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THE CALL IS OUT FOR MASS STRIKES IN 4 YEARS  
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Sarah Lazare
October 14, 2024
Workday Magazine
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_ These labor leaders are organizing for 2028. Cooperation across
unions and sectors—if carried out on a large scale—would be
unprecedented in the 21st century United States. _

General Motors' Spring Hill union employees walk the picket line near
Ultium Cells in Spring Hill, Tenn., Monday, Oct. 30, 2023., Denny
Simmons / The Tennessean

 

There is a credible call for a general strike in the United States in
four years.

The call first came from the United Auto Workers after its fall 2023
stand-up strike
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in which the union took on the Big Three carmakers simultaneously in
rolling, surprise
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work stoppages. All three contracts that emerged are slated to expire
on the same day: May 1, 2028, International Workers’ Day. This is
not the first time UAW has aligned the Big Three contracts, but what
the union did next is remarkable. It put out a challenge to the US
labor movement: “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,” UAW announced
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This appeal for joint expiration on such a meaningful day
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for workers opens up possibilities ranging from mass, simultaneous
strikes that disrupt industries across the country to a tremendous
number of concurrent contract campaigns that increase worker leverage.
This kind of cooperation across unions and sectors—if carried out on
a large scale—would be unprecedented in the 21st century United
States.

In the contemporary US context, most strikes occur when a contract has
expired, in part due to the prevalence of no-strike clauses in
collective bargaining agreements. (Though workers certainly strike at
other times as well, for example, when fighting for first contracts
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or in political protest
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And sometimes they strike in defiance of laws that prohibit certain
workers from striking at all, as we saw during the wave of red-state
teacher strikes
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It was contract alignment that enabled UAW to strike all Big Three at
once, and Shawn Fain, the UAW president, is urging the labor movement
to scale up this kind of joint action. “We want a general strike,”
Fain told
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UAW’s national political conference in January 2024. “We want
everybody walking out just like they do in other countries.”

The UAW’s public call set off waves throughout the US labor
movement, which has not seen a general strike in 78 years
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though they used to be more common
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century
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Of course, urging coordination on this scale is one thing, and doing
the organizing required to make it a reality is another. These days,
calls for a general strike are often the domain of “starry-eyed
dreamers,” Dan DiMaggio noted
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in a November 2023 article for _Labor Notes_.

But what makes the push stand out is _who_ is making it. “Now the
call is coming from a major international union” that has already
aligned its own Big Three contracts representing 146,000 workers,
DiMaggio wrote. Fain, for his part, is sober
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about the fact that “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.”

There are signs that credible unions and labor leaders are taking this
coordination and work seriously. The Chicago Teachers Union AFT-IFT
Local 1 is working with UAW and other worker and training
organizations to create an organizing institute for the express
purpose of getting ready for May Day 2028. Some major unions, like the
American Federation of Teachers, are formally supporting the effort to
align contracts, alongside a growing number of local, regional, and
labor bodies within the AFL-CIO. Labor activists say interest and
momentum are spreading, including among rank-and-file formations like
Unite All Workers for Democracy, a grassroots movement within the
UAW. 

Details are yet to be worked out; it is not clear, for example,
whether there will be joint demands nationally or locally, and if so,
what these would be. But some unions and labor bodies are taking
meaningful steps now to organize, so that they can take action
together in four years.

Sitting in a conference room at the CTU headquarters, the union’s
president, Stacy Davis Gates, told me the stakes are high. “I do not
think America will stand as a representative democracy if labor is not
more prominently leading in this new era. What other force gives you
half a chance against corporations and billionaires who do not care
about anyone else? We are the means to their billions. Why should we
settle for philanthropy and crumbs?” 

BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE

Jackson Potter, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, told me
that “high level” conversations are taking place between CTU and
UAW about establishing an institute “that would help coordinate May
1, 2028 and beyond.” The institute, for now called the May 2028 and
Beyond Organizing Center, is still in the process of getting
established and securing funding. But some heavy hitters are involved
in discussions, including Bargaining for the Common Good, a network of
unions and community groups, and the Midwest Academy, a movement
training organization.

Davis Gates, who came up with the idea for the institute, told me,
“You’ve got UAW and CTU doing it, and we don’t bluff.”

