Tomorrow’s May Day demonstrations have a special link to education. Jeff Bryant reports for The Progressive.
Crucially, a significant number of May Day events will be organized under the banner of Bargaining for the Common Good, a labor negotiation strategy in which unions partner with community organizations to make demands that go far beyond union members’ wages and benefits to include social justice issues such as affordable housing, access to good quality health care, immigrant rights, and environmental concerns. This approach has served as a unifying idea behind successful teacher labor actions in Chicago, St. Paul, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.
“We see this as an opportunity for hundreds of thousands to say there is a common cause to defend labor, immigrant, and civil rights, and then go on the offense,” Potter says. “We don’t want to go back to what was. We don’t want a country where only half the people have access to affordable health care, where immigrants live in constant fear, where school children are segregated, and where workers don’t have the right to organize.”
Organizing with the strategy of Bargaining for the Common Good also allows organizers to raise the prominence of public education, and other social justice issues, in the anti-Trump movement After all, public education, which touches nearly every American who either has attended public schools, enrolled their children in public schools, or paid taxes to support public schools, is a highly intersectional issue that can unite the various factions that oppose the MAGA agenda.
Indeed, the two national teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, are helping to organize the May First actions. So is the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), whose National Coalition director, Moira Kaleida, says May Day 2025 is an opportunity for progressive groups of all kinds to learn from each other and collaborate.
Within the labor rights arena, Kaleida explains, public education intersects most obviously with the rights of working educators and other school staff. But by using the Bargaining for the Common Good approach, education and labor organizers can make connections among the many progressive factions present in their communities.
“There has been a lot of work done nationwide to show what labor and community coalitions can look like,” she says, “and the idea is getting more recognition from labor and political leaders.”
For example, Kaleida says the synergy between education and immigrant rights organizing has played a role in resistance efforts in both Los Angeles and upstate New York, where schools and communities worked together to protect the rights of immigrants when Trump’s immigration officials threatened undocumented students and their parents. A similar collaboration contributed to the recent successful opposition to legislation drafted in Tennessee that would have challenged the Constitutional right of immigrant students to attend public schools.
“In all of these cases,” Kaleida says, “educators are on the frontline to protect the rights of immigrant children.”