Is America Pissed Off Enough at Trump and Musk for a General Strike?
It’s mid-April in Missoula, Montana, and Sara Nelson is asking a packed room of 8,000 people to visualize the obscenity of corporate greed and oligarchic wealth in America. “Income inequality today is worse than it was just before the Great Depression. So picture this…” said Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, a 50,000-member union. “If you stack hundred-dollar bills high enough to reach one of our flights at 35,000 feet—that’s nearly seven miles in the air—it would only be enough 100 dollar bills to equal just three percent of Elon Musk’s worth. That’s after he took the hit from the Takedown Tesla action.” The crowd howled with laughter.
But the ultimate point of Nelson’s speech at the University of Montana, delivered during a stop on Senator Bernie Sanders’s “Fight Oligarchy” tour, wasn’t simply to rip the richest man in the world—as easy and amusing as that can be. Rather, she drew the connection between Musk’s attempted wreckage of the federal government and the critical role of labor solidarity in stopping him. More than that, she has a specific plan to accomplish this.
“Nothing, nothing, NOTHING can move without our labor, and it’s time to exercise our power in a united working class,” she said. “We need to get ready for a general strike.”
Nelson’s call for a general strike, a tactic associated more with European nations, was audacious. But as the awesome popularity of Sanders’s tour has shown, a broad rage against the oligarchic class is stirring in America, and labor leaders see this as a time to bring workers all across the country, including red states, to thwart a new Gilded Age and to protect healthcare and retirement benefits.
A general strike—where masses of people across the country, unionized or not, walk off the job—is risky in the United States, where workers are largely at-will and stand to lose their jobs for striking. But Nelson, whose push for such a work stoppage was critical to ending the 2019 government shutdown, thinks it’s time for dramatic action.
“People fight when they have something to fight with, or they fight when there’s nothing left, and they have to fight,” Nelson told me. “We’re in the middle of those two things … It’s going to be terrifying to anyone in charge that there would be that kind of solidarity, breaking through all of the tactics that have kept people down for centuries.”
There are at least two specific movements for a general strike (neither of which Nelson has endorsed or rejected). One is a grassroots effort to get three million people to sign general strike cards—so far, more than 336,000 have done so—and then raise the goal to eight million, after which organizers will create a slate of demands and prepare to strike on a specific, and for now undetermined, date. It’s a steep challenge, and there will surely be a competing list of priorities among left-leaning groups, but “where we are now, we need to withhold our labor for things to get better,” said one of the organizers, Eliza Blum, who worked on the successful Fight For $15 movement in California to raise the state’s minimum wage.
The second effort also bills itself as a general strike, but it threads a legal needle to avoid violating federal law. The Taft-Hartley Act bans “secondary boycotts”—actions where one union strikes in support of another union. But United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain has a way of getting around it. He’s calling for unions to follow UAW’s lead in aligning their contracts to expire at midnight on April 30, 2028. That sets the scene for a massive, entirely legal strike on May Day, 2028. The American Federation of Teachers has already approved a resolution calling on their local unions to set their contracts to expire on April 30, 2028.
“There’s been talk about a ‘general strike’ for as long as I’ve been alive. But that’s all it has been: talk,” Fain wrote in a column for In These Times calling for the action. And what better way to show corporations and elected officials who really runs the show? “The fact is: without workers, the world stops running,” Fain wrote.
Union membership in the United States has been in steady decline since the late 1950s; less than 10 percent of American workers are unionized, a number that sinks to less than six percent when public-sector unions are taken out of the equation. But public support for unions is near a 60-year high, according to Gallup. Last year, the polling firm found that 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions. In the past few years, the country has witnessed successful strikes by a wide range of unions, including those representing auto workers, dock workers, communications workers in the South and actors and writers in Hollywood.