Creating this institute is time sensitive; ideally it would be
launched within the next six months, Potter said. Most union contracts
are two-to-five-years long, which means that if unions want to align
with the May 1, 2028 expiration date, they must start working on it as
soon as possible. CTU is currently bargaining its own contract for
roughly 26,000 educators in Chicago Public Schools. “I presume that
contract will expire on May 1, 2028,” Potter said, “at which point
UAW and CTU should be making an announcement: Come join us, some of
the biggest, baddest unions in the country.” 

The conversations about creating this body are serious, even as the
possibilities for what the institute could do are vast. An institute
could “put staff on the ground,” provide regional trainings,
coordinate campaign planning, and share databases, Potter said. It
could also be a place for coordinating demands, whether nationally or
locally, and for discussing “all the best legislative ideas,”
Potter said. “It could be labor’s ALEC.”

The CTU is no stranger
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to the work of organizing strikes. Its massive work stoppage in 2012
is a touchstone in social-justice unionism—teachers struck
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not only to improve their own conditions, but to stem the corporate
education reform that was wreaking havoc on Chicago’s school system.
In the process, the teachers built deep bonds with community members.

“When we shut down schools, this whole goddamn city is at a
standstill,” Davis Gates said. “Now imagine that on May 1, 2028.
That’s power. That’s power of agreement and consent. You have
organized, talked through. People have agreed, consented. It’s not a
passive voter guide, not a passive, ‘Come out in November.’ If you
are really working in solidarity for workers’ rights, you’re
working every day on that.”

UNION SUPPORT

At its annual convention in July, the American Federation of Teachers,
which represents 1.8 million members, passed a resolution
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titled, “Supporting The UAW’s Call To Align Contract Expirations
For May 1.” According to Potter, that victory emerged from a
collaboration between CTU and the Baltimore Teachers Union. The
resolution says “the AFT will encourage all our locals to consider
this common expiration as a useful tactic in the fight to advance
racial, economic and social justice.” 

This union is not alone. The American Postal Workers Union also passed
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a supportive resolution at its national convention in July. And
Brandon Mancilla, the elected UAW Region 9A director, told me that UAW
has also “been having conversations with different healthcare
unions” that are interested in joining. 

The union United Electrical Workers is also having “active
conversations” about the call for contract alignment, the union’s
general president, Carl Rosen, told me. Sara Nelson, president of the
Association of Flight Attendants-CWA who called for
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a general strike to end the government shutdown in 2019, told me over
text message, “The call for aligning contract expirations and
planning for a general strike is powerful in and of itself. The
consciousness of the power of solidarity that grows from cross-sector
organizing begins to change social order before feet hit the
streets.”

Not every effort to get formal support, though, has been successful.
The National Education Association voted down a new business item
supporting the alignment on the first day of its representative
assembly, before the National Education Association Staff Organization
went on strike
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But there are signs of momentum. Jessie Kelly is a founding member of
Unite All Workers for Democracy, a rank-and-file movement within the
UAW focused on making the union more democratic and accountable. This
grassroots body, which helped Fain get elected, is “definitely
talking about” the call for joint expirations,” Kelly said. “In
the auto industry, as auto workers, we have this culture of, ‘We are
ready to strike.’ The idea of our contracts aligning with other
industries makes sense.”

“What we’re doing at UAWD is trying to build local UAWD chapters
within locals, so that by the time it’s time to go back into strike,
we have strong militant shop-floor leaders and rank-and-file leaders,
so that the push comes from the rank and file,” said Kelly, who
works as a skilled trades mold maker at the GM Technical Center in
Warren, Michigan. “You’re only successful when it comes from the
rank and file.”

JC Bengtson is an auto worker with UAW Local 1268, currently out of
work due to Stellantis’s idling of the Belvidere Assembly Plant. UAW
is organizing for a possible national strike—before 2028—to force
the company to follow through on its contractual commitments
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to reopen the plant and expand manufacturing in the town. “We’re
easy to pick off as individual unions, much less, within those unions,
as individuals, locals, and plants—as you’ve seen,” he told me.
“It’s a call for a large organizational effort to have all of
labor stand up, and I think that’s a great thing to aspire to.”

LOOKING TO MINNESOTA

Several labor leaders I spoke to pointed to Minnesota’s alignment as
an example that is inspiring their own preparations for 2028. Greg
Nammacher is the president of SEIU Local 26, a property services union
in the Twin Cities. He told me, “Local 26 is aligned with
winter/spring of 2028. All of our contracts for all union workers that
had expirations in 2024—8,000 of our members—are all aligned for
that same general quarter within 2028. We’re all in. They are all
expiring within about four months of it.”

