations in more than a decade.

The May Day rallies came amid growing opposition to what union leaders called the most anti-worker federal administration in American history, and rising anxiety over Big Tech automation threatening to eliminate jobs across industries.

Anica Walls, president of SEIU 1000, which represents more than 100,000 California state workers, addressed a crowd gathered outside the John E. Moss Federal Building in the afternoon—a site where ICE has detained immigrants in recent months.

“This is what it’s about—workers coming together, fighting for the rights that other workers died for, so that we can have the eight-hour workday,” Walls said. “All of the things that we have won, the sick pay, the retirement—all of it is what we need to continue fighting for, because we know that these corporations are coming after us. We need to come together across all sectors, across all industries. Why? Because we deserve it. We are the ones who make California the fourth largest economy in the world.”

Fabrizio Sasso, executive director of the Sacramento Central Labor Council, traced the day’s origins to the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago.

“May Day was born in struggle, in sacrifice, in the streets,” Sasso said. “Workers demanded something radical for its time: eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. And for that, they were beaten, jailed, and killed.”

Sasso credited the broader labor movement with shaping the American standard of living. “The labor movement gave this nation weekends, overtime pay, pensions, safety laws, child labor protections, and the idea that democracy should enter every workplace. History was written by janitors, teachers, farmworkers, warehouse workers, nurses, clerks, and public employees who stood together and said: enough. That is legacy.”

Sacramento’s May Day events were combined with “A Day Without Immigrants,” a national protest and boycott calling on immigrant communities to abstain from work, school, and shopping to highlight their economic and social contributions. The dual focus carried particular weight in a city built by generations of farmworkers, healthcare workers, construction workers, and public employees—many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants.

Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, put the moment in historical context.

“In 1990, Forbes identified 66 billionaires. Today, they list 900 U.S. billionaires,” Gonzalez said in a statement. “Corporations are telling us that they can deskill our jobs, replace us with robots, and send our jobs to low-wage countries around the globe with the help of Artificial Intelligence. That’s why working people are saying enough.”

Gonzalez pushed back on narratives of a deeply divided electorate. “Working people across this country agree overwhelmingly on one basic principle: workers over billionaires.”

California unions came to May Day united behind a common platform: healthcare as a human right, living wages and retirement security, protection from AI-driven job displacement, fully funded public education, fair taxation of corporations and the ultra-wealthy, and the unrestricted right to organize.

Sacramento was one of more than two dozen California cities where workers took action, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, Fresno, and Bakersfield.