Following the UAW's Lead, Some Planning A Nationwide General Strike On May Day 2028
Though it's still in the planning stage, some are taking UAW president Shawn Fain's lead and planning a national strike on May Day 2028.
By Peter List, Editor | April 23, 2024
[See the Editor’s Note at the bottom of this post.]
Will the nation’s first general strike take place across the U.S. on May 1, 2028? It will if some union activists have their way.
As last year’s “historic” United Auto Workers’ (UAW) strike against the Detroit Three came to an end, UAW president Shawn Fain urged other unions throughout the U.S. to set their contract expiration dates for April 30, 2028.
By having other unions set their contract expirations for April 30th, Fain said, it would allow for unions to orchestrate a general strike nationwide on May Day, or International Workers Day.
May Day (or International Workers Day) is a more-than-century-old holiday that began in the United States following the Haymarket Square Riots and was adopted in 1889 by an international federation of socialist groups and trade unions as a day to commemorate workers and unions. In the United States, unlike the rest of the world, except for fringe Marxist groups who celebrate it, May Day never became a national holiday.
Rather, in 1894, as a sort of appeasement following the bloody Pullman strike, President Grover Cleveland, who feared May Day “would become a memorial to the Haymarket radicals,” signed Labor Day into law. Labor Day, as most Americans know, is celebrated on the first Monday in September.
Now, according to pro-union author and writer Hamilton Nolan, it appears that some unions are in the beginning stages of planning for a general strike on May 1, 2028.
Writing on his substack How Things Work, Nolan explains a session that took place at the Labor Notes Conference [in PDF] in Chicago last week, where a number of “union activists and officials” met to discuss what it would take to make a general strike happen.
According to Nolan’s account, the meeting was led by UAW’s Chris Brooks and Greg Nammacher from SEIU Local 26 in Minneapolis.
The reason that SEIU Local 26 was there is that they actually did something like a general strike just last month, on a municipal level. In early March in Minneapolis, thousands of janitors and airport workers and nursing home workers and others struck in a coordinated week of action that was an impressive demonstration of coordinated labor flexing across an entire region.
Writing about companies that refuse to agree to an expiration date of April 30, 2028, Nolan explains:
The man from SEIU made the point that a general strike doesn’t need every participant to have exactly the same contract expiration date. For a May Day 2028 strike, for example, people working under any contract that expired before that date could just keep their contract bargaining going until May Day. Also, anyone who had unionized but was still negotiating a first contract could grab onto May Day as a self-imposed deadline and participate in the strike.
“The mere act of bringing the concept of ‘general strike’ out of the world of Marxist chat rooms and into the world of reality would be extremely meaningful,” Nolan writes.
Hamilton Nolan’s entire article is well worth the time to read for insights as to how a general strike could occur nationwide.
Editor’s Note: If you haven't started following Hamilton Nolan yet, you're doing a disservice to yourself regardless of whether you're on the union or management side of the table. If you’re a subscriber to LaborUnionNews.com’s LinkedIn Group, I've suggested this several times before when I’ve shared his articles, and I stand by my assertion that you're missing out on valuable insights if you're not following him.