It would take that kind of broad base of support to make a national general strike work, experts say. That doesn’t mean everyone would have to stop working in America for a day or a longer period of time; Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor Erica Chenoweth’s theory is that it takes 3.5 percent of the population (or 11 million Americans) for a non-violent social movement to succeed. But it needs to include an economically and occupationally diverse group to send a singular message to the Trump administration that the country is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
“I think it’s important to look at the entire workforce and see what efforts could be made to demonstrate to the administration, more importantly to America, that people are not alone. There is a very large majority who don’t want to lose their Social Security or Medicare, Medicaid or their democracy,” Robert Reich, who served as President Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary, told me. “The point would be not to try to intimidate the Trump regime. The point would be to let the vast majority of Americans know that they are part of the vast majority.”
Mass demonstrations might serve as a national venting session for aggrieved Americans, and might even help mobilize people in a more organized way, advocates for a general strike say. But Trump is impervious to opposition (and in fact appears to delight in it), so protests don’t change his behavior. The “write your congressman” approach just isn’t working. What will work, general strike planners argue, is an action where workers stand together and show the power they have.
Unlike a labor stoppage at one company or in one industry, a general strike is broader, involving workers in multiple industries and across an entire community, region or country. The grievances could be broad as well, such as general economic inequality, or preservation of popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare. It’s something we’re used to seeing in Europe (laborers in both the public and private sectors went on strike in Belgium recently to protest government austerity measures), but not in the U.S.
There are some good reasons for that, notes Lane Windham, associate director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. European workers have more job protections than their American counterparts; in France (where the “Yellow Vests” protestors of 2018-19 succeeded in getting the government to scrap a fuel tax), the right to strike is in the constitution. In the U.S., most contracts have no-strike clauses, Windham said, and in an economic strike, companies can replace striking workers. Federal workers do not have the right to strike. And without a national healthcare system, American workers stand to lose health insurance along with their jobs if they strike.
“The U.S. system is more harsh than in some other countries. Workers can easily be fired, and there’s no safety net. The risks of striking are very high,” said Stephanie Luce, professor of Labor Studies at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. A general strike is not “off the table, but it’s a developing muscle. It will take a little bit of work,” she said.
America has had some notable general strikes in its history, demonstrating both the potential for unified action and the deadly response by authorities. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 started in Martinsburg, W.V., and spread to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Buffalo, Windham said. People rallied in support in San Francisco and throughout the South. “People weren’t used to working for wages. They came from farms, and were not used to corporations,” she said. “When strikes happened, entire communities got involved.” But they got beaten back, literally: The railroad company and elected officials sent in militias to quell the labor uprising, resulting in an estimated 1,000 arrests and 100 deaths.
A 1919 Seattle general strike, primarily in support of shipyard workers and endorsed by 110 unions, paralyzed then port city for six days (though workers organized to deliver milk for children, pick up trash and serve 30,000 meals a day). A wave of general strikes in 1934 culminated with the creation of the National Labor Relations Act the following year.
The last time American workers mounted a general strike, legislative retribution was swift. After 100,000 workers in Oakland joined in solidarity with 400 department store workers in 1946 as part of a series of post-war labor uprisings, Congress responded by passing the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act limiting union power.
What would lead American workers to take the chance again on a national general strike? It comes down to the very real threat, Nelson said, of losing the very things unions built up, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and basic worker rights. A general strike could be a short, she added, and perhaps—as in 2019—the mere threat of a massive walkout could do the trick. “The more we’re talking about what we’re willing to do, the less likely that an actual action would have to take place. The power of this is the idea and the notion that we can do this together,” she said.
Even still, it’s a big ask. “What they are really asking for is for unions and their community allies to be working together on a coordinated level that is ahistorical,” said Eugene Carroll, a longtime labor educator and organizer and a Worker Institute Fellow at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. But if “there’s continuing economic disruption on a big scale”—attacks on Social Security, erosion of workers’ rights, more mass firings, persistent inflation—then that’s “going to allow this spark to expand,” he said.
Reich used a similar analogy—and was also unsure of what will come of the smoldering fury across America.
“The tinder is there,” Reich told me. “The material that will catch fire is certainly there. I can’t tell you what specific form it will take. But I do have a feeling it will happen quite soon.”