Cover: On November 26, the biggest one-day general strike in the world happened in India where over 200 million workers paralyzed the country and refused to work. Supported by 10 central trade unions and over 250 farmers organizations, the strike led to a near total shutdown in multiple Indian states. Via https://www.leftvoice.org/farmers-unions-call-for-national-general-strike-dec-8/
Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee || The working class’s organizing muscle has grown weaker for decades. As bosses have built their strength off our failures, our response has been to stick to the routines we’re comfortable with. Now as the ultimate boss, Donald Trump, gears up for a final attack, we furiously wind up to use our best maneuver, the general strike, and a tendon snaps.
Over the past month, people all across the country have come to a startlingly quick realization: Our ultimate leverage is that the bosses desperately need us to stay on the job. We’re even lucky enough to be able to see from history that the last time workers got what they wanted was when they all got together and stopped working. If enough people in one community join in to shut down multiple major industries, that’s called a general strike. While this tactic is simple in concept, it takes a lot of organizing to pull off.
Historical examples
The classic examples we have of general strikes are the two that shook the country in the middle of the Great Depression. Over the course of six months in 1934, 40,000 workers in Minneapolis and 150,000 workers in San Francisco walked off the job in protest of murders by police, shutting down both cities. That same year, 10,000 autoworkers in Ohio and 400,000 textile workers across the U.S. struck, and it was all just too much for the bosses to bear. The following year, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, a landmark piece of legislation that has defined the labor movement as we know it today.
What’s remarkable about these strikes isn’t just their size but that the workers who joined them had so much to lose. With unemployment at 25 percent, most bosses wouldn’t have minded sending a few more uppity employees out to the breadlines. Just a few years prior, most striking workers could face jail or worse for defying local judges who ordered them back to work. What could have possibly made so many workers willing to take that chance?
Strikes were more common back then, for starters. In 1934 alone, 1.4 million U.S. workers struck; in 2023, only a one-third as many struck. Workers exercised the organizing muscle more often, so they knew how to use it when they needed it. These strikes also had powerful triggers that jolted ordinary people into action when they otherwise would’ve been complacent. That spark transformed the idea of mass action from the pet project of a few radicals into a fearsome reality.
General strikes today
In more recent years, workers have been asking how to replicate this level of mass action. These strikes took tens of thousands of people, more than any one union or political group could turn out. The issues these strikers raised had to be widely and deeply felt by the people in their communities. They shut down hundreds of businesses, which was key to the success of those strikes and key to our potential for strikes now.
If only the most ideologically motivated workers at one factory went on strike, the boss could just fire them and move on. Strikers got their power from the fact that they were able to get the regular people they worked alongside to take action with them, something that you can do at your workplace today.
That doesn’t mean your workplace has to be union before you can strike; it took plenty of nonunion workers to pull off the general strikes of the past, but you don’t get to wing it, either. If you don’t know how to bring your co-workers together to fight your boss, how are you going to fight the president?
Building to a general strike
The fortunate reality is that, to get your workplace ready for a general strike, you need to follow the same simple strategies workers have been using for years to organize new shops across the country. The first is to realize that your co-workers aren’t going to take action with someone they don’t know and they don’t trust. Do you know all your co-workers? What do they think of you? Do they trust you? If not, can you build that trust? If there’s someone your co-workers do trust, can you build a relationship with that person? It can be as easy as thinking of the co-worker you talk to the least and asking them about their day. When you’re ready to take the next step, ask them to hang out outside of work.
The next is to understand what your co-workers care about. Unless they’ve been directly harmed by ICE, many may not be motivated by issues that don’t feel tangible to them in the moment. Don’t see this as a barrier — it’s exactly where real organizing starts. At first, your co-workers might start just noticing problems at work, but once they get a sense of the power you all hold as a group, they’ll be one step closer to realizing there might be bigger problems they’re willing to take on together.
If you’re ready to get started in your workplace, we offer regular, online trainings on how to talk with your co-workers and build an organizing committee.
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