By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor.” –Ecclesiastes 4:9
“If you’ve got ’em by the balls, the heart and mind soon follow.” –Author Unknown
Labor Day 2024 seems like an appropriate date to look forward to May Day 2028, the date for which UAW President Shawn Fain, fresh from his “stand-up strike” triumph with the Big Three automakers, has called for a General Strike[1]. It’s nice to have time to prepare!
In doing the research for this post, I came to understand how little I know about the labor movement, so I hope that readers will bear with me, and union mavens who know more will correct me. It’s a sad commentary that the only mainstream publication with a regular labor beat is Teen Vogue, where Kim Kelly writes the “No Class” column. It would be a fine thing if every newspaper had a Kim Kelly (or a Mike Elk). It’s also frustrating that much of the reporting on labor — at least that which gets amplified — comes from niche publications on the unmasked, brunch-focused, Democrat-servicing, NGO-aligned putative left. All this combines to make me feel that we really don’t know what’s going on out there in the locals, let alone the workplace itself, which does allow one at least to project a certain sense of optimism. Just possibly Shawn Fain knows more than I do, or any of them do.
In this post, I will first give some background on the general strike (definition; history). Then I will quote Shawn Fain’s views (2023 and 2024). Next, I’ll present friendly amendments to and critiques of Fain’s views. Finally, I will play the armchair strategist snd present my own critique (hoping I have made clear that I have no particular qualifications to do this).
The General Strike: Background
Here is the definition of “General Strike,” from the Teamsters site:
A strike by all or most organized workers in a community or nation.
Kim Kelly gives a somewhat more wide-angled definition:
A general strike is a labor action in which a significant amount of workers from a number of different industries who comprise a majority of the total labor force within a particular city, region, or country come together to take collective action. Organized strikes are generally called by labor union leadership, but they impact more than just those in the union.
(I like Kelly’s definition better — sorry, Teamsters! — because her jurisdiction heirarchy is richer, and because she emphasizes the role of the community.
From the DSA, “Looking Back to Look Forward to 2028,” here is a potted history of general strikes in the Great Depression, which were critical to the formation of the union movement as we know it today
Ten years later when the Great Depression broke out in 1929, conditions appeared to have lurched back to the nineteenth century; the truth was more complicated. Important quantitative shifts had prepared the ground for a qualitative breakthrough. First, radicals led thousands of workplace organizing drives during the early Thirties. 1934 marked a turning point with general or mass strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, and East Coast textile mills, drawing in more than 1.5 million workers. Many of them joined the Communist and Socialist Parties, creating the largest left parties in U.S. history. Second, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Toledo all won contracts and significant wage gains, touching off a war within the AFL and the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Some union leaders understood that if they didn’t lead the rebellion, they might be left behind. Others genuinely supported it and threw their (relatively) well-resourced unions behind it. Third, although Roosevelt’s New Deal had only a small impact on macroeconomic activity, his administration created the foundation for the modern interventionist federal state, both in terms of economic investment—which really only took root as war production cranked up—and increasingly significant regulatory power. If Wilson’s National War Labor Board was a test balloon, Roosevelt’s National Labor Relations Act signaled the federal government’s willingness to corral labor and business when it served its own interests.
It’s impossible to reduce what came next to the “right conditions.” Strategic, tactical, and political debates raged throughout these years, but it’s clear that mass strikes were central to winning.
Now let’s turn to Shawn Fain and the present day.
UAW President Fain’s Calls for a General Strike
I came into this thinking that Fain had delivered a single address, which then got amplified, but in fact he first broached the idea in his report to the UAW membership after winning the UAW contract with the Big Three. He’s followed through several times thereafter. Here are several examples:
October 29, 2023. Fain’s report to the membership (CC disabled, sadly, so no YouTube transcript):
UAW’s Facebook page (!) (quoted but not linked by Common Dreams) contains the key passages from our standpoint:
“The Stand Up Strike will go down in history as an inflection point for our union, and for our movement.
We went to each of the Big 3 and proposed an expiration date of April 30, 2028. We did this for several reasons.
First, this allows us to strike on May Day, or International Workers’ Day.
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.
