Real Talk About a 2028 General Strike
The logistics of actually pulling this thing off.
After winning a nationwide strike against the Big Three automakers last year, the UAW said, “We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own so that together we can begin to flex our collective muscles.” That contract expiration date is May 1, 2028. It was a call to prepare for a May Day general strike, a perpetual dream of many labor radicals. But coming from the UAW—a major union, with major resources, with a crusading new president, which had just won a strike and plunged into a big national organizing drive and which appears to be very serious about everything it says—it instantly became a uniquely plausible dream.
Since that public call six months ago, I and many others have been musing over what it would actually take to pull such an audacious coordinated action together. A few days ago at the Labor Notes Conference in Chicago, we got some good hints. Inside a small meeting room that was so packed that the door couldn’t be opened without pushing people who were sitting on the floor, the UAW’s Chris Brooks and Greg Nammacher from SEIU Local 26 in Minneapolis talked to a room full of union activists and officials about the nuts and bolts of this thing. It is still much too early to know how real these plans will become, but the conversation in that room at least showed what the contours of a May Day 2028 General Strike might look like.
First of all, it must be said that the UAW has other shit to do right now. It’s not like they’re dedicating all their time to organizing a general strike. They’re in the midst of trying to organize the South. Their contract expiration dates are already set. They want other unions to figure out how to set themselves up for a coordinated action. A number of people in the room told Brooks that it would be helpful if their union leaders could have a set contact point at UAW who would help them coordinate, and he appeared to take that in in good faith, but the UAW doesn’t seem to have any sort of big ongoing staffed effort to coordinate this thing right now. They are in the “inspire others to do this thing which is a collective effort” phase, which is fine.
The reason that SEIU Local 26 was there is that they actually did something like a general strike just last month, on a municipal level. In early March in Minneapolis, thousands of janitors and airport workers and nursing home workers and others struck in a coordinated week of action that was an impressive demonstration of coordinated labor flexing across an entire region. Its power helped other unions, like the teachers, win contracts when they were on the precipice of joining in with the other strikers. Nammacher, from SEIU, spoke about the roots of that effort: a full decade of lining up contract dates internally, then expanding that circle to pull in more unions, planning the effort and building the funds, then getting buy-in from the leaders of other unions, then expanding the circle to the next level of leadership inside all of the unions, then expanding again to a wider pool of members, setting up group trainings where everyone could network beforehand, securing community group allies who were willing to bring their own fights to a head that same week in order to take part, and much more. Here is a good deep dive on the entire effort, by Sarah Jaffe. I’m not going to rehash it all here except to say the effort to build to that week of action was very long and the organizing was very intense.
There were quite a few lessons from Minnesota that are useful when thinking about a 2028 national general strike. One common question in the room was: How hard is it to actually line up the contract expiration dates? When you bargain a union contract, setting the expiration date is just one of a zillion things that you negotiate. Often there can be some push and pull on that, but it’s not a major issue. In this case, though, companies would certainly detect at some point that many shops in many unions were demanding to align their expiration dates, which is a common tactic to allow multiple strikes to go off at the same time, increasing the power of the workers. And presumably companies would start refusing to agree to that expiration date at some point. What to do?
The man from SEIU made the point that a general strike doesn’t need every participant to have exactly the same contract expiration date. For a May Day 2028 strike, for example, people working under any contract that expired before that date could just keep their contract bargaining going until May Day. Also, anyone who had unionized but was still negotiating a first contract could grab onto May Day as a self-imposed deadline and participate in the strike. So rather than thinking about only unions that could get that exact expiration date as possible participants, think about all the unions whose contracts expire in a six month window preceding that date, along with all the unions negotiating first contracts, along with all the unions willing to say “fuck it” and strike illegally. That is a much, much larger pool.
Some other relevant points:
The bills that are bubbling up in various states right now that would allow striking workers to access unemployment insurance could end up being very important to pulling off a general strike like this. It would be an economic safety net that would make it much easier to convince big groups of workers to join in.
A unionist from the UK mentioned that unions in his country had recently done a series of one day strikes covering entire industries—and that it wasn’t enough. One day strikes just aren’t long enough to impose the pain necessary to achieve change. They are effectively symbolic. A real effective general strike should be prepared to go for a week or more, so that the parts of the economy that it shuts down could not easily just grit their teeth and wait the whole thing out.
Many people felt that such a general strike would require a big, unifying demand—like, for example, Medicare For All, or something similarly transformative. Simply saying “It’s time for the working class to flex its muscles” might not be enough to bring a sufficient number of unions to the table.” This goes to a point raised by some European unionists in the room, who have seen politically oriented general strikes in their countries on a relatively routine basis. One view is that some grand political demand is the only thing broad enough to unite labor. A competing view is that America is so politically divided that a general strike should stick relentlessly to a basic theme of worker power (and/ or class war). I don’t know the answer! Something to think about.
The conventional wisdom in that room—which was, I hasten to add, full of experienced union people who all were enthusiastic about the idea of a general strike and are also well positioned to understand the reality of what unions can and can’t be made to do—seemed to be that the most likely, optimistic scenario was this: The UAW gets a handful of other really big unions to line up their contract expiration dates and calls it a general strike and then a million smaller local unions and political groups could kind of glom on and wave the flag with them for a day or a week, even if they weren’t officially on strike. So for example imagine the nation’s auto workers and the teachers in a number of states and some big five-figure-large units of building trade workers and hospitality workers and service workers and media workers and truck drivers and higher ed workers all going out on strike at once. This might not be a “General Strike” according to a strict textbook definition, but it could well be the biggest coordinated strike action that most Americans have seen in their lifetimes. It would be a big deal. And once it was pulled off, it would be a proof of concept to build to an even bigger general strike down the road. The mere act of bringing the concept of “general strike” out of the world of Marxist chat rooms and into the world of reality would be extremely meaningful.
All of this is only in the discussion phase right now. But let me tell you—if you’re interested, you better start those discussions in your own union very soon. (Here is one union-backed site that aims to get these discussions rolling.) Many unions have three year contracts. That means that the contracts that are signed next year are the ones that will enable the expiration dates to line up for the 2028 general strike. Some of those contracts are already being negotiated. The time to hop on this cause is now.
I don’t know if it will be done. But I know that it can be done. If we do it.
Also
Related: A General Strike in 2028 Is a Uniquely Plausible Dream; Getting Comfortable With Illegal Strikes; The Cost of Strikes.
I wrote a book about the labor movement called “The Hammer” which can be bought wherever books are sold. Shout out to everyone at Labor Notes who bought the book. That shit was on and popping. I’m on book tour! Thank you to everyone who came out to the event in Chicago with In These Times. That was awesome. Right this minute I am in Minnesota and I have events TONIGHT AND TOMORROW!
TONIGHT: Tuesday, April 23: St. Paul, MN—At the East Side Freedom Library, 7 pm. Event link here.
TOMORROW: Wednesday, April 24: St. Paul, MN—Fundraiser for Trader Joe’s United, 7:30 PM at Black Hart of St. Paul. RSVP here.
Minnesota has an extremely badass labor movement. Come out and say hey, Twin Cities peoples. And if you live somewhere else and are interested in bringing me to your city, email me.
You are reading How Things Work. This is pure independent media. There is no paywall. There are no ads. It is 100% supported by readers who choose to become paying subscribers. And I am not getting rich here, my friends. If you like reading this site and want to help it to continue to exist, please take a few seconds to become a paid subscriber right now. Together we will make it.
A general strike to make stock buybacks illegal again. A corporation can increase the dividend, invest in the company, pay workers more - but no more stock manipulation.
I'm so here for this.