What follows is the call to action for 2016 May Day actions in the Triangle – this statement became the basis for the establishing the Triangle May Day Unity Coalition and the Triangle People’s Assembly that developed from these actions.
Over the last year, workers and community organizations in North Carolina have led campaigns to challenge racism, sexism, LGBTQ oppression, and worker exploitation:</p>
- the Fight for $15 and a union for fast food, childcare, home care, municipal, and ALL workers
- demanding a “People’s Budget” led by UE 150, the NC Public Sector Union
- student/worker solidarity and occupation of the administration building at Duke University
- winning an union for adjunct faculty at Duke
- solidarity pickets with immigrants workers whose wages were stolen by the Marriott hotel
- campaigns to stop ICE raids and deportations in immigrant communities
- the ongoing campaign for farmworker justice targeting Reynolds American Tobacco
- bold campaigns to end the war on Black America by demanding accountability for police murders and jailhouse deaths
- militant QTPOC-led actions to oppose the anti-trans anti-worker HB2.
On May 2, 2016 we organized a mass demonstration in Durham to center working-class struggles and the multi-racial, multi-gendered, and multinational working class movement.
The continued mistreatment of workers and working class people must be met with resistance and demands coupled with action. Without justice, there is no peace. We stand in solidarity with international movements to resist worker oppression, imperialism, racism, and Islamophobia. Islamophobia is product of US wars and occupations abroad, and surveillance/institutional repression in the USA. The US South is home to more than 50% military bases in the USA. US law enforcement has entrapped Muslims throughout the country, including in local communities like Raleigh.
We will continue stand opposed to anti-worker, anti-environment, so-called free trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership. We believe that intersecting oppressions of the working class — transphobia, homophobia, racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, ethnocentrism and plain bigotry– must be fought alongside and within the class struggle.
The economy of the U.S. South was built on theft of native land, genocide of native peoples, and centuries of the 
enslavement of Black people kidnapped from the African continent. Vestiges of this history remain intact today in “right-to-work laws,” the Jim Crow-era ban on collective bargaining for public workers, poverty wages, and the relentless attacks on workers and oppressed peoples’ ability to organize.
Now more than ever, we must build unions, workplace organizations, and other institutions to fight back and build a new economy that serves the needs of the 99%, not the 1%.
People are rising up and fighting back, from the #BlackLivesMatter movement against racist mass incarceration and police murders to the #Not1More movement and fight to end raids and deportations of immigrant families. From the massive statewide uprising against HB2’s attacks on the LGBTQ community to the Southern Workers Assembly and the work to build a rank-and-file workers’ movement that is united with the broader social movements in the U.S. South. In spite of daily attacks, our movements have made this clear: an injury to one is an injury to all!
We will continue to send a message to the masses and the powers that be, that we are ready, and we are coming. We carry the spirit of Che Guevara, Fannie Lou Hamer, Assata Shakur, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Mother Jones, and all of those who stood for worker’s rights on the frontlines of the class struggle and struggle against all oppression.
Signed:
Durham Solidarity Center
Durham for All
Black Workers for Justice
UE 150 Public Sector Workers Union
Durham Beyond Policing
Duke Students and Workers in Solidarity
Raise Up for $15
Muslims for Social Justice
Si a las licensias
El Pueblo
Southern Vision Alliance
Faculty Forward Network
Triangle Green Party
Jewish Voices for Peace
ICE Out of NC
Witness for Peace – SE Chapter
Southeast Immigrants Rights Network
Triangle SURJ (Standing Up for Racial Justice)
Workers World Party