McGovern Calls for a General Strike

McGovern Calls for a General Strike

Jim McGovern, U.S. representative from western Massachusetts – and my congressman – has spoken at town meetings and called for a general strike. At a March 15 music festival billed as a day of “peace, love, and protest,” McGovern declared that “if there’s a constitutional crisis” where Trump ignores court decisions “we may need a general strike that tells them ‘enough is enough.’ . . . . If he wants to fight, we’ll give him a goddamned fight.”[1]

At a Greenfield town meeting organized by Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution on March 18, there were “resounding cheers” from the 750 constituents attending the gathering when McGovern declared it was time to “start thinking about outside-the-box ideas like a general strike.” When someone in the audience stated that a general strike was being organized on social media, McGovern remarked there was a need for “much more planning” and “the participation of the unions.”[2]

The UAW General Strike Plan

At the conclusion of a series of short strikes in 2023, UAW President Shawn Fain called for the auto union and other unions to plan for a general strike on May 1, 2028. Fain commented: “We have to pay for our sins of the past. Back in 1980 when Reagan at the time fired patco workers, everybody in this country should have stood up and walked the hell out,” Fain said. “We missed the opportunity then, but we’re not going to miss it in 2028. That’s the plan. We want a general strike. We want everybody walking out just like they do in other countries.”

Will the UAW recognize the nature of the moment and move up its plan for strike action?

The Growing Resistance

Describing the “slow erosion of rights and norms” taking place, McGovern warned that “This is the break the glass moment.” Supporting resistance and civil disobedience, McGovern noted his participation in a Worcester rapid response network in defense of immigrants threatened by ICE raids.[3]

Large crowds have greeted Senator Bernie and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as they take their “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” across the country. Unions of postal workers and other federal workers have been holding demonstrations and mobilizing their members to fight back. Demonstrators have called for boycotting Tesla and other companies supporting Trump’s attack on democracy.

Friends tell me about seeing anti-Trump protesters on the interstate overpasses, and demonstrations to support farmers having their livelihood threatened by Trump. A giant mobilization for an April 5 protest in Boston will draw people from throughout the state.

McGovern is right that a strike needs to be planned. Strike action allows workers to unite and put pressure on employers. A general strike allows workers – and their supporters – to effectively challenge those who rule and oppress us.

A general strike today would allow working people and their allies to fight back against the attempt of the Trump Administration to destroy the right to free speech and free assembly, the rights of federal and other workers, and social and regulatory programs that help the poor, consumers, and the environment. It is perhaps our strongest weapon.

Who is Jim McGovern?

When in junior high in Worcester, Massachusetts, McGovern began campaigning for Senator George McGovern (no relation) for president. He later served on the senator’s staff. As a congressional staffer, McGovern “led an investigation into the murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador.” He uncovered U.S. involvement in the training of Salvadoran soldiers and advocated cutting off funding for the School of the Americas.

Elected to the House of Representatives in 1996, McGovern has focused on hunger, human rights, and peace as well as measures to assist his constituents. In 2016, Massachusetts Peace Action (MPA) gave McGovern its Peace Builders Award. However, McGovern has not joined in MPA’s calls to end the Ukraine War. We’ve demonstrated outside his office on several occasions since the war began, most recently on the third anniversary of the start of the war.

McGovern on Ethel Rosenberg and the Threat to Democracy Today

McGovern recently joined Michael and Robert Meeropol, the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, in calling for the exoneration of Ethel Rosenberg. McGovern declared on the House floor:

“. . . let the congressional record show, and every person in this building know, the U.S. government knew that Ethel Rosenberg was innocent. We knew that she was not a spy, and we executed her anyway. And I find that to be a disgrace, and I want to apologize for the pain and grief her family suffered because of what happened. Ethel was put to death during the height of McCarthyism, a time of hysteria when due process was cast aside. She was put to death at a time when due process was not guaranteed and our democratic values were not always upheld. We let fear and anger and hate get the best of us.

“We are currently living through an equally troubling time in our country. People are being targeted and attacked for the way they think, what they say, and who they are. Facts must still matter, Mr. Speaker. Let's learn from our unperfect history.”

Past Big Strikes

Although we have not had a countrywide general strike in the U.S., we have had some significant strike movements in the U.S.

In August 1997, 185,000 United Parcel Service workers represented by the Teamsters Union went on a 15-day strike against the company. With the public siding with the workers, the union won 10,0000 new full-time jobs, significant increases in wages and pensions, and a reduction in sub-contracting.

In March 1970, although they lacked the legal right to strike, postal workers in New York City began a strike that soon included over 200,000 postal workers across the country. They won a 14 percent wage increase, the right to collective bargaining, and inclusion under the National Labor Relations Act.[4]

On October 15, 1969, several million people stopped their usual activities and joined together in the Vietnam Moratorium to protest the continuation of that unjust war. Starting with a base of support among college student leaders, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee and the New Mobilization Committee Against the War in Vietnam spent two months organizing at the local and national levels and gained the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters Union, the New Democratic Coalition, the Ripon Society, Americans for Democratic Action, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and twenty-four Democratic Senators.[5] At the University of Michigan, where I was a graduate student, the campus shut down for the day and over 30,000 gathered in the football stadium for a peace rally.

