We have an inheritance, but we must earn a legacy

By Fabrizio Sasso
Executive Director, Sacramento CLC

Take a moment today to think about the thousands of workers who make your life possible.

Think about the women and men who build our roads. Think about the working people who teach our children, stock our shelves, pick and package our food and drive it to the stores where we shop. Every day, we depend on each other, on other working Americans, in ways that are often unnoticed and invisible.

Yet each of those workers makes our collective lives and our collective success possible, and still, working Americans are told to be grateful for crumbs.

I want to be clear about something: what we are facing from the federal government right now is not just an attack on unions. It is an attack on everyone who works for a living. That means you. That means your neighbor. That means the teacher at your kid’s school, the nurse at your hospital, the farmworker who picked your food and the warehouse worker who packed your order. If you depend on a paycheck—if you depend on your labor to survive—you are under attack.

Grocery prices are up. Rent has never been higher. Families are choosing between medication and food. And while all of that is happening, we are being told there is no money for schools, no money for housing, no money for healthcare. Funny how scarcity always begins at the bottom and abundance always ends at the top.

We are now watching this country sink money into a war in Iran, while working families here at home are stretched to the breaking point. Meanwhile, ICE is being expanded, immigrants are being terrorized, and the administration hands out tax breaks to billionaires like party favors. They call this the free market. But if workers are drowning while billionaires get richer, that is not freedom. That is a system rigged by design.

This is where history becomes more than memory. It becomes instruction.

On May 4, 1886, in Haymarket Square in Chicago, workers were gathered peacefully. They were asking for something that sounds almost laughably modest today: an eight-hour workday. Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. That was the radical demand. For it, they were beaten, jailed, and killed. A bomb was thrown. Workers and police died. And in the aftermath, labor organizers were scapegoated, tried and executed—not for what they did, but for what they believed. They believed that ordinary people deserved dignity.

Their courage did not die with them. It traveled across oceans and generations. It became May Day—International Workers’ Day—celebrated by working people on every continent. It became the eight-hour workday, the weekend, overtime pay, child labor laws, workplace safety protections, pensions, healthcare benefits. Everything we take for granted was paid for in full by people whose names most of us will never know.

That is our inheritance.

The question now is what we will leave behind.

When future generations look back at this moment—at the soaring rents, the shameless greed, the union-busting, the AI displacement threatening millions of jobs, the creeping privatization of public goods, the fear being used as a political weapon—what will they say about us? Will they say we were spectators? Or will they say we organized? Will they say we stayed silent? Or will they say we raised hell?

Legacy is not something we inherit alone. Legacy is something we earn together.

Hope is not naive. Hope is what organizers have always run on. It is what carried Dolores Huerta through decades in the fields. It is what kept the sanitation workers marching in Memphis until Dr. King came and stood beside them. It is what gave California janitors the courage to come together for change. Hope, combined with solidarity, is the most powerful force in political history.

Solidarity is not a slogan. It is a strategy. Regardless of background, language, religion, or immigration status, we are all united by our work. And that unity, that refusal to be divided, is what this administration fears most.

Labor is not a special interest. Labor is the public interest.

The people who create the wealth deserve the wealth. Another world is not only possible—it is necessary.

Our predecessors handed us a torch. It is not enough to admire the flame. We have to carry it forward and make it burn brighter. Not just for ourselves, but for everyone who comes after us and inherits whatever we are brave enough to build.

That work begins now.