After more than a year of protests denouncing socioeconomic inequality and concentrated wealth, organizers are beginning to channel that anger into policy proposals, with May Day demonstrations in San Francisco calling for a statewide ballot measure that would tax billionaires to fund health care, housing and other public programs.
When thousands of workers, students and community organizers took to the airport and streets of San Francisco on Friday, they built upon more than a year of escalating efforts to mobilize public opposition to deportations by immigration agents, cutbacks of federal benefits and an economic climate that squeezes low- wage workers. But this time, they also focused on a proposed fix to a political system they said serves billionaires at the expense of everyone else, rallying behind a tax measure aimed at addressing wealth inequality.
California’s 2026 Billionaire Tax Act would impose a one-time 5% levy on California residents with assets of $1 billion or more, excluding some real estate and other exemptions. Propelled by more than 1.5 million petition signatures, the measure is pending verification by the California secretary of state for the November election.
If approved by voters, the tax would direct roughly $100 billion over five years primarily to health care, education and food assistance. Proponents cite research showing that California billionaires pay an effective tax rate of 24% of income, compared with 30% for the average taxpayer.
Rallies stretched from San Francisco International Airport to Civic Center Plaza and the Embarcadero. About 500 people gathered at 11 a.m. at the airport, where San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman, Supervisor Connie Chan and former Supervisor Jane Kim were arrested for refusing police commands to leave a crosswalk.
“No billionaire should be paying less taxes than our airport workers,” Chan said. “We should absolutely tax the billionaires statewide, and if they have a plan for tax evasion to go to other states, then let’s actually tax them in every state in the United States.”
The airport served as more than a high-profile backdrop for grandstanding. It was a venue for workers at a public amenity to share their struggles to make ends meet in the Bay Area, one of the wealthiest regions in the nation.
Noni Garcia, a cabin agent at SFO who cleans and restocks planes between flights, said his wages did not keep pace with what it costs to live in San Francisco. He said affording basic necessities was a constant struggle, with rent eating up most of what he earned.
“It’s enough to survive basic paycheck to paycheck, but how about the other things that we need,” Garcia said. “It’d be better if we get our wages at least balanced with the cost of living so we can survive.”
He said he supported taxing billionaire assets to pay for enhanced public services, but expressed skepticism that the wealthiest would actually pay, noting they have legal resources to find workarounds.
“They have the backing, they have the lawyers,” Garcia said. “The people that make average are the ones that are getting taxed a lot.”
Garcia said the one-time structure of the proposed tax fell short of what was fair.
“What everybody else pays every tax year, it’s recurring,” he said. “So why not them? They’re making more money than us.”
Noyra Gonzalez, an airport wheelchair attendant who rallied at SFO, also found housing affordability a struggle. She had slept on a couch for two years because her $22.79 hourly wage was not enough to cover rent in the Bay Area and to pay for her father’s medication.
“There are employees sleeping in the parking lot in their cars,” she said. “There are employees working two, three jobs and sleeping in the terminals.”
At 2 p.m., about 1,500 people gathered at Civic Center Plaza, listened to speeches and then marched up Mission Street to join a rally at Embarcadero Plaza at 4 p.m., while hearing from speakers on a truck. Finally, around 4,000 protesters marched back down Market Street.
At the Civic Center gathering, Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, director of campaigns and policy at the Housing Rights Committee, connected the billionaire tax to the housing affordability crisis, arguing that corporate landlords have driven up rents and pushed working people into poverty.
“This is a state of a lot of very rich people and a lot of very poor people,” she said. “And since the rich people are often directly making us poor, we should take a teeny, teeny, teeny bit of their income and use it to actually do the things we need — schools, affordable housing, more hospitals.”
Participants also rallied behind San Francisco’s Overpaid CEO Tax, which would levy a surcharge on businesses whose chief executives earn significantly more than their median-wage worker.
Maria Moreno, campaign director for Jobs With Justice San Francisco, and one of the rally’s organizers, said the coalition came together about two months before May Day, drawing in unions, immigrant-rights groups, housing advocates and Palestinian solidarity organizations.
“We’re protesting the violent deportations and abductions of our communities,” Moreno said. “We are protesting the federal budget cuts that have been affecting and decimating the needs of our communities, and we’re protesting the funds being diverted from our communities towards war.”
Moreno said the billionaire-tax initiative was common sense.
“We’re wanting to ensure that billionaires pay their fair share,” Moreno said. “We’re not giving them handouts the way that our government thinks our community is getting handouts. “All of us pay taxes in order for our communities to thrive.” But Moreno said the one-time nature of the tax was not ideal.
“It’s a good start, but I don’t think it’s the end of it all by any means,” she said. “We have to start somewhere to start taking care of our communities, and I think that we should definitely pass that on the ballot this year.”
Plaza to continue the anti-billionaire-themed demonstration. Credit: Neal Wong / San Francisco Public Press
Retiree Sheila Tully, who taught labor studies and women and gender studies at San Francisco State University, recalled growing up in a working-class family and being able to afford graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley.
“My students have just as much right to those opportunities as I did, but they were born at a time when Sacramento was cutting public education funding,” Tully said. “Many of those legislators in Sacramento graduated from the UCs or the CSUs — they got theirs, and then they pulled the plug.”
Tully said the state wealth tax is a necessary step toward restoring the public investment that had made California’s universities accessible to working-class students.
“If you think about how many billions of dollars these people have, they could give three or four billion and not even notice it,” Tully said. “It’s a way to begin the conversation about the unequal tax system.”