For Nammacher, May 1, 2028, “is a chance to take local experiments
we’ve been doing and think about what that could look like at
national level.” The struggle to align contracts in order to gain
more worker leverage is more common within unions, and around 15 years
ago, SEIU Local 26 began working on this internally between its
different contracts. Then, roughly 10 years ago, the union got
involved in efforts beyond its own workers to build coalitions with
unions and community groups. These relationships gelled into an
effort, which began in earnest in early 2022, to align contracts
across unions in Minnesota to expire in March 2024.

What resulted from this joint organizing effort was a complex and
multi-faceted escalation this past spring
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involving at least 13 unions, workers’ centers, and community
groups, mobilizing around shared demands: dignified jobs, stable
housing, good schools, and environmental protections. Unions across
sectors participated, many of them with contract expirations in close
proximity to each other. Some waged short strikes
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some went out on longer ones
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while the workers’ center Centro De Trabajadores Unidos En La Lucha
targeted
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developers. The coordination culminated in a week of action in early
March, and was held up as a national example
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bargaining for the common good, in which workers approach bargaining
with a recognition that they are also members of communities, whose
well-being, too, can be the focus of workers’ collective action.

According to Nammacher, “there is no question that we won more in
our contracts than we would have if we had fought separately.” SEIU
Local 26 got its biggest wage raises ever, won employer-paid
retirement after around 20 years of fighting for it, and won green
cleaning, which focuses on safer and more environmentally friendly
cleaning processes, which was among the community demands. Other
unions, too, got stronger contracts as a result, he said, and the
labor movement won its first hearing on a cross-sectoral Labor
Standards Advisory Board, which would give workers a tool to protect
labor standards across industries in Minneapolis. What’s more, he
said, “we dominated the narrative on our issues as working people in
general. This was just the buzz of the town.”

Still, Nammacher told me, “We are still in the early stages of
understanding how to use these tools. We did a little bit in
Minneapolis. Imagine what we could do if we had multiple regions
experimenting with this between now and 2028.”

It is not yet clear what, exactly, joint expiration will look like
scaled up to the national level; this is the question organizers must
grapple with over the next four years. Mancilla from UAW told me, “A
general strike is the goal, but further than that, the goal is to make
the labor movement finally ask the question of what it would look like
to coordinate and work together and move as one movement, rather than
as isolated unions.”

“What results from this is a question. But, that said, if it looks
like something more regional and coordinated than all out, that’s a
vast improvement from what currently exists in the labor movement,
which is the absence of coordination and planning.”

BUILDING THE WILL

Parallel organizing efforts are taking place among labor, regional,
and labor bodies within the AFL-CIO. Labor activists have formed a
website called Bargain Together, where they are sharing template
language [[link removed]] for a resolution
that “encourages unions to consider aligning contract expirations
for May 1, 2028, or other dates as locally determined.” 

Connor Lewis, the president of Seven Mountains Central Labor Council
AFL-CIO, Pennsylvania, said the effort “started with a
conversation” he had with the presidents of the North Alabama Area
Labor Council, AFL-CIO, and the Troy Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO in
New York. “We had a sense it was important to do something to
prepare, and do some of the ground work and encourage people to take
up the UAW’s call for contract alignment,” Lewis said. “We saw
our labor council as a key place to do that. It’s the only place
where local unions sit down at the same table and strategize.”

The resolution has spread “organically,” Lewis said; sometimes he
only discovered another resolution has succeeded after it passed. So
far, two state labor councils—Vermont and Washington—have passed
resolutions, as have two area labor federations in New York and
Massachusetts. And nine local councils and chapters have done so as
well, including the one where Lewis is president.

While the resolution has been passed by local and regional bodies of
the AFL-CIO, the national AFL-CIO, the largest labor federation in the
country, has not taken a position on the effort, and in one case
provided guidance to toss out a resolution on legal grounds.On
February 21, the Troy Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO in New York
unanimously passed
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a resolution that “encourages unions to consider aligning contract
expirations,” and calls for “unwaveringly supporting affiliates
and the broader labor movement in bargaining fair contracts, and in
anticipated or active labor disputes.” 

