Call to Action! Annual May Day March

On May 1st, 2015 San Antonio and many cities across the world will be taking the streets in remembrance of International Workers Day, also known as May Day. We will be marching to demand the right to organize, fair living wages and to fight for the right to migrate in the contemporary state.

Friday, May 1st at 6pm 

Plaza del Zacate/ Milam Park 

500 W. Houston 

(march ends at SWU offices 1416 E. Commerce)

May Day is a retrospective narrative dating 120 years of the labor movement. A date unifying workers, unions, and organizers to commemorate a struggle of labor, class and gender in the passage for labor rights, human rights, and the tragedy of the Haymarket Massacre of 1886 in Chicago; where police attacked workers while striking. Labor organizing voiced a demand to establish the eight-hour workday, the right to unionize, and prohibit exploitation of class and gender. Generations later, and the labor movement continues in the fight to protect these rights.

While prices for basic human needs keep rising at an unimaginable pace, low-wages for workers are disregarded by a capitalist society. For the past 26 years, Southwest Workers’ Union has organized for labor rights in South Texas. Currently, along with public school classified workers, domestic workers, and youth leaders are at the front to demand justice in their perspective workplaces.

In 2006, Southwest Workers’ Union witnessed a national retaliation towards undocumented workers. This occurrence reshaped the framework of International Workers Day in the United States by recognizing and including universal citizenship as a human, and labor right. The modern capitalist, and colonial economy is a layered structure, which exploits people of color through class, gender, age, other abilities, and a narrow aggression towards undocumented people. The effects of capitalism are detrimental to the undocumented worker and the working-class. Southwest Workers’ Union envisions a transformative economy that respects the health and dignity of the worker.

Through the Plaza del Zacate, we will march! All immigrants, all workers, all womyn, all LGBTQI, all indigenous, all youth, all unions, all community organizations...we will defend, we will fight, we will have rights, we will march on May 1st!

SWU will also be hosting a Workers Assembly on April 25 at 9am and a Know Your Rights Workshop on April 26th both events take place at The Movement Gallery, 1412 E. Commerce, where we will be running a worker photo exhibit through the month of May.

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