If we are going to truly take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that it starts to work for the benefit of the many and not the few, then it’s important that we not only strike, but that we strike together.
…This contract is about more than just economic gains for autoworkers. It’s a turning point in the class war that has been raging in this country for the past forty years.
Why contract alignment? Kim Kelly explains:
[S]ympathy strikes (in which workers join a strike in solidarity with strikers at another workplace) are, in most cases, illegal in the US. Due to the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which was passed in the wake of the women-led 1946 Oakland general strike, general strikes are effectively illegal too. This trampling of the right of workers to show solidarity has been a source of frustration for decades, but has also prompted union members and leaders to get creative when necessary.
So if, as Fain has suggested, a number of separate unions happen to set their contracts to expire at the same time, and happen to go out on strike as a result, there are no laws being broken. That’s just good timing. And then, for example, if thousands of other workers, union and nonunion alike, who are sympathetic to the cause, all happened to fall ill at the same time and had to take off work during the general strike… well, that’s just plumb bad luck.
January 22, 2024. The Guardian:
Speaking to union members at the UAW national political conference in Washington DC, Fain said it was time for union members to come together.
“We have to pay for our sins of the past. Back in 1980 when Reagan at the time fired PATCO workers [here], everybody in this country should have stood up and walked the hell out,” Fain said. “We missed the opportunity then, but we’re not going to miss it in 2028. That’s the plan. We want a general strike. We want everybody walking out just like they do in other countries.”
He reaffirmed ambitious plans to organize a general strike for 1 May 2028, coinciding with International Solidarity Day or May Day.
April 30, 2024. Shawn Fain, In These Times, “May Day 2028 Could Transform the Labor Movement—and the World“l
We wanted to ensure our contracts expired at midnight on April 30, 2028, not as a symbolic gesture, but as a rallying cry. We’ve asked other unions to join us in setting their contract expiration dates to May Day 2028 in hopes the labor movement can collectively aspire to building the power needed to change the world.
There’s been talk about a ”general strike” for as long as I’ve been alive. But that’s all it has been: talk.
If we are serious about building enough collective power to win universal healthcare and the right to retire with dignity, then we need to spend the next four years getting prepared.
A general strike isn’t going to happen on a whim. It’s not going to happen over social media. A successful general strike is going to take time, mass coordination, and a whole lot of work by the labor movement.
As working people, we must come together. We can no longer allow corporations, politicians and borders to divide us.
And:
We are fully preparing to strike on May Day 2028.
The first is that, to reshape the economy into one that works for the benefit of everyone — not just the wealthy — we need to reclaim our country’s history of militant trade unions that united workers across race, gender and nationality.
Critiques of Fain
(1) How serious is the UAW really? From Hamilton Nolan (2024), at the Labor Notes Conference in Chicago:
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.
If such a contact point exists on the UAW website, I can’t find it. Indeed:
There’s nothing on the UAW site about a general strike at all, now or in the past. So when is that “staffed effort” going to start? From In These Times:
We must see some tangible coordination of action across the U.S. labor movement. It is great when one union wins a contract, or organizes an important new company, but those isolated events will not be enough to take on the combined power of trillion-dollar multinational corporations and their political allies. Not even when they involve tens or hundreds of thousands of workers. Big unions, the ones with the most resources, along with whatever non-union groups want to help them, must be able to sit down and plan and carry out big national campaigns together if we want to have any chance at winning the class war.
(2) “Show some muscle” but to what end? It is true that Fain (above) mentions “universal healthcare and the right to retire with dignity,” but concrete material benefits don’t seem to be in the forefront of his thinking (which might not be a bad thing; see the Conclusion.) I note in passing that “universal health care” is not single payer, let alone a National Health Service; in fact, I seem to recall some ObamaCare advocates claiming, back in the day, that a combination of private health insurance plus ObamaCare filling in the gaps was, operationally, “universal health care,” so problem solved! One sardonic comment from trainer Jane McAlevey:
In the old days, the thing that really turned me off from the organized US left was that every time I would show up at a Left conference, I’d be immediately swarmed by white guys hawking papers in four-point font with their political line. And that’s not going to build a class-based, effective movement that’s tackling race and gender.
