The idea of a general strike has entered the national conversation

Something remarkable happened last week. Centrist Democratic Senator Rubin Gallego (AZ) advocated “a true national strike,” if Trump interferes with the midterm elections. “Do not go to work. … if you’re a pilot do not show up, if you drive a train do not show up, if you’re a teacher do not show up, we grind the country to a halt.”

We don’t know exactly what Trump’s plans are for November, whether the organization will exist to make such an action feasible or how serious Gallego is. But to even hear these words come out of his mouth is remarkable. Certainly, no one could have imagined him saying this just a month ago.

This is one legacy of the successful Minneapolis Jan. 23 “no work, no school, no shopping” call. About one-quarter of all Minnesotans participated in some way and, by my rough calculations, at least 15 percent of those who live in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro region did not go to work.

That’s about the percentage of New Yorkers absent from work on any day of the 2005 NYC transit strike.

Might we be on the verge of what Mark and Paul Engler call a “moment of the whirlwind,” when “the ordinary rules of social engagement are suspended and new possibilities instead come to the fore”?

And what might this mean in New York, and particularly to our unionized and non-union working-class?

Minneapolis… and beyond.

To help answer those questions, we can look at what some militant union leaders, labor academics and Minneapolis organizers have been saying over the past few months.

To Jackson Potter and Alex Caputo-Pearl, of the Chicago and Los Angeles teacher unions, any sustained labor resistance to authoritarianism will need to spring from “large local affiliates” (rather than their Internationals, Central Labor Councils, or the AFL-CIO) working in concert in their hometowns.

Then, those locals need to ally themselves “with community organizations and national progressive networks” to collectively organize local events – and to help them take the temper of those who are not currently unionized.

Their prescription looks far more like Minneapolis, where labor answered the call of community organizations – and their own members – than what happened in New York City during the October “No Kings” march, when unions mounted their own small march, separate from the hundreds of thousands who marched through midtown.

For example, Greg Nammacher, president of Minneapolis’s Service Employees International Union Local 26, which represents building workers (like 32BJ here), but also Uber and Lyft drivers and airport workers, described how a meeting “of our top 150 rank-and-file members” shortly before Jan. 23 created a “moment of uncertainty” because its contracts bar strike action.

The impetus to endorse “no work” came when those worker-leaders began to demand support for the action, and then 95 percent of participants indicated that they planned to not go to work. “Leadership was not organizing this whatsoever,” said Nammacher.

What that call did, said Kieran Knutson, president of Communications Workers of America Local 7250, which represents workers at AT&T retail stores in Minnesota and AT&T “legacy” workers throughout the Midwest, “was create a situation where tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of workers were absent from work, almost like a mass sick out.”

Undoubtedly, some employers might have pressed legal claims. But, in the face of overwhelming popular support, how many would want to seem to stand with ICE and Trump?

That’s what Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike! means when he explains that what he calls social strikes “acquire support from sectors like educational, medical, and legal professionals; civil society institutions like universities, hospitals, and religious denominations; and political forces. [They] join social strikes not out of fondness for social movements, but from a growing understanding that eliminating an autocracy may be necessary for their own self-preservation” – or to avoid finding themselves on the wrong side of the whirlwind.

Could it Happen Here?

If, to return to Gallego, Trump moved to sabotage the midterm elections, can we really imagine Governor Hochul, Attorney General James and Mayor Mamdani invoking the Taylor Law – if the alternative was decades of fascist rule?

So, could Minneapolis happen here?

Could New York’s unions educate, then mobilize, their members? Much will depend on the temper of those members, and the larger community.

“I have learned as much or more about organizing in the past 10 days than I have learned in the past 10 years,” reported Minneapolis faith leader Doran Schrantz. “I have learned that people will take great, great risks to defend themselves, their neighbors and one another. I have learned that our job as ‘architects’ is to build the larger containers for people to act and, when the moment calls for it, they absolutely will… Popular front is [just] a theory until you see it.”

And Nammacher adds, “this is an incredibly hopeful story about combining systematic, intentional, self-conscious organizing with … understanding that in a moment when the entire community is provoked, things will move far beyond your organizational control. There’s a surge of momentum that is just breathtaking and comes from every direction. It’s that heroism — and the risks that people, even outside of organization, are willing to take — that has combined to make this so powerful.”

Still, “great risks … beyond your organizational control … leadership was not organizing this whatsoever,” are words that send shivers up the spines of many union leaders.

“Historically,” warns Brecher, “unions have often deterred their members from participating in mass strike actions even when the rank and file wanted to strike.” So, “self-organization at the grassroots” of activists who advocate mass action, organize in their workplaces, build links across unions, “will be a crucial ingredient for any social strike.”

"This core," urge Potter and Caputo-Pearl, “must drive a politics … that is not satisfied with simply deposing an autocrat” but also raising political and economic demands that will assure a better future.

The national call for “no work” on May 1, 2026, writes Stephanie Luce, is “a place to test our muscles; Labor Day will be another. And a real test may come this fall, if the Trump administration interferes with the midterm elections.” Luce is one of the organizers of the May Day Solidarity School this Saturday at Murry Berstraum HS. Its union sponsors include UAW-9A, Writers Guild East, NewsGuild, the Taxi Workers Alliance, the Committee of Interns and Residents and her own PSC-CUNY.

That’s the start of the kind of organization New York’s working class will need if the whirlwind blows.

Still, the largest and most powerful New York unions remain missing in action. Where is DC37? Where is the UFT? Where is TWU Local 100, whose contract expires just a few days after May Day? In these unions, and others, those “grassroots activists” will need to step up.