Unions, community and faith groups, and small businesses are preparing for a day of “No Work, No School, and No Shopping” on Friday in the Twin Cities in protest against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invasion and January 7 murder of Renee Good. Hundreds of businesses have pledged to close; hundreds more plan to remain open but donate the day’s proceeds to victims of the ICE assault and organizations seeking to protect them.
Lending moral backing for the day is the call by faith leaders to honor the memory of Good. Providing the organizational backbone is the somewhat ambiguous but official call for a general strike by the Minneapolis American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and its sister local federations throughout the state — the first such call in three-quarters of a century.
As events unfold, it may be helpful to remind ourselves of the history of citywide general strikes in America.
General strikes are difficult to pull off and thus relatively rare. They’ve occurred little more than a dozen times and have usually had a major impact on working conditions and public policies. They have often arisen in the context of smaller actions against injustice building toward larger ones. These events are gaining renewed interest today in the search for effective tactics to resist authoritarian rule.
This will not be Minneapolis–St Paul’s first go-around with the tactic. The 1934 general strike — a foundational event for the city and state’s unions — may have moved beyond the reach of individual memory in recent years, but it suffuses the regional labor movement’s collective sense of its own origins. Add that background to the ICE incursion and the brutal and illegal execution of Good, and you have the ingredients behind the reentry of city general strikes onto the American political scene.
Supporting a coal heavers’ strike on the docks, the General Trades Union (GTU), an early central labor…
Auteur: Fred Glass
