The Importance of Rallies and Protests, part 2: Labor Day 2025 Edition

I do like these signs! Photo: John Barrett 

I’ve mentioned before that rallies, gatherings, marches, and protests are always more than they appear to be at first sight. While they very often are focused on a theme or cause, it is counterintuitive, perhaps, to say that is all they are about.

Yesterday’s Labor Day March, put together by 50501 Houston and Houston Coalition, was comprised of several hundred people who marched two and a half miles through one of the chi-chi retail districts in the country, Houston’s famed Galleria, through Highland Village to conclude at Lamar High School, located in River Oaks, where most of the one-percent reside in the metro area.

The group met at the Hines Waterwall as the result of a last-minute change, but somehow, this route made a world of sense. We marched for workers’ rights and this includes fair wages, paid time off, insurance, better work/life balance and in general, just better working conditions for all. It wasn’t lost on anyone that almost all the businesses we passed were open, and that Labor Day just meant "a holiday that you will labor on.” 

No doubt, some folks would say that they didn’t mind; that they were getting overtime for working on a holiday or that they had nothing else to do, so why not go in? But all of that reflects and belies the state of labor relations in the United States. People have to work because they are cogs in the machine that generates capital and profit shares for everyone but the worker. 

Again, some might retort that - providing we are fools enough to subscribe to Reaganomics - if the profit margins are larger, wages will go up. This is patently false. Starbucks’ new CEO has made 6,666% more than a barista, the largest wealth disparity yet, according to Standard and Poor. Additionally, Starbucks  is renowned for its union busting tactics and in some ways is emblematic of precisely why Labor Day is a cruel joke for most working Americans.

This Labor Day, the thousand or so protests across the country are freighted with additional import: with the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office, we have seen the greatest transfer of wealth in the shortest amount of time, as we see our rights to health, education, expression, and more rolled back, if not obliterated. You can be sure that. there were plenty of chants about removing Trump and blocking ICE and more.

Thus, from a purely operational perspective, the march entailed more than simply airing slogans about labor. Increasingly, we as organizers and protesters, are aware of the web fo interconnected issues that need to be addressed in order to meet the challenge of the country’s shift toward authoritarianism. Many of us are students of history and economics and it is, for some, jarring that the slide has happened so quickly. 

For others, not so much. I felt the inevitability of this moment when Ronald Reagan assumed office and began his attack on the country with his callous, ignorant spate of deregulation and his performative tapping into the electorate’s  angst by declaring that “government is the problem.” This was reinforced when Newt Gingrich appeared on the scene and heralded the swing to an even more aggressive form of conservatism that turned George H.W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” on its head, not that it ever was truly “compassionate.”

Whenever the tide has turned and something like a progressive agenda (really, it’s often just a center-left turn) is enacted, my sense is that it is not going to last. The Republicans have proven, since at least, 1980, if not as far back as the fifties when McCarthy, Buckley and. “Movement Conservatism” began to rear its head, to be venal greed heads, to borrow Hunter S. Thompson’s term. They’ve only gotten worse as the decades roll on, and we’ve seen the GOP metamorphose into the fascist organization it is with the acceptance into its ranks and its manipulation of the Tea Party initially and the more recent Make America Great Again movement.

The party weaponized the aggrieved nature of the people who supported these movements, capitalized on their anger at their socioeconomic lot, often in southern - but not exclusively - states, and turned them into significant players in the American political landscape to use them for the disruption and destabilization they party higher-ups needed to leverage their hold on government. They’ve had help, of course, as is well-known, but the point is that as Americans as a whole begin to wake up to being frogs in a slowly heating up pan of hot water, the chickens are coming home to roost.

To say that these are uncertain times, is almost cliche. But we do; and let’s be honest that, unless everyone feels the same urgency and overcomes their inertia, the republic is going to be gone for generations to come. As it is, enough damage has been done to the social safety net, such as it was, that. It may be decades before. It is restored to anything reasonably functional. 

We are also living at that critical inflection point where the federal government is weaponizing troops against targeted cities. First, it was Washington, DC and as of today, Chicago, Illinois. This is why we march. This is why we rally, knock on doors, make phone calls, sign petitions, make speeches, and write.

