WCU May Day Rally celebrates unions, decries political attacks
On May 1, several dozen students, faculty and community members gathered beside Western Carolina University’s “Catafount” in Cullowhee for a May Day action celebrating the history of labor organizing — and demanding the rights workers have yet to be afforded.
May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, is an expression of worker solidarity in honor of those who lost their lives in the aftermath of Chicago’s Haymarket affair.
In early May 1886, workers had been on strike for an eight-hour workday and were confronted by the police at a Haymarket Square rally. A bomb was thrown and detonated by an unknown party. Authorities — without evidence — convicted eight known labor organizers, several of whom were not present at the time of the explosion. Four of the eight were hanged, one died by suicide and three were sent to prison and eventually pardoned. While May Day is recognized in many countries, the United States celebrates Labor Day in September because former President Grover Cleveland did not want Americans associating it with the Haymarket riots and workers’ political demands.
But as U.S. income inequality reaches a 60-year peak, May Day has seen a resurgence within the national consciousness. This year, a group called May Day Strong called for a May 1 boycott of school, work and shopping and created a map of over 5,000 nationwide actions.
The WCU event is listed on the site and was organized by College Democrats, Indivisible Common Ground WNC, the Revolutionary Book Club and the American Association of University Professors. These co-sponsors range in political persuasion from the College Dems’ reformist strategy to the Revolutionary Book Club’s socialist-minded vision but agree on at least one basic principle: billionaires are stealing from working-class people.
A whiteboard facing the fountain asked passersby to consider a personal question — “What labor issues matter to you?” — as rally-goers chalked the ground with messages such as “Like Saturdays? Thank unions” and “No war with Iran, peace not bombs”.
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Like the Haymarket rioters, WCU May Day speakers were driven by grievances that affected their livelihoods — through witness, relationship or experience.
Undergraduate senior and RBC General Secretary Max L. spoke about how AI is affecting students like himself.
“We need to oppose AI in higher education almost totally. There’s no way it works. It’s only led to negative outcomes for us up until now,” he said, framing the harms of its usage not in terms of academic dishonesty but rather in its intellectual impacts down the line. In other words, asking ChatGPT to churn out an essay might save time in the short term, but undermines one’s growth as a writer.
Max pivoted to affordability, explaining that he attended WCU for its low-cost tuition. Still, he said, there has been an increase in student fees every semester.
WCU AAUP President Vincent Russell said that hasn’t coincided with an inflation-rate increase in faculty wages. Meanwhile, professors are forced to teach more students.
“WCU student population has surged in the past 10 years, but the number of full-time faculty hasn’t kept up with that road,” he said.
With these demands comes fewer job protections.
“Since the 1980s, the United States has seen a rapid decrease in the number of tenured and tenure track faculty. More than 70% of faculty at colleges and universities today are non-tenured,” he added.
Tenure protects faculty from being terminated for personal beliefs or actions, and according to AAUP, is meant to “safeguard academic freedom.” Being stripped of tenure means one might become vulnerable to politically motivated scrutiny that can threaten employment status. Recently, however, multiple states have restricted faculty tenure and reduced its protections.
“Fifty-four faculty were suspended or terminated since September 2025 in efforts to control their speech, a historic attack on faculty that we didn’t even see in the first three years of the McCarthy era in the United States,” said Russell.
“And that’s just happened in the last six months.”
WCU student Trevor Gates discussed a personal barrier to accessing quality higher education — disability status. Gates is blind and said, in academic settings, people with disabilities are often excluded and ignored. He urged the crowd to consider how ableism exists within community organizing spaces, especially as some states are attempting to scrap a portion of Section 504, a policy foundational to the Americans with Disabilities Act, which allows disabled individuals to seek community services as an alternative to institutionalization.
“People with disabilities are connected to everything. So, there is no true progress without us,” he said.
Indivisible WNC founding member Nilofer Couture addressed the April 29 U.S. Supreme Court ruling to overturn a cornerstone 1965 act that prohibited racially discriminatory voting practices.
“Two days ago, six unelected justices in the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, the law written in the blood of the civil rights movement. 6-3. Party lines. No apology. They didn’t protect your vote. They came for it,” she said.
Couture drew parallels to the shuttering of WCU’s on-campus early voting site by the Republican-controlled Jackson County Board of Elections in a 3-2 vote on party lines. Now, students must commute to a location over a mile off campus that can only be safely accessed by car. She isn’t directly impacted by this closure but is standing in solidarity with those who are.
“We really want to [work with students at Western], because they’re the ones that are so affected by what’s going to happen in this country, but also because their right to vote on campus has been denied,” she told The Smoky Mountain News.
“The first day of early voting, I actually marched with them to their [off campus] early voting location,” she recounted.
Expressions of solidarity were sprinkled into other statements. For example, Max lamented the fact that Aramark owns nearly every on-campus food and drink establishment. The company serves correctional facilities and ICE detention centers, where it has been accused of grave food safety violations. In some facilities, food is prepared and packaged through prison labor.
“Everyone on this campus understands the evil of Aramark … they are being paid to starve immigrants in immigration detention facilities. We know of the conditions of their food. We know that there are maggots, and we know that Aramark are the ones who are providing the food with the maggots in it,” he said.
Another speaker, community health nurse James Gabriel, informed rallygoers of the pain and horror he continues to witness.
“I stand here today because in the last 10 years, I have watched the wholesale destruction of our community health systems, and it’s something that’s actually, literally killing us,” he said.
Though all speakers addressed connected, systems-wide issues, their proposed solutions reflected political differences among co-sponsors. Some had explicit demands and pushed for better on-the-ground organizing, while others thought electoral politics could remedy the present moment.
Russell, for example, recited the talking points of his union.
“We demand dignified and secure work for faculty that ends pr ecarity and contingency. We demand protections for academic freedom and freedom of expression and an end to bullying faculty and students. We demand the immediate suspension of ICE activities on col lege campuses and in our communities across this country, and we demand that the government fund education, not war and deportation,” he said.
Max believed power was best built — and progress best sustained — by community and student organizing.
“What I do seek to do is build an organization that can do something, build an organization with a legacy that will create student socialist leaders that will change this system,” he said.
But State Senate Democratic candidate Tom Downing (District 50), acknowledging the right to free and fair elections has come increasingly under attack, described casting a ballot as a crucial, change-making action.
“Check your registration every month. Check your registration every month … and for God’s sake, just go and vote,” he said.
Gabriel similarly framed change as something achieved through long-standing institutions. “We have to make collective action … in the court of public opinion, in the courts of law and at the ballot box. Like all the people in front of me have said, if you’re not registered to vote, get registered. If you have a problem getting out to vote, let one of us know. We will make sure that you get to the polls,” he said.
But just as the four groups collaborated to make May Day happen, so too did Max close out with a call for unity between liberal and socialist political contingents.
“I call for people to join Indivisible, broad organizations that will connect you with your community in a deeper sense. You may not always agree with them, but hey, they’re the people you have to work with. They’re the people who have the time to get out there and organize protests,” he said.
“Those people are invaluable, so we better get them on our side.”