Medicare for All being one such hawked thing, sadly. (Although I have to say that the idea of a class-based movement that doesn’t “tackle” class seems odd to me.)
(3) Contract aligment may be the best tactic, but is it the only one? Hamilton Nolan once more, from the same conference:
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.
(4) What about opposition from the national unions? The labor movement can rightly be said to be fractious. From Socialist Call:
One is the difficulty of getting many unions on board, because of the fragmentation of the labor movement, the siloes and leaders’ egos. The president of one union doesn’t see himself as needing a leader from a different union. The established leaders don’t know Fain well and they have reasons to distrust him — his origins in dissent, his radical rhetoric, and even his widely publicized winning strike against the Big 3 automakers last fall, an achievement others can’t point to. In 1997 the Teamsters’ strike at UPS was a resounding national success but it did not lead to other unions’ doing likewise.
In our Balkanized system it’s hard for successes to spread from union to union.
But:
A possible exception is the idea of reform from below, as reformers in other unions (Food and Commercial Workers, Massachusetts Teachers, Chicago Teachers, Professional and Technical Engineers, Machinists, Theatrical Stage Employees) have taken heart from the example of Teamsters for a Democratic Union and now Unite All Workers for Democracy, the movement in the Auto Workers, and begun their own caucuses. That direct learning from each other is part of what Labor Notes promotes. But with reformers decidedly not in control of many unions, the power of a good example of how to lead is… less powerful.
Leading me to—
(5) How about support from the locals?. From HuffPo:
Eight councils affiliated with the AFL-CIO labor federation have endorsed the [general strike] concept so far, said Connor Lewis, a union member, writer and president of the Seven Mountains Central Labor Council in central Pennsylvania. The councils span six states; the most recent to sign on was the council for Louisville, Kentucky, where Ford workers went on strike last year.
(6) Who organizes community mutual aid networks? From Kim Kelly, “Everything You Need to Know About General Strikes“:
Organizers stress the importance of first building mutual aid networks and strong community systems to care for people in the event of a mass labor action like a general strike, before asking people to hit the streets. It’s hard enough to go out on a planned strike during union contract negotiations…. In those cases, workers at least have the support of their union, and, hopefully, a strike fund to help cover bills.
(7) Isn’t the general strike a “one-shot” strategy? From Kim Kelly, “The UAW Strike May Have Finally Set Us Up for a General Strike“:
To be brutally honest, though, we’ll probably only get one shot at this before the government magics up a new set of laws to make it even more difficult to try.
I would imagine lawfare against the union leadership is also a possibility, especially under a Harris administration.
Armchair Strategy
Here is Fain’s favorite bible quote in full (the first verse being the epigraph). Ecclesiastes 4:9-12:
9 Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. 10 For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! 11 Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? 12 And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
Let’s take that “threefold cord” as an omen or a heuristic, and ask ourselves which other two major, national unions besides the UAW would be sufficient for a general strike.[2],[3] If we consider the second epigraph (“If you’ve got ’em by the balls….”) then the question becomes which unions control which chokepoints. The answer can only be those unions that control essential parts of the supply chain. Kim Moody (not Kelly) urges:
Even as capital in the United States was consolidating in industry after industry, the ties that bind the production of goods and services together, whether locally or across space, were tightening in new and important ways…. One of the most important changes in the reorganization of supply chains is their geography, the concentration of workers in key “nodes” or “clusters” [chokepoints] along with their technological drivers and linkages…
(Moody goes on to recommend organizing the unorganized at those nodes, but I think the organized at those nodes could have good effect in a general strike).
Obvious candidates from supply chain unions are the Teamsters, the Longshoremen (ILWU), and the Flight Attendants (AFACWA). I think we can rule the Teamsters out, since Teamster President Sean M. O’Brien doesn’t mention a general strike in his Labor Day article, “The American Worker’s Power Is Greater Than Any Party.” That leaves the AFACWA, and the ILWU.
