May Day 2026 message from IRLE Director Toby Higbie

May 1, 2026

Dear IRLE Community,

To Understand Solidarity, You Really Ought to Experience It

Millions of people across the globe will celebrate International Workers Day this Friday, May 1st. It’s a tradition that dates to 1886 when workers across the U.S. carried the demand for an eight-hour workday into the streets, and for Angelenos this year marks the 20th anniversary of a massive protest wave to defend the rights of immigrant workers.

As we do every year, students, faculty, and staff from UCLA’s Labor Studies Department, Labor Center, and the IRLE will join the march. For some, it will be their first experience of a large, nonviolent demonstration. They will see the great diversity of social movements in Los Angeles on full display. Labor unions, worker centers, community organizations, and political factions each marching together with their colorful banners. On any given day, these groups may not see eye-to-eye, but on May Day they move together in what can be a very profound expression of common purpose. You can learn a lot about worker rights in a classroom, but to fully understand the power of solidarity and the challenge of sustaining it, there is nothing quite like the experience of a May Day march.

During the first May Day 140 years ago, a popular slogan demanded, “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, and 8 hours for what we will.” It tells us that the clash between employers and workers was not only over pay, but also over time, that most precious commodity. It would be more than fifty years before the 8-hour workday and 40-hour work week were written into federal law. That created the expectation, although not the universal reality, of time off over the weekend to rest, to be with friends and family, or to do “what we will.” For many labor advocates of the early 20th century, the 8-hour day was just a starting point. Some called for a 4-hour workday as a way to combat unemployment–with the same wages as earned in 8 hours, of course.

The slogans for May Day 2026, like those of 1886, blend the practical and the aspirational. They invoke intersecting challenges of war and peace, inequalities of race, gender, and wealth, climate change, and the preservation of democracy all of which require thoughtful collective responses. Solo el pueblo (only the people), they say, can transform these aspirations into reality.

Hope to see you there,

Toby Higbie

Director, UCLA IRLE

Professor of History and Labor Studies

Tobias Higbie is a labor historian, professor of history and labor studies and directs the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE), a multi unit research center that advances labor research and education for workplace justice through the work of its units — the UCLA Labor Center, Labor Studies, the Labor Occupational Safety (LOSH) and Health Program and the Human Resources Round Table (HARRT).