But when that same resolution language was submitted to the convention
of the New York State AFL-CIO, it was determined to be “out of
order.” That ruling was influenced by guidance from the office of
the general counsel for the national AFL-CIO, which said the
resolution violates articles 19 and 20 of the AFL-CIO Rules Governing
State Central Bodies
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These articles say that state central bodies can’t order a local
union to strike or take a strike vote, and can’t take part in the
collective bargaining of local affiliates, unless requested. According
to the AFL-CIO, that guidance was provided upon request, but the
national federation is not retaliating against any bodies that are
passing resolutions.

Sean Collins, president of the Troy Area Labor Council, said the
proposed resolution doesn’t violate those amendments. “It instead
offers that we’re prepared to support the efforts of affiliates and
provide whatever support and guidance we can to facilitate May Day
2028-related organizing and bargaining efforts,” Collins said. “We
have asked them for specific guidance in terms of what would make the
resolution not out of order, and they haven’t provided anything.”

“I have not heard from anyone saying that we shouldn’t proceed
with this, and I have not heard from any other local or regional
affiliate CLC or area labor federations saying they can’t pass these
resolutions,” Collins said. “It’s not going to have a chilling
effect on our efforts. We see these resolutions as an opportunity to
reinvigorate and revitalize these CLCs across the country.” 

I asked the national AFL-CIO about what happened in New York, its
reasoning for its guidance, and whether it has taken a position, as a
national body, on the contract alignment effort. Mia Jacobs, AFL-CIO
director of media relations, sent me a statement in response. “As a
democratic body of 60 affiliate unions, the AFL-CIO brings unions
together to have critically important discussions about how to advance
the shared interests of working people. To date, no affiliate union
has brought a specific contract alignment proposal to the Executive
Council of the AFL-CIO for consideration,” she said. “We look
forward to continuing the essential conversations happening throughout
the national labor movement about building worker power through
contract alignment and how best to empower workers to keep
winning.” 

Jacobs said, “Collective action is the core of what we do and who we
are as America’s labor movement. The UAW’s strike at the Big Three
automakers last year was a powerful testament of that solidarity,
showing that workers can take on the biggest corporations against all
odds and make historic gains for their members when they do it
together.”

DEFINING THE GOALS

Part of the organizing process must, necessarily, be deliberation over
what, if any, joint demands could be issued—whether nationally,
regionally, or locally. Coordination could, theoretically, allow
workers to tackle some of the issues that extend beyond any one
bargaining table. And May 1, 2028, will come during another
presidential election year, raising possibilities that labor could
make demands of the state, or influence political discourse.

“If working people are truly going to win on a massive scale—truly
win healthcare as a human right, win pensions so everyone can retire
with dignity, win an improved standard of living and more time off the
clock so we can spend more of our time with our family and
friends—then unions have to start thinking bigger,” Fain urged in
an April 30 op-ed
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for _In These Times_.

Potter posed a few possibilities: “Can you work on national debt
forgiveness? Is there a local ordinance that forgives people’s water
bills, and a national one that forgives their debt? Could we win
something like national healthcare? Could we win something like the
PRO Act? We could be asking for a 32-hour work week, or taking on
foreign policy consensus, like bipartisan support for Israel.”

But this doesn’t mean joint demands are a given. Some make the case
that alignment, in itself, is valuable in the US context, where union
density is historically low
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even as union enthusiasm is surging
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“I am excited about joint demands where they are possible, but I
think this alignment is incredibly powerful even if there aren’t
joint demands,” Nammacher told me. “We should not let the desire
to have joint demands get in the way of all the other levels of
alignment.” After all, he said, Minnesota shows “we are able to
get more in separate bargaining even if we don’t have joint
demands.” And there’s value, he said, in “coordination and
strengthening our muscles.” 

Ultimately, union leaders say, there is more work to be done to set a
roadmap for 2028. But, according to Davis Gates, the conditions are
already being established. “The best uniting we have is that
everyone is getting exploited as a worker,” she said. “You can be
Black, white, immigrant, female, male, transgender. But if you’re
punching in somewhere, somebody is exploiting you. You’re not
getting your agency, your fair share.”

By Sarah Lazare [[link removed]] | October
14, 2024
Sarah is the Editor for Workday Magazine.

_​This article is a joint publication of _Workday Magazine_ and _The
Nation [[link removed]].

* Organizing for a General Strike; US Unions; UAW; Chicago Teachers
Union;
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