Interestingly, the AFACWA views itself as having threatened a general strike, successfully, in 2019:
And the ILWU has this article on its website: “Logistics Workers Use Supply Chain Power to Win.” In a successful strike against Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics:
With unyielding supply chain solidarity from Local 23 leadership and members, workers re-centered coworkers day and night around a strategic vision of union power while dismantling the distortions, misinformation, and lies rolled out every day in meetings, memos, and daily management texts to all employees. “After each round of busting, we could look over at the ships and remember how strong we are and how scared they were,” said Milton Turner, a warehouse worker.
Messages of solidarity poured in from the Maritime Union of Australia, the Maritime Union of New Zealand, and the International Longshoreman’s Association, whose members work at Wallenius-owned job sites. MUA’s message to workers highlighted Local 23’s strong stance to back up Australian longshore for victory in their fight against WWL in previous years, and MUA’s readiness to do the same in return. Meanwhile, workers from P&B Intermodal just down the road in the Port of Tacoma shared with WWL employees their experience of striking to shut down their job site, winning a union through Local 23, and the incredible, transformative gains they secured in their first union contract.
So I would say there is hope for a “three-fold cord.” Shutting down air travel, plus shipping, with auto manufacturing, might indeed cause the “heart and mind to follow.”
Conclusion
So I guess I’m going to have to throw a flag on my own Betteridge’s Law violation. I don’t think the answer to the question in the headline is “No,” at least, though it will take a lot of staffwork, starting now, to carry it off. But there does seem to be a path to enough chokepoints with a “three-fold cord” (which reduces the scope of work considerably, control of scope being key to project success).
But to me, the emphasis on worker benefits seems a little misplaced, even if the benefit is as big as single payer. The issue, to my simple mind, is worker power, not worker benefits; worker benefits flow from, and only from, worker power, and not capital’s goodheartedness or even sense of self-preservation. The issue, then, is the same as it has been since the mid-Nineteenth Century (not long in historical terms): Worker ownership and control of the means of production. Can anyone seriously argue, for example, that Boeing would not be better off — not to mention the flying public, who must know worry about planes that fall out of the sky, or getting sucked out of open doors at 30,000 feet — if it were run as a worker’s cooperative, along the lines of the Mondragon co-operative in Spain? How about once-storied Intel? Or, for that matter, once-functional Google? If we’re going to have a general strike, let’s think big!
NOTES
[1] From Yahoo News, “How the UAW won a major victory and what it could mean for U.S. labor going forward“:
Fain is the first UAW president directly elected by the membership and the head of an insurgent bloc; his election followed years of corruption by union leadership, including two former presidents embezzling millions. An electrician from Kokomo, Ind., Fain provided constant video updates to his membership via social media, breaking from previous approaches where the work was done behind closed doors. He was combative in his approach to automaker executives, pillorying their salaries while wearing an “EAT THE RICH” T-shirt and expressing a belief that billionaires shouldn’t exist.
“They look at me and they see some redneck from Indiana,” Fain said in a speech earlier this month. “They look at you and see somebody they would never have over for dinner or let ride on their yacht or let fly on their private jet. They think they know us. But us autoworkers know better.”
Fain also mixes in Scripture with his speeches, telling the Atlantic that his favorite verse was Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 and his favorite line from it was: “A cord of three strands is not easily broken.” Fain says that the passage “speaks about what life’s about: standing together and helping one another and loving one another.”
Love the Bible quotes!
[2] Kim Kelly guesses “four or five,” but I would speculate Fain is trying to tell us something with Ecclesiastes 9i.
[3] Randy Weingarten’s AFT is the first and so far only national union to support Fain’s call. I discount this, first because of Weingarten’s miserable treatment of the AFT membership, allowing them to be forced back into poorly ventilated workspaces, unmasked, in the midst of an airborne pandemic; second, because of her support for genocide; and third because of her close alliance with the Democrat Party. Weingarten is exactly the sort of union leader who would cave when push came to shove, especially if it inconvenienced a Democrat administration or campaign to the slightest degree.
APPENDIX On Electoralism
Views of a Staff writer for The New York Times:
My best case for Harris Walz, is that I want a general strike on May Day 2028 to bring this country and its billionaires, to their knees. When we withhold labor, we make the demands. Change doesn’t come from politicians, it comes from us. Kamala Walz will get in the way less https://t.co/pdy03Ucj2I
— Justin T Brown (@jtbthought) August 17, 2024
Nobody seems to remember how Obama, through DHS fusion centers and the cops, orchestrated a seventeen-city crackdown on Occupy, a crackdown that broke the movement. Please, let’s not kid ourselves about what a Kamala administration would do.
