On Friday, more than 3,000 May Day protests will take place across the United States – more than double last year’s number. Workers, students and families are calling for a strike: no school, no work, no shopping, and an end to billionaire rule. I’m headed to the streets with members of my own union, the United Auto Workers, in New York City.

Americans are fed up – and not just with Donald Trump. People are angry at a Democratic party establishment that has abandoned the working class, that treated the labor movement like a turnout machine instead of the pillar of democracy it is, that funded a genocide in Gaza while ignoring a cost of living crisis, and that took its own base so completely for granted that it pushed millions out of the political process entirely.

History tells us not to be surprised. One hundred and forty years ago, workers across this country walked off the job with a single demand: an eight-hour workday. It sounds modest now. At the time it was so radical that it provoked riots, mass demonstrations, and the execution of union organizers at Haymarket Square in Chicago. The people who fought for that demand faced a robber baron class – JP Morgan, Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel – that had bought the government, militarized the police, and was perfectly willing to let workers die to protect their profits. There was no political establishment coming to save them. They won because they organized, sacrificed and refused to go home.

The conditions today are not so different. A new oligarchy is waging this same class war. Elon Musk dismantled the federal agencies that protect workers. Jeff Bezos is looking to raise $100bn to accelerate automation in manufacturing. Private equity is gutting our hospitals and our pensions. And the Democratic party’s answer has been to ask for our votes while delivering neither justice nor relief.

We can’t wait for the establishment to catch up. As the United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain put it: “It’s time to decide what kind of a world we want to live in. And it’s time to decide what we are willing to do to get there.”

My union taught me what it takes. I worked low-wage jobs my whole life until I was hired into a unionized shop at Columbia University. Walking into my first union meeting – a room full of workers I’d never met, from all over the university, doing all kinds of different jobs, trying to figure out together what we deserved and what we could demand – I felt for the first time in my working life that I wasn’t alone. My union gave me wages, benefits, dignity and control over my life. And it taught me how to recognize in every single person around me their political power and potential. That’s not something a politician hands you. It’s something you build together.

I’ve seen what happens when people believe that. Last November, more than 2 million people voted for mayor in New York City – the highest turnout since 1969, and nearly double the 2021 figure. And they turned out to elect Zohran Mamdani: a Democratic socialist who campaigned on the idea that our city should be livable for the working people who make it run. More than 100,000 volunteers canvassed, made calls, and talked to our neighbors about the world we deserve. When I knocked on one woman’s door, she told me it was the first time anyone had ever knocked on her door to talk about politics. That’s what it looks like when working people stop watching from the sidelines and start acting like the city belongs to us – because it does. I’m proud to have Mamdani’s endorsement as I fight to take that same movement to Congress.

May Day has always been both beautiful and devastating. It is a reminder of how high the stakes are and what people have been willing to sacrifice for a simple vision: a dignified life. Not just stable housing, healthcare, and good benefits – but the good life. Time off, time with friends and family, the ability to feel powerful in our daily lives.

The UAW has already set its contracts to expire at midnight on 30 April 2028 – May Day – and are calling on unions across the country to do the same. Workers aren’t waiting to be saved. We’re already preparing for a general strike, for a presidential election, for a chance to take this country back from both the fascists and the establishment that let them in.

The eight-hour day felt impossible until workers made it inevitable. We’ve been here before. We can decide how this ends – if we organize.

• Claire Valdez is a New York state assemblymember, union organizer, and Democratic socialist running for Congress