General Strike

So You Want to Organize a General Strike

Trump opponents are marking May Day with walkouts, boycotts, and marches. What’s the next step?

Schuyler Mitchell

On Friday, International Workers’ Day, tens of thousands of people across the US will walk out of school, skip work, and refrain from shopping as part of a nationwide economic blackout against President Donald Trump’s agenda. Organizers with the May Day Strong coalition, a coalition of labor unions and community groups, are helping oversee more than 3,500 marches, rallies, and teach-ins. The coalition’s May Day action is inspired by the mass popularity of the Day of Truth and Freedom, in January, when more than 70,000 people took to the streets in Minnesota to demand ICE leave their state.

But are either of these events general strikes? And does it matter?

To better understand this moment, I spoke with Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island and author of Organizing America and A History of America in Ten Strikes. We discussed the history of the general strike in America, the legal barriers hindering today’s labor movement, and how workers can use their strategic power to stand up to the Trump administration.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

What is a general strike, and how does it differ from a typical labor strike?

A regular strike comes out of a workplace. It’s usually affiliated with a singular workplace action by a group of workers who are angry about something going on in the workplace. They’re trying to form a union and the company won’t negotiate, or they have a union and the company won’t come up with a fair contract.

The idea behind a general strike is that the workers writ large, workers generally, will all come together and walk out in favor of some goal—a kind of broad-based revolution. It can be across sectors. Let’s say I go on strike as a college professor because my university is treating me really badly, and the hospital workers also walk out on strike with me. They’re trying to use their influence over their sector of the economy to increase the stress of the conditions so that I can win what I want to win. It doesn’t have to be about the workplace if a bunch of unions come together. Part of what they were trying to do in Oakland in 1946, for instance, was to overthrow the Republican political machine that controlled the city.

Has the US ever had a true general strike? What conditions preceded them, and what were the demands?

Basically every general strike in the US has come out of the established labor movement. We’re talking about Seattle in 1919, San Francisco in 1934, Oakland in 1946, New Orleans in 1892. These general strikes have been attempts by the labor movement that usually come out of a specific workplace issue but then explode as part of a general discontent with the system as it exists at that time—to place pressure on employers, the city, the forces of order.

In Seattle in 1919, it’s very much about employers not raising wages on docks after World War I, and the Seattle labor movement comes together as one to try to force a general increase in wages. In San Francisco in 1934, the longshoremen were led by the famed radical Harry Bridges, who had come out of the Industrial Workers of the World, in an attempt to form a union, which the companies and the police were very strongly resisting. In Oakland in 1946, it starts at a department store and spreads throughout the city of Oakland. In that case, it’s very much also about wages.

These have not always really been that radical. But the second thing you have to understand is that the general strike—or more specifically, sympathy strikes, where you strike in sympathy to try to put more pressure on the employer—were declared illegal by the United States as part of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. A union cannot actually legally engage in what would be required to hold a [true] general strike today. They could do it, but they would break the law and face all kinds of penalties for doing so.

Some people were using the term “general strike” to describe Minnesota’s Day of Truth and Freedom in January, and other people were pushing back against that word choice. Is “general strike” the correct term, and how much do definitions matter?

I am one who is a little skeptical about the way this term is being used. I don’t think what happened in Minnesota is a general strike, and I don’t really think what’s going on May 1 qualifies either.

But maybe it doesn’t matter. People are using the terms and the ideas that they have access to through their education and trying to apply them to the presently terrible political situation, and that’s okay. In fact, that’s exactly what people should be doing. Whether or not it is technically a general strike is far less important.

If people can use these terms in order to push for a more just world, then that’s a heck of a lot more important than whether it technically is or is not a general strike.

In 2022, it felt like we were seeing an inflection point in the American labor movement. There were key unionization efforts with companies like Amazon and Starbucks. Do you think that momentum has continued, or has it been really diminished by Trump’s second term?

I think there’s a few things there. One is the anger over economic inequality is very real. I think that hasn’t changed at all. I think we’re seeing that with the increased success of more left-wing candidates in the Democratic Party. Trump may be a liar and a terrible human being, but one of his lies is that he’s good for the working man. A lot of working people believe that because they’re so angry about the system as it exists.

So the economic anger is still very much there. And then every time a union wins something these days, there’s a sort of liberal-left world of writers and readers that want to blow up every single small victory into the revival of the labor movement, and that’s more pressure than it can bear.

We saw this with the Amazon vote, which, let’s face it, was one vote in one factory. We saw this with the Starbucks workers. And we saw this with the successful organizing by the United Auto Workers at that one plant in Chattanooga.

The reality is that the barriers to successfully organizing, in part because of the Taft-Hartley Act, are enormous. The Starbucks workers have done one heck of a job, but what they’re facing is a company that simply refuses to negotiate a contract. The burden to win a union vote and then win a contract is enormous, and if anything, winning that first contract is even harder than winning that first union election, and so companies can wait for years before actually seriously negotiating.

The reality is American labor law is broken. It’s controlled by corporations. President Biden’s idea of the [union-supporting] PRO Act would have tried to reset the playing field on this. But that’s what we need to happen in order to see this kind of energy turn into wins. It really is about political power. The reason that the unions were able to succeed in the 1930s, yes, it was going out on strike and all of the actions they took—but that had happened before.