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2028? He might as well call for a strike from an eventual Starfleet. These things have to result from unrest in the moment. Today would have been good. Or maybe October 1 or something. A 2028 strike called in 2024 isn’t going to happen. No one has the attention span for that. Carbon emissions cuts by 2050 won’t happen either.
Going by current trajectories, the chances that there will be unrest in the moment are excellent (but do consider reading the short history given in the post. A lot of planning goes into the seemingly spontaneous.
Anyhow, do you think banging your spoon on your highchair will do the trick?
Thank you, Lambert, for a wonderful, informative post.
And: this comment made me laugh out loud.
erm, the Labor component is, imo, an integeral part of the ‘capitalist’ enterprise. Labor is its own capitalistic concern. Selling its product (its labor) for the best price. And why not? So there’s that. / ;)
Did you read the conclusion? Consider it.
I did read the conclusion. I don’t disagree with it.
You forgot to mention free market, and Constitution.
Four more years of the denial by the elites of the growing economic and ecological collapse combined with a growing rage, possibly nihilistic, of the American nation, and the almost certain underground reorganization that takes the Occupy crackdown into account slamming into the growing censorship, generally repression, and the reappearance of the American governments’ use of false arrests and convictions as well as assassinations of American citizens. What an interesting future.
Just as the growing corruption, violence, and incompetence that arose from the War on Drugs and using fines, fees, and civil asset forfeitures to fund both the government, especially local city and county, and the police, I expect that the poor American policing of regular crime such as robbery, assault, rape, and murder, to get much worse. Just as with the military, one gets better at what they do, not at what they should do.
adding: why a general strike in 2028? Timing seems a bit odd. Another election year, but not earlier?
adding: why a general strike in 2028? Timing seems a bit odd. Another election year, but not earlier? Ah well….
I think that the large amount of time needed to organize the general strike as well as picking a good date requires the long lead time.
The typical UAW contract is for 3 years. This one is going longer so that when contract negotiations come up in the unions Lambert highlighted and perhaps others, they can set the end of their contracts on the same date or close. It would take a minimum of a three-year wait. The bold thing is that Fain announced this when he was explaining the contract they had won to the rank-and-file.
> The bold thing is that Fain announced this when he was explaining the contract they had won to the rank-and-file
That was the amazing thing. Since when so we have a President of anything standing up and explaning what they did and why?
“The Stand Up Strike will go down in history as an inflection point for our union, and for our movement.
We went to each of the Big 3 and proposed an expiration date of April 30, 2028. We did this for several reasons.
First, this allows us to strike on May Day, or International Workers’ Day.
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…”
Union contracts have a time limit. Reads like this latest UAW contract is timed to expire in 2028. Lord Google says the current UAW contract is for 4.5 years, and went into effect April 30 2024-minus-6-months ago.
Plus like jbird says, and Mr. Strether implies above, gotta organizize the organizizers if there’s to be a hope in hail of broader union (and labor) solidarity.
Of course, it gives the other guys plenty of time prepare, if anything comes of it we’ll get a good view of just how scabrous the modern American worker be.
Happy Labor Day.
> Timing seems a bit odd
As opposed to 2027 or 2026? For one thing, this is a big big project. Nothing on this scale has been attempted for a long, long time.
As far as 2028 being an election year, I don’t see that as a bad thing. Moves worker power (one hopes) to the center of “the conversation,” and will concentrate the minds of the parties long before that.
Thanks for this fine article. I listened to the video of Fain and the VP from beginning to end. I do the Garth and Wayne “we are not worthy” to both their new thinking about strike strategy that obviously did a great job of scarring the industry bargainers and the sound and member-centered set of priorities they accomplished.
But how did a Wob get into UAW leadership? He’d find a nemesis in the dark Walter Reuther who purged the UAW who purged the union of Communists not even for misguided ideological reasons but to retain power by adopting the methods of the rising anti-Communist campaign. To me, Fain talks, with a twinkle in his eye, in a way that would be approved by two heroes of mine: Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg.
