The first of May has been a significant day for workers around the world since the Haymarket massacre interrupted the fight for an 8-hour day over a century ago. This year, though, Americans claimed International Workers Day for the cause of immigrants rights. The result is being called the largest single day of protests in US history.

An estimated 1.5 million people across the contry skipped work and school and refrained from making purchases to demonstrate how immigrants matter in US economy and society. Immigrants make up 14 percent of the US workforce and account for over half of its growth in the past decade.

The protests continue months of intense opposition to the anti-immigrant HR4437, which passed in the House of Representatives in December of 2005. No parallel bill has yet passed in Senate.

Highlights: Huelga General in Los Angeles || California sees multiple 100,000+ marches || El Pueblo Unido: 700,000 march in a historic May Day in Chicago || Foros de Inmigracion in Philadelphia

Related: Democracy Now Coverage || May 1 Video Network || Videobomb 'noborders' tag || Commentary by KPFK's Sonali Kolhatkar || Portland IMC May Day Page

» IMC-US May Day 2006 coverage
» IMC-US immigrants rights coverage archive

Stories from around the country: Portland || Santa Ana || Olympia || Los Angeles || Urbana-Champaign || San Diego || Tennessee || Boston || Houston || New York || || Colorado || Milwaukee || New Mexico || Philadelphia || Carrboro and Chapel Hill || Charlotte || Santa Barbara || Worcester || St. Louis || Medford || DC || Austin || Central Coast California

Global Mayday: News and photos from around the world

Report from NJ Civil Rights Defense Committee

The first national general strike in US history occurred yesterday. It was also the largest strike of any kind in the nation's history. At least 1.2 million people participated in day-time rallies in the just the largest cites, with many hundreds of thousands more in 100 or 200 events around the country. Although not all at the rallies were taking off from work, undoubtedly many took off work and did not go to the rallies, so between one and two million workers struck yesterday. This is 10-20% of the entire immigrant workforce.

AP estimate of the biggest rallies:
400,000 in Chicago
400,000 in LA
100,000 in San Jose

55,000 in San Francisco
15,000 in Houston
30,000 across Florida

In New York City, estimates of size were all over the place, but the 3-mile long March could not have been smaller than 150,000

In certain areas and industries, the strike was almost complete.
Agricultural production across both Florida and California came to a halt. Contstuction workers in Florida struck in large numbers. In the Midwest, all three largest meatpackers war forced to close, knowing that if they did not, their workforces would have walked out anyway. In Los Angeles, the garment workers closed the huge garment center and the wholesale food workers struck as well. The independent truckers shut down the ports of Los Angles and Long Beach. Except for some of the meatpackers, none of these groups of workers were in unions.

By comparison, in all of last year, labor-union strikes involved 100,000 people.

Workers have found the US in 2006, as they have found in other places and at other times that there is another way to fight than traditional union strikes: the political mass strike. What demands for wages or working conditions alone could not do, an ambitious political demand--for the legalization of ALL immigrants--has accomplished.

At the same time, the immigrant rights movement, now clearly a movement of the immigrant section of the working class, has discovered that bold, uncompromising demands--for Equal Rights, no deportations--and bold tactics--a general strike-- can achieve unity , while timid "realistic" demands and tactics cannot.

In New York the crowd was overwhelmingly Latino, so the sort of unity achieved among various immigrant groups in Chicago has not yet come to New York. Nor were many native-born in evidence, so the unity of the peace movement and immigrant movement is also yet to be achieved. But it was a joyous and militant crowd. The sure-fire applause lines were all those calling for legalization for all immigrants and equal rights for all. Those were the demands that unified everyone and that had brought them there.

At the rally, Saleh Ajaj spoke for NJ Civil Rights Defense Committee on the demand, adopted by the May 1 coalition, to "free all detainees". He movingly spoke of being himself detained for 14 months. NJCRDC then paraded in the midst of the huge crowd with our "FREE ALL DETAINEES" banner, which got into many photos.

Of course, the local English-speaking press declined to publish any of the demands.

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