OptionalChicago Mayor Issues Defiant Call For A General Strike
LasherzI’m dubious that a general strike is possible in the US. All of the other countries that have had massive strikes affecting large chunks of the market were driven by large unions. Our unions don’t have that sort of sway and they rarely help others to maximize their diminishing bargaining power with the ongoing degradation of workers rights. Importantly this also happens on the supply side, the consumer side will just buy it tomorrow instead usually. A day of no productivity has much bigger consequences.
That being said, I’ll definitely participate.
ProdigalFrogThe UAW was planning a general strike for May 1st 2028. I don’t know how willing they’d be to start a wildcat general strike, but they may join one.
May Day 2028
After the historic success of the Stand Up Strike in 2023, UAW President Shawn Fain called on the rest of the labor movement to join our union in preparing to strike on May Day 2028. May Day is the international worker’s day, and it’s our opportunity to create a crisis for the billionaire class to win more for all of us. We know that when workers align their fights to the same timeline, we have more leverage than we do alone. What if we didn’t just do that in a corporate chain or one union, but across the country and the labor movement? Now is the time to get ready to create that crisis for the bosses.
What is the point if scheduling a strike so far in advance? Also, aren’t UAW leadership aligned with Trump?
The point as I understand it is that they’re allowing other unions to set their contract expiration to the same date, which increases the potential for pain during their next negotiations and makes for a quasi general strike across all unions who participated. It’s a pretty good idea all in all.
Also, it’s complicated who Sean Fain aligns with. He’s pro-tariff and praised Trump for incentivizing cars to be made in the US, although it seems like that’s the extent of it, and I wonder how he feels about it now that it’s been fully unmasked to just be market manipulation by Trump’s circle of billionaires. Sean’s speech still hit most of the socialist talking points of pro labor even though it was to a bunch of Republican donors, leading to the funniest and most revealing awkward silences after sections about how the working class is who provides all of the value in an economy.
Pro-tariff makes sense purely from a “protecting American labor” point of view. The ideal of them is to encourage internal markets to favor domestic production. However, that first requires domestic production to exist, and it also needs to be done in a way that doesn’t harm domestic production. The Trump tariffs aren’t this, obviously.
Historically, what the UAW wants isn’t necessarily good for the rest of us. The “chicken tax” that pushes larger and larger trucks in the US was done as part of LBJ negotiating with the UAW. The result was that foreign small trucks couldn’t possibly be profitable, and thus had no competition for domestic manufacturing to make the largest trucks possible and nothing else.