He was useful while Biden was the candidate to go for some of that working class male vote, but I doubt if he’s much use to Kamala whose image is far from the idea of the general strike. I never imagined the UAW would sound like anarcho-syndicalists of Spain’s CNT.
As for Obama and Occupy, we had the Cleveland 5 here, a combination of essentially homeless kids and drifters, put into prison as terrorists for a plot cooked up by the “informant” to make it on federal land and funded by the feds themselves to the point of trying to pick up one of the “conspirators” on the day of the deed multiple times after he kept refusing to go along.
And with much lower stakes, I remember how talk of a general strike proposed by the regional board of the AFL-CIO was tamped down on DK by the push to elect a woman to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She lost. More and better, baby.
“If you’ve got ’em by the balls, the heart and mind soon follow.” –Author Unknown
Not Chuck Colson quoting Teddy Roosevelt?
Admittedly can’t confirm that on the intertubes.
> Not Chuck Colson quoting Teddy Roosevelt?
That’s one of the attributions, along with Mendel Rivers, but nobody’s really traced the quote to its source. Amazingly, Quote Investigator, the best site at this sort of thing, doesn’t include it!
I’ve also seen a similar quote in Elmore Leonard’s City Primeval (“heart and head” for “heart and mind”).
I’ve read of the quote as attributed to Lyndon Johnson when discussing the “Hearts and Minds” strategy in the Indochina Adventure.
Several class 1 railroads have completed contract negotiations with about half the unionized workforce, months early. This locks in “labor peace” until 2030, so no May Day 2028 on the railroads. Interesting to note this is being done on an individual company, not industry basis:
CSX adds more union agreements
A 5 year contract at 3.5%/year? Do these union officials not remember 9.2% inflation, or 24% since their 2019 contract expiration? Obviously no militancy present in railroad union misleadership.
>And then, for example, if thousands of other workers, union and nonunion alike, who are sympathetic to the cause, all happened to fall ill at the same time and had to take off work during the general strike… well, that’s just plumb bad luck.
How many Union contracts are written that state their members do not cross picket lines set up by another union? Solidarity for all? Wildcat strikes anyone?
It seems to me an obvious candidates for supply chain disruptions would be the railroad unions. And walk off the job with a F**k it attitude in support of the general strike even if their contract does not align with the others. Again, the wildcat walkoff angle.
Though I could be hopelessly naive.
On railroad unions, see Upstater immediately above. Further, the railroad unions are extremely fragmented by craft; I don’t think they could all be brought on board in eight years, let alone four. That’s why I didn’t pick them for the two additional unions. Of course, some locals probably are militant, and there’s always work-to-rule, sick-outs, even sabotage. All it would take to make a serious point would be shutting down a yard.
Also, maybe these unions should be reducing their political donations in order to build up their respective strike funds. For instance, The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, $26.4 million to Democrats. Save some of it instead. Send a message you’re for real. They are Listed below in a WAPO article, number 10 under the category of organizations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/biggest-campaign-donors-election-2024/
> $26.4 million to Democrats. Save some of it instead. Send a message you’re for real.
Excellent point.
Adding, I don’t see how it would be possible for the unions to turn off the spigot now. But they could do so the day after election day. Which is better? “Get out the vote” or “Get out the workers”? The latter, certainly (though that isn’t a very good slogan, perhaps readers can improve).
I’ve never been in a union yet in life, and I’m not affiliated with the UBC in any way, but I’ve had some conversations with members and also read a little of their history.
I’m not surprised they’re a major Democratic contributor, but I think there are a lot of gears turning behind that one. I think one part is a calculation (in a practical / cynical “if you can’t beat them” sort of way) that the wider construction workforce leans very conservative, but the industry is also very susceptible to conservative policies. They may feel they’re way more at risk from sticking their neck out & abandoning both parties in DC.
At the same time, I doubt you can separate the donations from the UBC president Douglas McCarron. I have no idea what to make of his various roles in uncovering scandals, being accused of them, etc. But the one thing that seems certain is that he’s a major force behind regionalization. It seems to have streamlined the UBC’s regular operations but also made it more hierarchical. In short, even though he didn’t come up that way, he definitely seems to think about organizations in a way very similar to the Democratic party apparatus.
