If you haven’t checked your calendar today, it’s May 1st, more commonly known as May Day. You may be celebrating this day as a festival with ancient origins with rituals like flower wreaths, poles, and bonfires to mark the beginning of summer. Or, if you’re like us at Patriotic Millionaires, you’re celebrating International Workers’ Day.
International Workers’ Day (or May Day, as we’ll call it for the rest of the piece) celebrates the achievements and progress made by workers and labor movements. The holiday has its origins in the US and the tragic 1886 “Haymarket Square Riot” in Chicago, where several people were killed by a bomb at a demonstration in support of an eight-hour workday. It’s a bit ironic then that, unlike many countries, the United States does not recognize May Day as an official public holiday. For various historical reasons, we celebrate our own version of May Day on Labor Day in September every year.
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know we spend a lot of time talking about the plight of workers and the affordability crisis. At this point, we could probably fill an entire library with all the statistics, facts, and figures we’ve shared about how high costs are and how workers’ wages aren’t rising fast enough to meet the moment.
If you’re not a regular reader of this newsletter and don’t have time to read an entire library, here are three statistics that caught our eye recently that should give you a good understanding of the plight of workers these days:
- According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, single adults in America need to earn at least $25 an hour to afford basic essentials. Today, about 45-50% of the country—that is, 66 million Americans—earn less than that.
- According to a new analysis by Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation, in 2025, CEO pay increased 20.4 times faster than worker pay in America.
- If incomes for the middle 20% of earners in the US had grown at the same rate as overall average income between 1979 and 2022, they would have made over $30,000 more in 2022. This can be called the “inequality tax.”
We’ll be the first to say that it’s critical to highlight problems in our economy, especially with how bad it’s been under the Trump administration. But we’ll also be the first to say that it’s important to highlight progress made on the path toward economic justice, no matter how big or small that progress may be. And what better day to do that than May Day?
Even though America officially celebrates Labor in September, we don’t see the need to wait four months to honor America’s workers. On that note, for this week’s Closer Look, we’ll commemorate May Day by highlighting some of the most promising worker-led developments that we’ve seen recently—some of which have our name on them! Let’s dive in.
“May Day Strong” events
Today, over 3,000 “May Day Strong” events are being held across all fifty states. In addition to various rallies and marches, people are also organizing “no school, no work, no shopping” economic blackouts, following the example of what Minneapolis did in January to protest ICE.
Along with thousands of other labor unions and national and local organizations, Patriotic Millionaires has proudly signed on as a sponsor for this effort. The demand behind these events is simple: we want a country that puts the interests of workers over those of billionaires. To do it, we need to do a lot of things, but a necessary first step is to tax the rich.
Last year, there were 1,300 May Day actions across the country, so it’s safe to say the momentum for economic justice and worker power has caught fire over the last year.
Living Wage for All Act
On Tuesday, the Living Wage for All Act was introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressmembers Delia C. Ramirez (IL-03), Jesús “Chuy” García (IL-04), Lateefah Simon (CA-12), Analilia Mejia (NJ-11), and a host of co-sponsors. Among other things, the legislation would gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour, with a faster phase-in period for large, highly profitable corporations. It would also end subminimum wages of every kind and index the minimum wage to two-thirds of the national median hourly wage. The Living Wage For All coalition, comprised of 100+ labor and social justice organizations, was instrumental in crafting the bill.
The Living Wage for All Act is a big deal. As we mentioned, single adults in America today need at least $25 an hour to afford essentials. If this bill were to become law, millions of Americans would immediately get on a fast track to earning the living wage that they deserve.
Patriotic Millionaires was proud to endorse this legislation. One of our members, Ritchie Tabachnick, also spoke at the bill’s introduction on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. In his remarks, Ritchie made the important but often neglected point that raising the minimum wage is not just good for workers but for business owners and investors like many of us. Our economy is driven by consumer demand, so we need workers to have enough money in their pockets to spend on products and services and grow the overall economy.
Below is a picture of Ritchie representing Patriotic Millionaires:
Union developments
It’s no secret that unions have been on the decline for some time now in America. But the good news is that they are now on the rise. In 2025, 16.5 million workers were represented by a union, or 11.2% of the workforce. This marked a 0.1% increase (463,000 workers) from 2024. We also have the highest number of union-represented workers in America since 2009.
Public opinion for unions is also through the roof. Over 68% of people in the US hold a positive view of unions, and that favorability carries well across age groups and political parties. People are recognizing all the good that unions can do—like boosting wages and benefits and ensuring safe working conditions—and understandably want “in.”
There have also been some notable union victories in recent months. The biggest one that caught our eye was back in February, when Volkswagen workers at a plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee ratified their first union contract through the UAW. This has been a long time coming. If you can believe it, on May Day in 2024, we highlighted these Volkswagen workers’ historic vote to become the first non-union auto plant in the South to join the UAW and the first foreign automaker in the South to unionize in history.
Of course, there is still a lot more work to do to strengthen unions. In 2025, over 50 million workers in America reported that they wanted to join a union but could not. And let’s not forget all of the attacks that the Trump administration has lodged against unions, particularly those representing federal workers.
The last bit of good news we’ll share has to do with a group that recognizes this reality and is doing something to change it. Prominent leaders at some of America’s largest unions have recently formed a new non-profit, Union Now, with the goal of increasing union density. By making it easier for people to join unions and helping new unions negotiate strong contracts with employers, organizers hope that they can take the labor movement off life support and bring it back to the powerhouse it was in the mid-20th century.
Conclusion
If you didn’t know “May Day” as the ancient start-of-summer festival, we’ll bet you know the “mayday” signal used by pilots and ship captains. You could say that we’ve been issuing a “mayday” for workers, and a big one, ever since we started this group in 2010. We don’t plan to stop until workers share in the success of the American economy.
For now, it’s nice to have another, more positive meaning to attach to the “May Day” phrase, albeit in two words instead of one. An eight-hour workday for the workers protesting in Chicago back in 1886 probably seemed like a pipe dream. But that didn’t stop them, and look where we are now. We must follow their example, and thankfully, thousands of workers across America already are. Things like a $25 minimum wage or easy-to-access union representation might seem unachievable, especially with the current administration and Congress we have on deck. But we feel confident in saying that they are not impossible to get if we stick together and keep at it.
Happy May Day!