Announcing The Daily Bread!
Welcome to the Daily Bread, a new dispatch for the labor movement.
Welcome to the Daily Bread, a new dispatch for the labor movement.
This moment in history presents us with world-historic challenges: right-wing control of Washington, attacks on government workers and their right to a union, threats to political speech, economic uncertainty, and an onslaught of anti-immigrant actions.
It also presents us with an opportunity. Workers across different regions and industries as well as ideologies and identities can beat back these threats. But it’s going to require strategic thinking and solidarity to meet the moment.
That’s what inspired the Daily Bread. It’s a newsletter for union members and allies across the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. It will compile the clips you need to be reading as well as periodic analysis about points of leverage where labor can come together and take action.
A newsletter can’t build a new labor movement. But it might play a part in getting us all on the same page about what the conditions are, and how we can fight back. Write to m.cunninghamcook@gmail.com with clips you’d like included, ideas you’d like explored, or actions that other union members can take.
Solidarity,
The Daily Bread
Chicago Teachers Union-educated students on May Day 2025
May 1 On Our Minds…
The Daily Bread caught up with Jackson Potter, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, which played a major role in yesterday’s May Day actions. Hundreds of thousands of union members and allies across over 800 U.S. cities and towns participated. This was the labor movement’s first major response in the streets to Trump’s second term with the attendant rise in fascism and massive assaults on the labor movement.
“We’re in a movement moment,” Potter said. He pointed to the critical role played by a CTU-led convening on March 19 and 20 in Chicago. At that convening, he said, there were 250 reps from unions across 25 states. They set a goal of May Day protests in 100 cities. “Now we’re at 850 cities in 50 states,” he said. “That exponential growth doesn’t happen unless we have a movement in the making.”
Potter told us that it’s the conditions on the ground that make the moment ripe for mobilization. “The greatest motivator has been Trump’s assault on working families, immigrant families, and people of color, which is a product of the billionaire takeover of the government. It’s very clear they want to destroy the little we have. While we want Medicare for All, they’re pushing to eliminate Medicaid for some.” That mobilization is coming from the working class, as evidenced by the union-led May Day protests. May Day is also known as International Workers Day, and honors the Haymarket martyrs who were executed in the wake of the 1886 demonstration for the eight-hour day in Chicago. “The working class is standing up,” Potter said. “We have people calling off of work to march. We can shut it down if they continue going in this direction.”
The Daily Bread asked Potter to discuss the CTU’s role in fostering the fightback spirit of yesterday’s marches. After over fifteen years of non-stop organizing, the CTU just won a transformative contract that mandates major investments in the school’s Chicago’s children deserve—this in the city that effectively launched the modern neoliberal education reform movement.
“I think we have experienced the folly of privatization, of austerity, of attacking public goods and services and accommodations,” Potter said. “We built our union and our movement back up from what had been destroyed and prevented a calamity of epic proportions like what happened to New Orleans’ public schools” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “We’ve struck three times in Chicago Public Schools, in 2012, 2016, and the 11 days in 2019, and then we’ve had six charter school strikes. Those struggles taught us what was possible, how we could work to stop racist school closures and to ensure that schools had librarians, social workers and nurses—and really address an educational apartheid system that has given more resources to wealthier and whiter students in this city and nationwide and less to Black and Brown low-income students. This allowed us to win the first elected school board in Chicago history, to win back bargaining rights we lost in 1995, to be the first state to eliminate a voucher program at the state level. We’ve shown what it takes to reverse engineer what DOGE is trying to implement nationally.”
“Instead of corporate tyranny that profits at the expense of the public we are defending the public good. That’s what the resistance needs to be doing nationally,” he said. Potter ended by reiterating the call for unions to line up their contracts for the spring of 2028. “The United Auto Workers call for a general strike in 2028 is not just a good idea, it’s probably a necessity as a way to prevent autocracy and liquidation of union power.” The CTU’s contract expires in June 2028.
News and Views
International May Day Demonstrations Protest Trumpism
White House Rally: “Worker Rights, Immigrant Rights.”
Shawn Fain: May Day Is a Day for Strikes
ANALYSIS: In First 100 Days of Trump, 121,000 Federal Workers Were Cut or Faced Layoffs
Tesla Board Reportedly Sought to Replace Musk
NLRB Officer Rejects Whole Foods Request to Overturn Union Vote
To The North…
Canada Post Workers Could Strike Again Soon. Here's Why.
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