The rally at SFO, which demanded U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers out of the city, was led by the airport’s passenger service workers, who are preparing for a Board of Supervisors hearing next week over low wages.
“They move bags, they assist the elderly, disabled passengers, they clean airport cabins … and I was there to stand with them in solidarity as they push for a new contract,” Becker said. “But also I think it’s part of a larger moment today on International Workers’ Day to say that one job should be enough here in the Bay Area. Unfortunately, for many workers, that’s not the case.”
SFO was also the site of a high-profile altercation with ICE last month in which officers forcefully detained a woman and her young child.
The demonstrators who were detained and being processed Friday afternoon appear to have been among a group blocking the street outside the airport’s International Terminal.
“It’s a good day for the movement,” Sanjay Garla, first vice president at SEIU United Service Workers West, said as he was escorted through the terminal by police. “ICE out of SFO!”
San Francisco Civic Center
At 2 p.m., Mission Action, a group that advocates for the city’s immigrant and low-income residents, held a rally at Civic Center, which was followed by a march to Embarcadero Plaza.
“We’re walking out of our schools because we need to show up and be there for the people — because we are the people,” said Max Navarro Serrano, a high school student at Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts. “We have the power, not the f— billionaires.”
Among the May Day Coalition’s demands are that leaders support a ballot measure that would impose a one-time, 5% tax on the assets of California’s roughly 200 billionaires, which qualified for the November ballot this week.
San José
In East San José, local and state labor groups joined hundreds of progressive activists at a rally at Story and King roads.
Among the crowd was Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, who directly called out Big Tech for trying to “buy elections” in San José.
“It is the epicenter of what we’re fighting here, when we say ‘Workers over billionaires.’ We’re going to fight back and we’re going to do it right here on their turf,” she said.
Oakland
Hundreds rallied and marched from Fruitvale Plaza through the East Oakland neighborhood to show solidarity with immigrant workers. Oakland resident Andrea Byers held a sign that said: “I support my immigrant neighbors.”
“I support my immigrant neighbors because my immigrant neighbors support me, and support this economy,” Byers said. “It’s what our economy has always been based on.”
Melissa Guzman Garcia, an associate Ethnic Studies professor at San Francisco State University, said she came to Oakland alongside some students and colleagues to remind herself that “there are so many things to fight for in this country, even when it feels like so many things are going wrong.”
“It’s nice to see so many people, so many different generations showing up to Fruitvale, Oakland, and coming here to celebrate together,” Guzman Garcia said.
May Day, or International Workers’ Day, is a public holiday honoring labor in many countries.
In the Bay Area, the first May Day was celebrated in 1890 in Emeryville’s Shellmound Park, organized by carpenters and joiners unions, according to activist historians Left in the Bay. The labor celebrations overlapped with the festival celebrating the change of the seasons, commemorated throughout the northern hemisphere.
That May Day used to be a public holiday in San Francisco for schoolchildren, who danced around May Poles and were given free milk and cookies in city parks.
KQED’s María Fernanda Bernal,Farida Jhabvala Romero, Sydney Johnson, Daisy Nguyen and Joseph Geha contributed to this report.
