‘No Kings’ and No More Patience Waiting On a General Strike?
Oct. 18’s “No Kings Day” demonstrations included increasing calls for a general strike to confront the Trump administration’s rising authoritarianism.
By Joe Maniscalco
Unlike previous “No Kings” rallies held across the county earlier this year where demonstrators were a lot more circumspect about calling for a nationwide general strike in response to the Trump administration’s growing authoritarian attacks on American democracy—Oct. 18’s demonstrations were much more definitive about the need to take such action now.
In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson actually called for a general strike to combat Trump’s “tyranny” during that city’s “No Kings Day” rally. In New York City, demonstrators marched up 7th Avenue with a giant banner visible from above declaring, “Defend Democracy: It’s Time For A General Strike.”
When last we checked, the Instagram post reporting on the Chicago march had 139,431 likes, while the NYC post received 71,368 likes.
Calls for a general strike have been brewing for a long time inside the labor movement prior to the start of Trump 2.0 in January.
Former Amalgamated Transit Union VP Bruce Hamilton urged workers to start planning for a general strike way back in 2019 in response to the increasing threat of climate catastrophe.
“Workers really do want to engage in radical action with a clear chance of making their lives better,” Hamilton said at the time.
In 2023, UAW International President Shawn Fain called on the rest of the labor movement to begin gearing up for a May Day 2028 general strike to “create a crisis for the billionaire class to win more for us.”
The more than 400,000 active member UAW, which also boasts another 580,000 retirees throughout North America and Puerto Rico, is still urging their union brothers and sisters to push expiring contracts to align as close as possible to April 30, 2028.
“Building the strike weapon takes lots of work and preparation,” the UAW warned two years ago.
“Workers Unite”: Members of the Committee for Interns and Residents [CIR] jeers Donald Trump’s devastating Medicaid cuts and urges worker solidarity at NYC’s “No Kings Day” march on Oct. 18. Photo/Judith Sokoloff.
But just how much preparation will a general strike aimed at confronting the Trump agenda need? How much will actually be organized—and how much of it will happen organically?
“If you look at history,’” Class Struggle Unionism author Joe Burns told Work-Bites in 2023, “the way that we ended up with general strikes is that workers engaged in strike activity—and then when one group of workers got in trouble they put out an appeal picket lines started to spread. Other workers joined in the battle—that’s how we got a general strike. So, I think if people want to see some sort of general strike or larger strike activity—the best way to do it, is to focus on building strikes and class conflict wherever we are.”
Earlier this year, Association of American Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson told Work-Bites contributor and WBAI radio host Bob Hennelly that American workers have “very few options but to join together to organize for a general strike,” after the Trump administration stripped Transportation Safety Administration [TSA] workers of their collective bargaining rights and threatened the safety of U.S. air travel.
“But just how much preparation will a general strike aimed at confronting the Trump agenda need? How much will actually be organized—and how much of it will happen organically? ”
“What we have to understand is the people in charge, the people doing this, are doing this to make the federal workforce miserable—to make us all miserable and demoralized, and shrink into our own space to inspire scarcity and competition among workers so that we don’t rise up together to stop them,” Nelson continued.
Nelson previously called for a general strike six years ago, during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, when the safety of air travel was also plunged into jeopardy during Donald Trump’s first administration.
On the morning of Jan. 25, 2019 Nelson backed up her call for a general strike to end that nearly five-week shutdown by announcing, “We’re mobilizing immediately.”
Trump agreed to provisionally reopen the government just a couple of hours later. The New York Times responded by calling Nelson, “America’s most powerful flight attendant.”
In 2017, it only took the New York City Taxi Workers Alliance a few hours to mount an effective one-hour strike at JFK International Airport that helped combat the Trump administration’s so-called “Muslim travel ban.”
Despite that kind of impactful militancy, however, the AFL-CIO—the federation of 63 national and international labor unions representing nearly 15 million active and retired workers in the U.S.—hasn’t exactly been gung-ho about calling for general strike to confront the Trump administration’s authoritarianism.
The umbrella organization threatened to put the entire Vermont State Labor Council into trusteeship after the group—under the leadership of former president David Van Deusen—passed a Nov. 21, 2020 resolution calling for a general strike “of all working people in our state in the event that Donald Trump refuses to concede the office of President of the United States."
“You should consider this a final warning,” late AFL-CIO President Richard Trumpka wrote to Van Deusen. “I fully expect that you will uphold your oath of office wherein you ‘promise and agree to comply with the Constitution of the National AFL-CIO and the rules governing AFL-CIO Federations.’”
During last weekend’s “No Kings Day” march in NYC, New York City Central Labor Council President Brendan Griffith told Work-Bites, “It’s pretty simple. The attacks from the federal government are attacks on all workers. We need to stand together to push back.”
That pushback, Griffith added, should happen at the ballot box, on the streets, in communities, and “through labor unions.”
But if that also means pushing back with a general strike, it’s unclear. Work-Bites reached out the the NYC Central Labor Council for further clarification, but hasn’t gotten a reply.
The AFL-CIO also hasn’t responded to requests for comment on this story.
One thing is clear, for those advocating for a general strike during Oct. 18’s No Kings Day demonstrations to confront the Trump agenda—May Day 2028 will come way too late. That’s why they probably will not wait.
In Aug. 2019, Nelson also told delegates at the Democratic Socialists of America convention that “Solidarity is a force stronger than gravity.”
If that’s true, those calling for a general strike to save whatever’s left of American democracy before May Day 2028 finally rolls around won’t need to wait too much longer to take action.