“We all have to be preparing for a general strike. We all have to be focusing on strike readiness. This is the fundamental check on capitalism. The greatest power that we have is our labor. This world doesn’t turn without it. But it only matters when we all take that action together.”
– Sara Nelson, President of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA)
The general strike in Minneapolis against ICE on January 23 was a shot across the bow of the Trump administration. Working people make this society run, and we can shut it down. After the strike, big business started to sweat: 60 Minnesota CEOs, of companies including Target, UnitedHealth, Cargill, General Mills, and 3M, issued an open letter calling for “an immediate deescalation of tensions.” They want Trump to stand down, because they’re afraid workers will strike again—and bigger.
The strike sent the Trump administration scrambling to make some minor concessions like the removal of Greg Bovino and now some 700 federal agents from the Twin Cities. Meanwhile, they remain firmly committed to their anti-immigrant project. To force change on our terms, we need to go further. We need nothing less than a nationwide general strike, with major national unions at the heart of it, organizing their members to deliver the maximum possible hit to profits in key sectors of the US economy.
The strike is not just another tactic available to us. It’s the most powerful tool our class has against the capitalist class and their state. General strikes throughout history and around the world have won victories against right wing regimes, and we urgently need to build a movement to carry this out today.
January 23, as well as the national day of action a week later, has put pressure on the national labor movement that the working class wants to take action. Now, several major labor leaders, alongside other organizations, have made the call to get strike ready. They’re raising the call for a nationwide general strike, and they’re pointing to May 1, International Workers’ Day, as the flash point. This is a massively important development, but won’t materialize out of thin air just because it has been announced. Workers everywhere need to turn the heat way up to actually hold their union leaders to it. We need a groundswell of bottom-up organizing by the rank-and-file of every union and tens of thousands of workers in non-union workplaces too.
In reality, as ICE continues to abduct and murder our neighbors, May 1 is too far away. With enough pressure from below the date could be moved up, but still, having a date set for a nationwide general strike is enormously positive, and we must get our entire class strike ready now and prepare to escalate the struggle.
Getting Strike Ready
The May Day Strong coalition has put forward a call for “No Work, No School, No Shopping” on May 1, and at a recent Zoom meeting, Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) President Sara Nelson and others rallied the thousand-plus attendees about the urgent need to get the unions strike ready. In 2019, Nelson famously called for a strike of flight attendants and played a key role in forcing Trump to end the government shutdown then.
The May Day Strong coalition includes National Education Association (NEA), National Nurses United (NNU), AFA-CWA, AFT locals like UTLA, and other political organizations like Sunrise Movement, 50501, and Indivisible. Labor leaders like Stacy Davis Gates, President of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), Greg Nammacher, President of SEIU Local 26 in Minneapolis which initiated the January 23 strike, and Mark Meinster of United Electrical Workers (UE) also spoke.
Getting strike ready must become a major topic of discussion in society. But what does this mean concretely? The greatest potential to shut down centers of profit is possessed by the unions, because union workplaces already have the structures needed to organize strikes. Unions will need to mobilize as many of their members as possible. In many cases, this includes making the case to members about why this anti-immigrant offensive is not simply morally repugnant, but a scapegoating distraction from the regime’s own crises and an attack on the solidarity and unity of the working class and its capacity to struggle. Rank-and-file workers will need to organize actively in their workplaces, which will include convincing coworkers why they should join the strike, making plans to make May 1 as strong as possible.
To test and build confidence amongst workers, unions should organize their biggest ever contingents on mass days of action, such as at the next No Kings Day on March 28. This can act as what is known in the labor movement as a “structure test”: the size and makeup of the contingent—who turns out and from which workplaces or shifts—reveals where organizing is strong and where it needs to be shored up.
But the vast majority (90%) of the US workforce is not in a union, and disrupting the flow of profits in major sectors of the economy will require getting strike ready in these workplaces too. Many nonunion workplaces did take part in the 1/23 strike, often by calling out sick as a group. Nonunion workplaces have a golden opportunity to begin organizing—the possibility that their very first strike could be alongside millions of workers across the country could electrify the labor movement and spur the birth of hundreds or even thousands of new union shops.
Students also have a critical role to play. It was immigrant student organizations who didn’t blink before pointing the way forward out of the January 23 general strike, calling for a nationwide shutdown on January 30. While this day of action did not have the organized labor movement in the drivers’ seat the way the Minneapolis general strike did the previous week, over 300 actions took place across the country, including hundreds of thousands of students walking out of school, and many workers organizing their own sick-outs.
Students can build pressure on the wider movement, especially the labor movement, to escalate the struggle, and can plan mass student walkouts to line up with a nationwide general strike. Solidarity between students, faculty, staff, and the wider community play a critical role in cutting across Trump’s divide and rule, and widening the anti-Trump movement.
Challenges
Organizing a nationwide general strike will mean unions defying anti-union, no-strike clauses which dominate in contemporary union contracts. Some workers will be hesitant to strike because of these restrictions in their contracts. But let’s be clear—the protections afforded to unions, including the right to unionize itself, today were won through breaking the law. These protections are under attack from the right wing, with Trump attacking federal workers and kneecapping the NLRB. Anti-strike laws are written for the bosses, who know very well what strikes mean for their profits. Furthermore, Trump’s regime has no problem breaking the law, from murdering legal observers in Minneapolis to kidnapping Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.
We can’t negotiate with laws meant to break us and slow down our struggle. Our movement must follow the longtime labor maxim, “There is no such thing as an illegal strike, only an unsuccessful one.” Leaders of union locals will need to seriously take this up to prepare rank-and-file workers for strike action, even if deemed illegal by the bosses.
All-Out for May Day—Every City, Every Town!
In many ways, we are in a period unlike any other, with a drive towards more inter-imperialist conflict, more catastrophic weather, more economic instability, and more right-wing violence. At the same time, before us is an opportunity to organize the first-ever nationwide general strike in the US—to bring the whole rotten system to a halt, to bring the capitalist class to their knees, and to strike a real blow to Trump’s unbridled power and force ICE out of our cities. It is an opportunity for the labor movement to leap forward, rebuilding its strength to lead even bigger battles. It is an opportunity to fight to not only win back all that we have lost, but also for more, like abolishing ICE to fund healthcare, affordable housing, and education.
At the heart of the crises today is a violent system starting to unravel. Capitalism requires exploitation and oppression to function, with one class that suffers at the hands of the other. Our class, the working class, makes everything in society run. That means we have the power to not only shut it down, but to change it. The capitalist class employs divide and rule to scapegoat immigrants, which our movement must wholeheartedly reject. Part of our fight to get strike ready now is to build the kind of worker power that can not only abolish ICE, but abolish the system that makes such forces possible. The struggle against oppression is the struggle for a better world, a socialist world.
