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IS AMERICA PISSED OFF ENOUGH AT TRUMP AND MUSK FOR A GENERAL STRIKE?
 
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Susan Milligan
April 24, 2025
The New Republic
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_ The United States hasn’t seen such a massive labor action in 78
years. But the oligarchic wreckage of this administration is fueling
multiple movements toward that goal. _

President Donald Trump turned the South Lawn of the White House into
a temporary Tesla showroom in a conspicuous favor to his adviser Elon
Musk, the car company’s billionaire CEO, during their Tesla
infomercial last month., NBC News Screenshot

 

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
[[link removed]] 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 3 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
[[link removed]] 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 health care 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
[[link removed]] 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  [[link removed]]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”
[[link removed](Section%208(b)(4)),being%20dragged%20into%20the%20fray.]—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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
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are unionized, a number that sinks to less than 6 percent
[[link removed]] 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 [[link removed]] 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 autoworkers, dockworkers,
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 nonviolent 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
[[link removed]] 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 [[link removed]].
European workers have more job protections than their American
counterparts; in France (where the “Yellow Vest” protesters 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
[[link removed]] to
strike. And without a national health care 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
[[link removed]] started
in Martinsburg, West Virginia, 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 the 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
[[link removed]] the
following year.

The last time American workers mounted a general strike, legislative
retribution was swift. After 100,000 workers in Oakland
[[link removed]] joined
in solidarity with 400 department store workers in 1946 as part of a
series of postwar 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 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 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 so, 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.”

_[SUSAN MILLIGAN is a contributing editor for The New Republic. She
is a former White House and congressional correspondent for
the Boston Globe, U.S. News and World Report, and the New York
Daily News.]_

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