WILMINGTON — At a Mayday potluck in Wilmington, local activists turned a day of global labor protest into a gathering for economic resistance, urging residents to boycott major corporations and support local businesses at a May 1 event.
Purposefully held on Mayday, a.k.a. International Worker’s Day, around 50 attendees attended to honor workers who fought for labor rights and protest labor exploitation and economic inequality. Across the country, different cities held demonstrations, marches, and strikes in honor of the worker’s movement.
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“We are just not in a place where we can be doing a mass shutdown or anything of that nature,” Payton Alexander with Indivisible Wilmington said, referring to the lack of numbers and physical means in Wilmington. “I mean, we couldn’t even get our school board to agree to shut down schools for the day.”
To combat the disparate pay and funding levels, many teachers across the state took off Friday to travel to the capital in protest. In New Hanover County, the superintendent attempted to accommodate the strike by giving students the day off on May 1; this was denied in a 4 to 2 school board vote in April.
UNCW student Maya French attended Wilmington’s potluck in support of her mother, a teacher in Raleigh.
“She would talk all the time about how, after over 20 years of working there, she gets paid the equivalent of what she got paid when she first started working there because of how the economy has risen but her pay has not adequately risen with it,” French explained, adding her mother has a master’s degree and Advanced Placement certification for administering tests; however, North Carolina doesn’t recognize master’s pay.
Instead of a large protest, local organizations landed on a public potluck to encourage people to avoid spending with large corporations at places like Starbucks and Kroger, who have been embroiled in union disputes.
Event participants put together a list of local businesses the public could turn to instead. Indivisible Wilmington noted businesses on a banner — Slice of Life Pizza, Castle Street Kitchen, Wild Hare Studio and Alchemy & Aura — that are all progressive-leaning.
“I don’t need to support these giant corporations,” Alexander said, noting this was what she was looking to hear from attendees. “I can support my neighbors. I can support my local farmers market. We can withhold our economic power because that’s really all we’ve got left.”
However, the event was meant for more than just a strike against corporations; it also served as a way to build support for future actions.
“We need to identify what our stress points are,” Alexander told Port City Daily, “what our demands are, what the collective is unhappy about.”
Their top concerns related to labor and economic rights were housing affordability, wages and drinking water, though she also mentioned rising gas prices, as a result of the war with Iran.
Attendees ranged in age from 1 to 65-plus and gathered under a picnic shelter as hot-dog-scented smoke wafted from the grill. Tables were set up by local organizations like Siembra, Wilmington Organizing for Wilmington, Indivisible Actions Southeast North Carolina, the Peace Monitors, and the Democratic Socialists of America.
“As much as I would like Wilmington to be the hotbed that ends the Iran War, realistically, that’s a big ask,” member and former co-chair of the DSA David Braga said. “But what can we do to educate people? What could we do to agitate?”
Also joining were several executive board members from the newest left-leaning organization on campus, Progressive Involvement Organization. PIO formed in fall 2025, following UNCW’s Spirit Rock incident after the assassination of Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk; a group of students painted a memorial to Kirk and others wanted to paint over it in protest. A student who was alleged to have assaulted TPUSA members on campus — though this was not confirmed — was doxxed online by conservative media.
“We just felt like we weren’t supported on UNCW’s campus as people in the LGBTQ community or liberals or left-leaning students,” co-founder Caitlyn Withey said.
Withey further spoke to the importance of Mayday in general.
“There are lots of good things that have come from capitalism, but capitalism did its job,” she said. “I believe it was Marx who said that we need capitalism to figure out the means to mass produce goods and to make sure the needs of the people are met. Now we’ve met that, and we’ve even surpassed those needs. But it’s not being distributed evenly.”
PIO and Democratic Socialists of America suggested distribution and decision-making should return to the worker — or done bottom-up as opposed to top-down. They stated large corporations and the upper-class do not distribute goods and services evenly or equitably.
DSA began in Wilmington in 2020 off the back of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. The organization, more than 100 deep, has participated in local strikes and protests, such as the Avelo protest, and also aids local working class members of the public. Recently, it built new bus stop benches around the city to accommodate workers who don’t have a vehicle and need to take WAVE Transit. The projects were approved by the city and WAVE,
Next to the DSA, Siembra’s chief goal was to recruit volunteers to canvass local workplaces and educate workers about their Fourth Amendment rights.
Representatives Pam Cook and Jocelyn Beam explained what volunteers would do and demonstrated typical responses from employees and business owners, using examples from Cook’s own experiences. The two women presented the flyers with information on the “Know Your Rights” classes for employees to the potluck attendees.
The women added the most ICE activity in the Cape Fear has been a result of migrants working in the food industry and delivery drivers bringing food to or near, typically, military bases at Fort Bragg and Camp LeJeune.
“When someone who lives on or near a base calls in for food to be delivered, sometimes their GPS takes them to a place where they shouldn’t really be going, and they get picked up by the military police,” Cook said during the workshop.
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