‘Truth and Freedom’ Action Promises Daylong Shutdown-Are We Seeing the Beginnings of a Wider General Strike?
New Yorkers will gather at Union Square on Jan. 23 for a 4 p.m. march and rally in support of Friday’s “Day of Truth and Freedom” action in Minnesota.
By Joe Maniscalco
No one really knows what impact Friday’s “Day of Truth and Freedom” in Minnesota will have on the state and the rest of the nation when workers there put down their tools, students stay home from school, and everybody stops shopping.
Whatever happens, the Jan. 23 action demanding ICE out of Minnesota following the cold-blooded murder of Renee Nicole Good will not be contained to that state. Nor is it likely be confined to a single 24-hour period. Calls for a nationwide general strike have been on the rise lately as evidenced by recent marches and rallies held both here in New York City and across the cournty.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, when not kidnapping world leaders, threatening to take over Greenland, and teetering on the precipice of World War III, is openly talking about invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 and flooding American cities and towns with U.S. military troops and hardware in response to the growing pushback.
A general strike, whether or not organized labor feels sufficiently prepared for one, could organically erupt in response, nevertheless. And many would welcome it.
“Fascism is not gonna wait for us to have our shit together,” former Vermont AFL-CIO President David Van Deusen recently told Work-Bites. “We need to respond with everything we’ve got if we’re gonna still have a labor movement. If we’re still gonna have a republic, if we’re still gonna have a democracy by next year, or the year after, we can’t wait for the perfect moment. We can’t wait until we have all our ducks in a row. We have to respond forcefully now with everything we’ve got—or we stand to lose everything.”
Van Deusen got into hot water with the AFL-CIO back in 2021, and the Vermont State Labor Council was threatened with receivership after the organization passed an earlier 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” at the conclusion of Trump’s first term.
He’s still at odds with the establishment.
Former Vermont AFL-CIO President David Van Deusen.
“The ultimate power we have is our labor—and that means we must be organizing towards a general strike,” Van Deusen told Work-Bites. “It must be something that’s not only on the table, but is actually something the AFL-CIO takes the lead on—and that is something that [AFL-CIO President] Liz Shuler has not done. As far as I’m concerned, she is a coward and she is unimaginative. She must be pushed, and the national AFL-CIO must be pushed, to rise to the movement to defend our republic and to defend our democracy.”
Labor unions across the country have been responding to Friday’s “Day of Truth and Freedom” with endorsements—including the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, consisting of more than 175 affiliated unions representing over 80,000 workers across seven counties in Minnesota.
“Working people, our schools and our communities are under attack,” organization president Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou said in statement this week. “Union members are being detained commuting to and from work, tearing apart families. Parents are being forced to stay home, students held out of school, fearing for their lives, all while the employer class remains silent. Our labor federations are encouraging everyone to participate on January 23rd. It’s time for every single Minnesotan who loves this state and the notion of truth and freedom to raise their voices and deepen their solidarity for our neighbors and coworkers living under this federal occupation.”
Former TWU Local 100 President Roger Toussaint spent three days in jail after boldly taking New York City Transit workers on strike back in 2005.
He believes working class people need to change a deep seated attitude in the labor movement that the only choices are to legislate, arbitrate, litigate or capitulate.
At the same time, the former TWU Local 100 leader who still remembers how the civil rights movement in American captured his imagination as a Trinidadian youth—warns against positing a general strike as a cure-all or one-shot remedy for the immediate threats all working class Americans now face from the Trump administration.
“You need direct, mass action to take place and that can take many forms,” Toussaint told Work-Bites. “You can't necessarily create a formula. This is a struggle that's a journey—not like a destination where you get to a general strike and the world changes. That simply doesn't happen. It has never happened like that. To me, the issue is how to build the broadest and most intensive movement possible that matches and exceeds the intensity of the attacks that you’re faced with.”
Former TWU Local 100 President Roger Toussaint.
Van Deusen also said that the “theory of an organic uprising” is no excuse for not doing the hard work of rank and file organizing in alliance with communities and other grassroots organizations.
“We have to do that organizing,” he stressed. “But at the same time, history has a tendency to get ahead of our best intentions. Nobody predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet, people rose up and said we’re gonna do something different. In the same way, we are at an inflection point in this country. The talk about Greenland is essentially our modern day answer to the Sudetenland—this Trump administration is fascist. They’ve eliminated bargaining rights for nearly one million [federal] workers. That’s a direct attack on [the working class]. This is an existential fight and we’re not gonna win in the courts. We are only going to win when we become unafraid of our own power and use it.”
Toussaint further warns against establishment leaders “attaching themselves to emerging movements in order to kill them.” Ready or not, however, he also said that oftentimes it’s the “enemies of the people that tend to hasten the crisis and create openings for dramatic change.”
“And we may well be at such a moment given what’s going on nationally and the international aggressions that are taking place,” he said. “I think that those conditions are ripening rapidly.”
Friday’s “Day of Truth and Freedom” in Minnesota will feature a 2 p.m. [CST] rally and march in downtown Minneapolis kicking off at The Commons, 416 Portland Ave.
New Yorkers will show their solidarity with a similar rally and march beginning at Union Square in Manhattan at 4 p.m. [EST]
What happens after that remains to be seen.