I have never been, nor will ever be a royalist. That said, this Handel musical work says something to me. Maybe to others. From a Proms Palace concert. I don’t know.
Prom Palace – Music for the Royal Fireworks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I38Kw-oG0kE
We all appreciate the music, imo.
We could use more fireworks! That said, is this comment in the right place?
One union to keep an eye on would be the Nurse’s Union. They have a pretty good track record as to organizing and ‘action.’ If they would go out alongside the Industrial Unions…..
The trick is to find the critical bottlenecks and ‘utilize’ them for your preferred ends. Say, what if there was a strike at the oil and gas shipping terminals on the General Strike Day?
There are a lot more possibilities here than most people realize. Our society is very fragile. Take advantage of that fact.
I’m a seasoned labour market relations scholar – but primarily Nordic/European ones.
Regarding the point made by ambrit above, I agree that nurses’ unions are a good model – also in Europe. As we explain in our chapter in this book, the most radical/militant unions nowadays can be found in the public sector and in services. In a non-diplomatic turn of phrase, this is because they’re the ones that get shafted, even in the relatively equal Nordic labour markets.
https://www.routledge.com/Workers-Power-and-Society-Power-Resource-Theory-in-Contemporary-Capitalism/Arnholtz-Refslund/p/book/9781032547862?srsltid=AfmBOoojyc1ES3IVywrCd5DWssTL7XnjHtrwJk7jz99IoJo1TWMCn7Yp
On strikes generally, this is a very current topic in my academic corner. The big question is, why there are so few strikes nowadays compared to e.g. the 1970s and 1980s. A big part of the answer is the organization rate, but this is not the whole story. In my informed opinion a big reason is also the reorganizing of work through outsourcing, subcontracting, hired guns etc. That makes it really hard for unions to have united activity, because those “peripheral” workers may be in some project for a limited time. I don’t know to what extent this is true for the US, but with firm specialization have come many new unions also, for many different fields. So rather than a kind of “big tent” there is a collection of smaller unions focused on their own working conditions – which to some extent can be coordinated by national unions. However, this requires a lot of coordination and employers may exploit this.
So one main point is that current organization of work doesn’t quite help a general strike – especially regarding the services sector.
The other main point is contract alignment. This is an interesting idea as such – in Finland collective agreements have more or less the same duration in each sector, so negotiations would take mostly place in Autumn. But here we also get to national systems of industrial action: in Finland (and most of the world, of course) there is a peace clause for the duration of the CA. This means strikes during the validity of the CA are illegal – depending on the country, political strikes are allowed. After the end of the CA usually the then-current provisions stay in use until the new CA. The period of negotiation is typically the period in which strikes for higher wages are allowed by law (I suppose this is valid also for the US).
Announcing a general strike on the basis of the contract alignment seems rather farfetched to me. General strikes usually have been against the government, not a tool in collective bargaining. So indeed it is a big question, what the goal is. From my point of view, a general strike is a political instrument, and if it is in this way aimed at Medicare, then that’s a laudable cause. But even without knowing the specifics of the US, I think a general strike is unlikely. In Finland we have the most anti-union government ever, at the moment, and even here, in the Valhalla of unions, they did not manage to sustain protest for very long.
RE: organizing, worker power, and chokepoints.
On organizing: Workers (and other people) have become atomized. Working class community and civic, organizations have all but disappeared and workers spend their non-work hours watching Netflix or Ice Road Truckers or Youtube videos featuring tractors. Not as members of the Elks or the Grange or the Polish (Italian/ Hibernian/ Italian Club.) Or going for a nightly brew and chat at the local bar. And organizing and running a community organization hones an organizational skill set, as well as serving as an informational and solidarity-boosting network. So how does a labor organizer counter fragmentation?
On worker power: removing the services of critical groups of workers will disrupt life and the economy. Transportation (truckers, flight crews, public transit workers): health care (nurses): schools (teachers, school bus drivers) and has a spillover effect as in ‘no childcare so parent(s) stays home from work:’ baristas and fast food workers (a nation without its morning shot of caffeine or breakfast sandwich!)