The difference was massively electing pro-union officials to office, and then those pro-union officials putting the laws into place that create a pathway for those union actions to succeed. You need both the action on the ground, the strike, and you need the electoral side. And we haven’t had that electoral side in many, many decades. And that often has been true under Democrats and is always true under Republicans. So I think the energy is there, and there’s a huge demand for unions. But I don’t think people understand just how hard it is, because labor law is completely captured by corporations, backed by the courts and with the full support of the Republican Party.

I’d like to dive into the Taft-Hartley Act some more. What led to its passage, and how does it shape what’s legally possible when striking today?

First off, the Taft-Hartley Act is one of the worst laws in American history. It continues to severely limit what unions can do today. 1946 is a huge strike year in America. You have all these workers who had struggled through the 1930s and the Great Depression, and even if they’re forming unions, there’s not a lot of money in the economy, so their standard of living is still pretty low.

Then World War II happens, and sure, everybody has a job, but the government’s controlling wages, and we’re not really making consumer goods because everything’s for the war. And so there’s all this massively pent-up demand for increased wages. People want to live a good life, and that’s what a lot of these strikes were about, right? And so it was an enormous strike wave. Over 5 million Americans go on strike in 1946—almost certainly the most in any year in American history.

At the same time, Congress and America generally were moving sharply to the right. We’re seeing the beginnings of Cold War anti-communism, and some unions were led by communists. They were seen now as the enemy, and a lot of employers hated everything that had happened since the unions had started forming in large numbers a decade earlier in the mid-30s and wanted to roll all of that back. So the Taft-Hartley Act bans almost everything that labor unions were able to do to succeed. The sympathy strike is banned. Wildcat strikes—in which you’re under a union contract, but the employer does something bad and you walk out [without a formal strike vote]—are banned.

States were then allowed, through this law, to create the so-called “right to work” laws, in which anti-union states basically incentivize people to not join unions. These have been used in more recent years to try to destroy the labor movement. Taft-Hartley also requires union leaders to pledge they’re not communists, which takes out many of the best-organizing unions in the labor movement [of the time]. It’s a horrible law that continues to have massive impacts on the American labor movement today and goes very far to explain why the movement has become weaker.

It often feels like workers in European countries are engaging in the types of mass strikes we haven’t seen in the US in a long time. Part of it, like you said, is because there’s a lack of the political conditions that that we need to have in the States.

But is there anything else we can learn from other countries that maybe have stronger labor movements?

I think the key is the cultural differences. And this goes back to the mythologies that Americans tell themselves about America: That this is a nation of the individual. This is a nation where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This is a nation where the poor man can become rich if he just works hard enough, and all this other bullshit. And you don’t see that in nearly the same kind of way in Europe, in which you have a much more defined system of class consciousness.

Not that European politics are an amazing utopia. But I think it’s always been a challenge in this country to overcome the cultural barriers within the working class that can be this kind of pro-capitalist pathology that lots and lots of people have. And the gig economy, or the rise of Uber, really builds on that—saying, You can make more money by your side hustle.

Racial divisions also absolutely have been a major issue in American labor history. In the past, American workers have often chosen to divide themselves by race. And on top of that, the power of evangelical Protestantism and religion has been a real issue too, in that you have many, many Americans being told messages at churches about individualism, about getting rich, about power structures, about listening to your employer, about obeying. Religion has often been used to crush and bust American strikes as well. So politics is a piece of it, but the biggest difference between here and Europe are cultural issues around class consciousness.

I think a lot of people are looking for strategic actions to take to resist the Trump regime outside of just going to protests and see the general strike as one potential pathway. Given the state of the labor movement, do you think a general strike is the most useful tool to deploy in this moment? Or are there other more strategic pathways?

I think that people want to have one thing that they do and it stops Trump. That’s not going to happen. Everybody’s looking for a shortcut, and I think a lot of general strike rhetoric is a shortcut—if only we come together, we could solve this problem—but I’m not sure that’s really true unless it’s a very real general strike, where the American labor movement leads millions of workers off the job and says they’re going to keep it up for days with clear demands against an anti-worker Republican Party.

Unfortunately, the labor movement is doing nothing. A few unions are even Trump-supportive. The labor movement as an actual organized movement continues to not rise to the occasion. Some state federations have done a pretty good job, but at a national level, it’s been very poor.

So in the absence of that strong labor movement, what do we have?

We have people doing the best they can. And I think that that’s really noble in its own way. We can’t just snap our fingers and stop Donald Trump, and I think this is where learning from other historical movements really makes a difference— thinking about the ways in which people were organizing in the American context in tremendously difficult conditions.

We’re talking about civil rights organizers from the 1920s through the ’50s and ’60s pushing back on Jim Crow. We’re talking about the early organizers in the gay rights movement in the ’70s and ’80s, and the hate and murderous violence that they faced. These are people that we could be inspired by. It might not happen overnight, but we have to understand that struggle happens over the long term, and we have to commit ourselves to that struggle and continue to try to move these conversations forward through our actions, through our organizing.

Whether or not what’s happening on May 1 is a general strike, people using those terms to come together and try to put more pressure on a terrible situation is really a positive thing. And people should take heart from whatever happens out of that and use it as the next moment to continue to build the struggle.