Yellow Vests, L.A. Protests, and the Imperative Necessity of a General Strike
Anti-ICE protesters set up barricades on the streets of Los Angeles over the weekend. Photos/Laura Jedeed
By Joe Maniscalco
In 2018, my partner and I found ourselves in Paris, France on the eighth day of the burgeoning Yellow Vest Movement navigating the bonfires openly burning along Franklin Delano Roosevelt Avenue.
A week later, back at work on East 23rd Street in New York City covering the prolonged strike between IBEW Local 3 cable installers and Charter Communications, I couldn’t help but note how stark the contrasts were between the revolutionary street actions I had just experienced in Paris and the latest run-of-the-mill demos I continued to cover at home.
The spirit of the participants was much the same—working class people in both Paris and New York City were totally PO’d about falling behind while corporate elites and their government lackeys continued to make money hand over fist.
In 2018, that fervor could no longer be contained in Paris as it erupted into flames and shut down street traffic. In New York City it remained safely kettled behind NYPD barricades as one labor leader after another took his turn at the mic to bluster and talk tough. The workers surrounding me that day in Manhattan didn’t want to hear any of it—they wanted to take the street and force some real action, accountability, and change. They reminded me of the Gilets Jaunes on Roosevelt Avenue.
They didn’t get that change, however. IBEW Local 3 instead ended its years-long strike against Charter Communications and totally quit representing their employees in the New York City Area. Then Governor Andrew Cuomo—who had famously threatened to drive Charter Communications out of the state—ended up resigning in disgrace a few years later after an investigation by New York State Attorney General Letitia James found Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women.
Armed to the teeth: Militarized police confront L.A. protesters with heavy weapons this past weekend.
Ever since then, as growing economic inequality worsened and the assault on working class people intensified, my partner and I have often debated if and when working class people on this side of the Atlantic would ever rise up like their counterparts in France had done.
She wasn’t convinced it would ever happen here. And I could see her point. But as a student of U.S. labor history, I was also cognizant of what happened in the past when push had finally come to shove.
Push came to shove this past weekend in Los Angeles when the community there refused to sit back while a self-aggrandizing president overseeing a collapsing colonial empire he’s powerless to salvage sent in militarized police to snatch up and deport working class people without any semblance of due process and the rule of law.
Here’s where we’re at in this country: Mounted riot police are trampling on protesters and the U.S. Marines are on American soil squaring off against their fellow American citizens.
In New York City, protesters have begun demonstrating outside Trump Tower and other places around town, forcing embattled Mayor Eric Adams to warn that, “The escalation of protests in LA is unacceptable and won’t be tolerated if attempted in our city.”
It’s everything the hundreds of thousands of people protesting the Trump administration this past April in “Hands Off” rallies in NYC and across the country feared they would soon see.
“We can't stay silent and let our country turn into a fascist state—because that's what this is turning into,” New Jersey elementary school teacher Karen Marren told Work-Bites outside Bryant Park on April 5. “We can't allow this to continue, and we have to use our voices. It's all we've got.”
Mounted police at the scene of this weekend’s anti-ICE protests in L.A.
In March, Magaly Licolli, executive director at Venceremos, a worker-led organization that advocates for the rights of meatpacking employees across Arkansas, told Work-Bites how American citizens in the state were actually being scooped up by authorities and detained “because they look brown.”
“We have had cases of workers or people in the community that were detained by the police and they had to prove their status because they didn't have their passport with them—they were detained for two hours until they proved that they were citizens,” Licolli said.
Not long after speaking with Licolli I had the opportunity to speak to Ravi Ragbir, the prominent immigrants rights activist who, in 2018, was arrested and detained by ICE during Trump 1.0.
Not only was Ragbir not heartened by the outpouring of support he’d seen during the April “Hands Off” rallies because he understood they would not be enough to stop the Trump agenda—he also said the threat of actual American citizens being rounded up and “deported” was not an idle one.
“Everyone is hoping that the legal community will be the one who will respond—they are waiting for something to happen. They are not active,” he said. “Each one of us has to be responsible for our role in stopping this administration. Every single business, every single space should be a sanctuary space.”
Ragbir urged everyone who feels that responsibility to begin to educate themselves, network with other members of the community, and think about how they could take collective action to shield neighbors targeted by ICE.
“Each one of us have to be responsible for our role in stopping this administration,” he said. “Everyone has a role to play—not just the house of worship, not just the legal community.”
David Huerta, head of SEIU’s California division, was among those arrested and hospitalized during this weekend’s anti-ICE protests in L.A. In a statement after his eventual release he said, "What happened to me is not about me. This is about something much bigger. This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that's happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice. This is injustice. And we all have to stand on the right side of justice."
The most powerful way that working class people in this country can act, however, is withholding their labor and going on strike—a nationwide general strike.
“I'd be open to hearing about it more,” Marren further told Work-Bites during April 5’s "Hands Off” rally in NYC. “I haven't actually heard about that. It's an interesting idea. So, I'm not saying no to it.”
UAW President Shawn Fain has already outlined his plans for a nationwide general strike in 2028—ten years after the start of Yellow vest protests ignited in Paris.
But if this weekend’s protests in L.A. tell us anything, it’s that working class people in the U.S. now being ground under the boot heel of 21st century fascism cannot wait that long.