On chokepoints: our world is now linked and controlled by digital systems, systems that are attacked, breached, invaded, disabled daily (internet search for ‘cyber attacks and data breaches’ is revealing and frightening!). Airlines and airports, pipelines and power grids, banks and grocery stores, health care, the internet … Last week’s ‘cyberattack’ at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, bringing down baggage services and flight information boards, caused minor chaos. Earlier this year, an attack in late May on the Seattle Public Library’s system, resulted in loss of library services: no internet, printing, ebooks or audiobooks, and recovery took weeks. And, a big ‘whoops!’ by CrowdStrike, the ubiquitous cybersecurity software brought health care, transportation and banking (among others) businesses to an (expensive) halt. One line of ‘faulty’ code!’
Randi Weingarten, if she is even around anymore, won’t determine whether AFT locals participate in a general strike nearly 4 years from now. AFT has little ability to command the tactics of its locals – several AFT locals went on strike last year at Rutgers and won historic gains, while AFT National mainly watched on the sidelines. They of course would tell a different story, but the point is they have no capacity to keep rank-and-file-led strikes from happening if those locals commit to organizing themselves.
Unlikely to happen for many reasons…But why are the unions concerned about the Taft-Hartley Act, when the Federales pay no attention to any law they don’t like?
In any event, 2028 is likely to be so messy that this strike will be a minor issue…
there will be little or no sit down strikes. obama proved that the police state set up by bill clinton, joe biden and the supreme court will have its day.
but, we do not have to have a sit down strike. the rich free traders that run the nation, will do it for us.
every day more and more people world wide under the free trade umbrella can no longer afford let alone buy, the goods and services these geniuses hawk.
the only thing holding up bill clintons world economy, is the federal reserve. and that is another rube goldberg contraption, where almost all money goes to a few, and fuels ever more speculation, deflation on the global south and wage earners in general and inflation for us.
which means even less consumption.
no doubt there will be riots, even some sections of the country will become ungovernable. but the rich will just squeeze harder, making their eventual collapse quit predictable.
i do not take unions in general serious. they are pouring money into the nafta democrats pockets, even as i type this.
according to hedges, america has lost 30 million production jobs since 1996.
and the nafta democrats refuse to acknowledge what they have done. can you imagine trying to get workers to vote for you, and bill clinton was a keynote speaker at the laughable democrat convention. 30 million production jobs have been lost since 1996.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Lm63-weV9M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-IIpTbx7LQ
and the unions still are pouring money into the nafta democrats pockets.
its become laughable, harris/walz are begging for blue collar support, and still free trade at the same time.
i thought picking walz was for Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, that seems to be the places the nafta democrats have been spending most of their time since the end of the coronation convention.
the nafta democrats think that they will not make the same mistake hillary made and ignore the blue collar workers. but with the blue collar workers, that ship sailed in 1996.
Just a few various thoughts. Like Henry Moon Pie, it is both cool and surprising to hear a major, contemporary union head even hint at a general strike. I don’t know how sincere Fain is, but assuming he is, I do think his approach deserves a little more credit for a few reasons.
1. If nothing else, it serves as a “focal point” in a game theoretic sense. Not only does May Day have international and historical significance, but it will be 6 months before the 2028 election (if we have one). And focal points become more important precisely when direct coordination becomes difficult.
2. If he is sincere, then keeping cards close to his chest about any detailed tactical & operational plans seems wise to me.
3. And if he is truly sincere, then I would interpret his couching it in terms of contract negotiations and “worker benefits” as a rhetorical way to mask how radical his plans actually are. My understanding from grungy, old, syndicalist theory is that a successful general strike is pretty much proletarian checkmate. If you can pull it off, you’re no longer negotiating with capital, you’re giving them terms of surrender. If they say no, you just stay on strike and they watch their literal business activity and raison d’etre evaporate more each day. As a result, I wouldn’t take any supposed goals for after the strike too literally; the important thing is to have people that know the actual processes and are capable of organizing them. And not in the fuzzy way labor or community organizing is meant, but in a more concrete, technical sense, similar to the “long march through the institutions.”