May Day’s Call to Stand United and Protect All We’ve Won

Washington, D.C. (May 1, 2025) — Brent Booker, General President of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), made the following statement today on solidarity, May Day:

May Day is about history, sacrifice, and workers improving their lives — but it is foremost about the power of solidarity.

 

The world-wide commemoration, sometimes known as International Workers Day, is American-born, on the streets of Haymarket Square in Chicago in 1886. Thousands of workers seeking an eight-hour workday braved bullets and bombs. They stuck together and they won.

 

Today, May Day is about the solidarity we are building across the United States and Canada through Laborers Rising. It is about our union’s march to 1 million members. It is about protecting what generations of laborers have fought for and won — the right to be safe on the job, prevailing wages, family-supporting benefits, and decent retirements.

 

May Day is also about what is at risk. Workers are under attack right now in ways we have not seen in decades. In the last three months alone, nearly a million national defense workers, including LIUNA members, have lost their collective bargaining rights. Longstanding oversight offices, NIOSH and OSHA, that keep construction workers safe have been gutted. Chaotic economic policies including tariffs on our allies threaten laborers’ work in the U.S. and Canada. The National Labor Relations Board has been hamstrung, making it harder for workers to protect themselves from abusive employers and more difficult for unions to organize. With no due process, we’ve seen one of our own building trades brothers, a father of three, abducted and illegally deported. And the attacks are just getting started.

 

As we commemorate the martyrs of the original May Day, I think of their tenacity and their refusal to back down from what the working class deserves. I celebrate how their solidarity transcends generations and lives, laborer to laborer. And how we can continue to rise together with that same power, the power of solidarity. Happy May Day, brothers and sisters — keep solidarity alive!

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The half-million members of LIUNA – the Laborers’ International Union of North America – are on the forefront of the construction industry, a powerhouse of workers who are proud to build the U.S. and Canada.