Bay Area Workers Defend Labor, Protest Trump on May Day

The Bay Area will be bustling with labor actions on Thursday, with thousands of workers and activists expected to take to the streets and picket lines across the region on a May Day that, for many, carries a heightened sense of urgency.

From Santa Rosa to San José, more than 50 marches and strikes are slated to take place — among thousands nationwide — many taking aim at the Trump administration’s bold efforts to fundamentally reshape American government and society.

“We want to work freely,” said Socorro Diaz, a housekeeper in Sonoma County. Diaz said she felt compelled to start organizing fellow workers, many of them immigrants, when the administration launched its sweeping immigration crackdown.

“Our rights as immigrants are human rights, and we want worker rights to be respected,” Diaz said.

Many demonstrations are being organized by May Day Strong, a national coalition of more than 160 grassroots organizations united in their opposition to the administration’s right-wing policies on everything from immigration and labor issues to health care access and education.

In San Francisco, demonstrators are planning to march in the late afternoon from City Hall to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office downtown to show “we are all together as a working class and that immigrant workers are the backbone of our economy,” said Maria Moreno, an organizer for Jobs with Justice San Francisco.

“One historic thing that we’re doing this year is marching with every union in the city,” said Moreno, predicting that many workers who have never marched before will be galvanized to show up this year. “It’s to show solidarity across the movement.”

Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley and UCSF, thousands of health care, research and technical workers are planning a one-day strike, accusing the University of California of unfair labor practices following last month’s announcement of a systemwide hiring freeze. Some 60,000 workers in the UPTE-CWA 9119 and AFSCME Local 3299 — which includes social workers, pharmacists and IT workers — are expected to walk off their jobs at all 10 UC campuses across the state — in what will be their fourth strike since November.

The two unions have negotiated unsuccessfully with the UC system for months over new contracts. Both recently filed separate complaints to state workforce regulators alleging, among other things, that UC failed to provide notice of the hiring freeze or allow the unions to bargain over it in advance.

Dan Russell, UPTE’s president and chief negotiator, and an IT worker at UC Berkeley, said the stalled contract negotiations and hiring freeze come amid a severe shortage of frontline workers at UC medical centers and other facilities.

“Our workers have seen the impacts of short staffing for years now, with clinical trials being canceled or paused, clinics closing their doors to new patients, students waiting longer and longer for appointments with therapists, patients waiting longer and longer in emergency rooms,” he said.

Russell said UC’s hiring freeze was ostensibly prompted by the Trump administration’s bid to slash billions in federal grants to universities. But, he noted, those cuts have so far been blocked by the courts.

“This is the university using ‘storm clouds’ on the horizon, even though there have not been significant financial cuts yet, as an excuse to deepen a crisis that they have created,” he said. “As a way to hoard billions in reserves and expand their market share.”

For its part, UC officials emphasized that the hiring freeze applies to future hires only and does not in any way impact the status of current employees. They also said they have consistently tried to negotiate “mutually beneficial contracts” with both unions.

“We are disappointed by the union’s continued choice of striking as a negotiation tactic,” UC said in a statement. “These strikes cost union members a full day of pay, and they cost the University system millions of dollars. This is especially harmful considering the current economic and fiscal uncertainty in higher education and nationally.”

On a brighter note, the Oakland teachers union called off its planned May Day walkout after reaching a last-minute tentative deal with the city’s school district.

In a statement, the Oakland Education Association said the district agreed to maintain contracts for 120 high school teachers whose hours would have been reduced in next year’s budget to shrink the district’s deficit.

Campus-based substitute teachers, whose roles would have been centralized after this year as part of the proposed budget cuts, will also remain at their assigned school sites under the new $2.5 million deal with the Oakland Unified School District.

“This outcome reflects the power of educators standing together against cuts harmful to our goal of retaining experienced teachers in Oakland’s hardest-to-staff classrooms,” OEA President Kampala Taiz-Rancifer said.

The averted walkout would have been the fourth Oakland teachers’ strike since 2019.

KQED’s Farida Jhabvala Romero and Katie DeBenedetti contributed reporting.