Los Angeles on May Day: Workers gear up to fight back

Thousands participated in a beautiful, multinational May Day commemoration in downtown Los Angeles on May 1. 

Beginning with a rally at the corner of Broadway and Olympic, unionists, immigrant rights fighters, socialists, environmentalists and activists fighting racist police brutality took every lane of one of the busiest thoroughfares on their northbound route to Grand Park. 

The march was initiated by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) and numerous L.A. trade unions. The signs and banners, consistent with the tradition of this international holiday, called out the important issues in the global working-class struggle. 

After long decades of suppression, it was a resurgence of the immigrant rights movement that fueled a mega-march on May 1, 2006, and brought May Day to the attention of hundreds of thousands of people once again. Though interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the size and breadth of this year’s march shows that was not an aberration. 

Workers and oppressed people are geared up for a fightback to recoup all that was lost or delayed by the billionaires who have exploited and elongated the deadly pandemic. 

SLL photos: Scott Scheffer