For generations, the wealthy in this country have done everything in their power to crush working-class movements and bury the truth about who really built this country. From the blood-soaked picket lines of the nineteenth century to the red-baiting and assassinations of the twentieth, from the union-busting consultants of today to the billion-dollar propaganda machines that flood our airwaves, the story is always the same. When working-class people start standing up, the people on top do everything they can to shut us down.

That’s why May Day—International Workers’ Day—matters. It’s our holiday. It was born out of the fight for the eight-hour workday, a demand that workers bled and died for right here in the United States. But while the rest of the world honors this history every May 1, in the country where the fight began, we’re taught to forget. Instead of parades and strikes, we get silence. Instead of pride, we get erasure.

The corporate class doesn’t just want to exploit us. They want us to forget that we ever fought back. They want us to believe that there is no alternative to the way things are—no path to dignity, no hope of power. They want to keep us divided, distracted, and defeated. And for too long, they’ve succeeded.

In fact, they’ve succeeded with running the same anti-union playbook for over a century. One of their oldest—and most effective—tools is something called the Mohawk Valley Formula. Developed in the 1930s, this strategy was designed to crush union drives through a combination of fear, disinformation, and manufactured crises. Paint union organizers as dangerous outsiders, frame strikes as threats to the community, flood the media with lies about the union’s motives, and then send in the cops—or worse.¹

As Noam Chomsky put it, the basic idea is to present a picture of the world that looks kind of like this:

There’s “us,” a big happy family in the community . . . and then there are those “bad guys”—the union organizers—trying to destroy all these wonderful things we have.”²

This strategy didn’t stay in the 1930s. It’s alive and well today. When Starbucks workers organize, they’re told they’re betraying their “store family.” When teachers strike, the corporate media warns that students and parents will suffer. When auto workers demand fair wages, we’re told we’re threatening the entire economy. Same playbook, different century.

May Day—International Workers’ Day—matters. It’s our holiday.

But the Mohawk Valley Formula isn’t just about stopping strikes and organizing drives. It’s about shaping public opinion—convincing everyday people that the real threat to their well-being isn’t the billionaire class squeezing every last drop of profit from their labor. It’s the people fighting back.

As Australian scholar Alex Carey put it, “The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”³ Corporate America has built what Carey calls “the largest and most sophisticated propaganda system in history.”

It’s a system designed to make you forget you’re part of a class, part of a struggle, part of a fight. It’s designed to convince you that your coworkers are your competition, that poverty is your fault, and that billionaires are your saviors. Possibly the greatest accomplishment of this system is that many working-class people have been blinded to even seeing that it exists, despite the fact it is all around us.

“Rather than continuing to rely on kidnapping, torture, murder, and violence to control the public,” Carey writes, “the U.S. business elite chose to rely on ‘corrupting the electorate’ through the use of techniques for manipulating public opinion—that is, propaganda.”

In this system, May Day had to go. It was too dangerous. It reminded people that workers built this country. It reminded people that solidarity works. So, they buried it. They gave us Labor Day instead—a sanitized, BBQ-and-sales-version of our real holiday, stripped of its militant roots.

But that, too, is starting to change.

In 2023, the United Auto Workers (UAW) went on strike not just to win record contracts—which we did—but to change the balance of power in this country. And now, we’re doing something even bigger. We’re working with unions across the country to align our contract expirations, to build toward a historic moment of collective action on May Day, 2028.

This is the moment to go on the offensive.

We’re not doing this because it sounds good in a speech. We’re doing this because we believe in the power of working people. We believe that we can reclaim our history and reclaim our future. We believe that May Day can once again be a rallying cry—a line in the sand between the billionaire class and the rest of us.

Let’s be clear about who our enemy is. It’s not immigrants. It’s not queer people. It’s not college students. It’s not teachers or journalists or healthcare workers. Our enemy is the billionaire class—the corporate executives and Wall Street investors who profit off our poverty, who bust our unions, who offshore our jobs, who poison our communities, and who have spent the last century trying to erase every memory of working-class power in this country.

This is the moment to go on the offensive. To fight not just for better wages, but for a better world. To remind people that the working class is the majority in this country, and when we stand up, we can move mountains.

We believe that May Day can once again be a rallying cry—a line in the sand between the billionaire class and the rest of us.

We know what happens when workers stand up together. It changes what people believe is possible. When the UAW struck the Big Three automakers in 2023, we heard from workers all over the country who were inspired to start organizing their own workplaces. That’s what movement moments do—they tear open the fabric of what people thought was permanent, and they let new possibilities flood in.

May Day 2028 can be that kind of moment. If we do this right, it won’t just be about what happens at the bargaining table. It will be about what happens in coffee shops and classrooms and warehouses and hospitals across this country. It will be about millions of working people realizing that they don’t have to take it anymore. That they can join a union. That they can stand up. That they have power.

But that won’t happen by accident. It will take organizing. It will take strategy. It will take courage. It will take all of us.

Because the bosses have always had a plan. And we know what it looks like. As sociologist Robert Lynd warned the Congress of Industrial Organizations all the way back in 1946, the greatest danger wasn’t just propaganda in the workplace—it was the attempt by business “to capture—body and breeches, mind and soul—the local community.”⁴

That’s what the ruling class has done. They’ve used their immense wealth to capture our stories, our history, our holidays. And now it’s time we take them back.

We are laying the groundwork today to reclaim May Day. To make it a day when the working class stands tall and fights back. To use our collective power to win not just better contracts, but a better future.

So let the billionaire class be afraid. Let the union-busters and the pundits and the politicians who serve the wealthy try to stop us. We’ve seen this before. We know their playbook. But this time, we’re writing our own. We are reclaiming May Day. And we are just getting started.