To come back to Houston, one element that was readily apparent was the presence of a massive amount of Houston Police. Neil Aquino pointed out that this deployment was costing us taxpayers dearly. There were dozens of vehicles, scores of individual officers, a couple of dozen horseback police, all of which it felt to me, you could apportion ten marchers to one cop, with little or no exaggeration. As Neil pointed out, the next time your neighborhood pool or library is closed or the next time garbage isn’t picked up, let this misallocation of funds come to mind. These officers were all on overtime pay and there are a couple of things to bear in mind about how significant this is*.(1)

One is that according to the Houston City Council, Budget and Fiscal Affairs Committee, police overtime has exceeded the city’s budget for the last ten years with the gap reaching record highs since FY 2024. The other is that the city’s FY2025 monthly spending is outpacing the budget every month.(2)

Let this sink in. Additionally, and not tangentially, ICE has touted the highest number of arrests in Houston, and specifics remain somewhat hazy.(3) Nevertheless, we do know that there were massive sweeps earlier in the year and this past spring, but the mere presence of ICE in one of the most diverse cities in the nation casts a chilling pall over the city and is a haunting reflection of where we are as a nation.

Once we arrived at Lamar High School, we heard from educators who castigated the Texas Department of Education for what it has done to Houston schools and the ridiculous book bans (not to mention the ludicrous filing of a non-fiction book about the Wapanoag nation under “fiction”!); we heard from Immigrating Youth Texas about the challenges facing immigrant children who are most at risk for slipping between the cracks and left with few, if any resources. IWT is working to open the first self-sustaining shelter in Texas in 2026, for displaced youth.(4) Neil Aquino spoke, as well, and I recommend reading his post on The Houston Democracy Project’s blog. (5) We also heard from a union organizer addressing the walk-out and strike at the Hilton downtown for its refusal to meet with organizers and come to the bargaining table, a result of its treatment of its immigrant employees. We also heard an impassioned plea for transgender rights from Eve, a transwoman who emphasized the harm that the stripping away of medical care and human rights from trans people causes. 

As ever, I have to mention that a rally, a protest, a march is where people’s involvement can and should start; it’s where you meet organizers and likeminded people and where a sense of community is fostered that can be expanded outward across the various groups and causes they represent. What helps one, helps all.

Lastly, it’s not about the numbers. Sure, at No Kings, we had an estimated 15,000. Here, a few hundred. But what counts is how galvanized people are to be involved, to step up and do the work.

Note

*Also worth questioning is on whose side will the police be if or when the time comes to put down a peaceful gathering? The Labor Day March was a uniformly peaceful and dare I say, joyous, occasion. Past rallies and marches at City Hall and downtown that I’ve attended were likewise peaceful and without incident and the HPD presence was a fraction of what turned out Monday.

Footnotes/Further reading

1. Houston City Council, Budget and Fiscal Affairs. https://www.houstontx.gov/council/committees/bfacommittee/20250401/overtime-analysis.pdf 
2. ibid.
3. Various sources: https://www.fox4news.com/news/texas-ice-raid-tracker-cities-dallas-austin-houston-jan-28; https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/trending/article/houston-ice-arrest-fiel-protest-20371707.php; https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/how-many-ice-agents-are-there-in-houston-what-to-know-about-local-immigration-enforcement/ar-AA1yYdnq; ICE; This is here because you need to see their sites to get a feel for the propaganda they’re putting out. There are few avenues to determine accuracy in their reporting, much of which strikes me as extravagant: https://www.ice.gov/newsroom
4. Immigrating Youth Texas. https://immigratingyouthtexas.com/about-iyt
5. Aquino, Neil. Houston Democracy Project in Chronicle About Democracy March & HPD. Houston Democracy Project. September 2, 2025. https://www.neilaquino.com/houston-democracy-project-blog/houston-democracy-project-in-chronicle-about-democracy-march-hpd

Now that you’ve read through all this, here’s a treat: a whole page of videos and photos which I hope capture some of the spirit of the march.