In 1959, 500,000 steel workers conducted a successful 116 strike to prevent the company from removing a contract clause that protected them from management’s unilaterally changing work rules to eliminate jobs and intensify work.

In 1946, over 1.6 million steel, electrical, and packinghouse workers struck together and won substantial wage increases. Prior to the steel union joining the strike action by the left-wing United Electrical Workers, steel industry management rejected a compromise proposed by President Truman. Steel Workers Union President Philip Murray commented that big business was involved in an “evil conspiracy . . . to exact unconditional surrender of the American people and the United States government . . . [they] have deliberately set out to provoke strikes and economic chaos, and hijack the American people through uncontrolled profits and inflation.”[6]

Community General Strikes

On November 2, 2011, thousands involved in the Occupy movement that began with Occupy Wall Street and spread across the world, shut down the Oakland, California port as part of an Oakland General Strike. They protested the domination of the 1 percent and growing inequality.

A feature of the 1946 strike wave included some community general strikes. In Rochester, New York, as many as 50,000 workers conducted a one-day general strike that won a return to work of fired city workers and recognition of their union. In Oakland, California, a three-day general strike of 100,000 supported striking retail workers, who won union recognition a few months after the strike’s end. There were also community general strikes that year in Lancaster and Pittsburgh, PA, in Stamford, CT, and in Houston.[7]

The most famous U.S. general strike is the San Francisco General Strike of 1934. Following the police killing of two workers during the coastwide longshore workers strike, unions began a general strike which eventually included 150,000 workers. Weakened by conservative union leaders, the general strike lasted four days and led to an agreement to arbitrate the dispute. Workers returning to the job “continued job actions to protect strike leaders and rid the docks of scabs” and pushed “beyond the significant concessions in an arbitration award to gain sole control of the hiring hall and end the power of management to intimidate workers.”[8]

Perhaps the most instructive community general strike to study for the crisis we face today is the Seattle General Strike of 1919. Sixty thousand workers struck the city for four days to back striking shipyard workers. A contributing factor in the move to the general strike was the campaign to free Tom Mooney, a union leader convicted on perjured testimony of a bombing at the 1916 San Francisco Preparedness Day parade. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Mooney’s appeal as he sat on death row awaiting execution. “The urgency of the Mooney campaign, and the overarching themes of working class solidarity, internationalism, personal liberty and simple fairness that infused the Mooney fight, flowed seamlessly into the January dispute in the Seattle shipyards that triggered the general strike.”[9] Mooney’s sentence was commuted but he wasn’t freed until 1939.

Key Demands Today

As grass roots organizing for a general strike develops, local and national groups will weigh in on the key demands of the action. Here are some suggestions.

Freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and All Those Unjustly Detained

The arrest of Khalil, a Columbia University student leader of the campaign for Palestinian rights and against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, is a central act in the campaign of the Trump Administration to suppress freedom of speech and assembly by supporters of Palestinian rights. Trump has continued and expanded the Biden Administration’s attacks on academic freedom and freedom of speech and assembly of Israel’s critics, falsely labelling such criticism as anti-Semitism.

As Khalil has pointed out in an open letter, the Columbia University Administration is complicit in the campaign against academic freedom, expelling Grant Miner, president of the Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers, UAW on the eve of negotiations.

“Trade unionists everywhere, defenders of the Constitution, of freedom of speech, of academic freedom, and of the right of free association, should be appalled and disgusted by the behavior of Columbia University, and should take it for the clear signal it is,” the UAW wrote. “If they can come for graduate workers, if they can arrest, deport, expel, or imprison union leaders and activists for their protected political speech, then they can come for you. For your contract. For your paycheck. For your family. And for your rights.”

Activists on campus are among a large group of people unjustly detained. Khalil described this reality from his cell in Louisiana: “Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.”

Khalil and all those unjustly detained must be freed.

Return the Fired Federal Workers to Their Jobs

According to US News and World Report, “more than 200,000 federal workers have reportedly been fired or had roles eliminated since early 2025, with an additional 75,000 government employees accepting buyouts.” Russell Vought , director of the Office of Management and Budget, designed the rapid and often illegal terminations to destroy federal workers’ mental well-being: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected … “we want to put them in trauma,” he told a conservative think tank. Let’s turn our anger at this brutality into activism on federal workers’ behalf,

Restore the Gutted Federal Agencies and Departments of Government

Departments and agencies shredded by the Trump Administration need to be restored. These include the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Park Service, the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, and many more.

Restore Terminated Grant Funding Appropriated by Congress

At the town meeting in Greenfield with McGovern, executive director Rebecca Todd of the Connecticut River Conservancy pointed out that the freezing of $13 million in grants to the conservancy hurts efforts to preserve and protect the environment “and the great people who rely on the river.”[10]

Fire Musk and Close Down DOGE

Elon Musk may have bought his access to Donald Trump, but he was not elected and has not been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. DOGE has not been established as a department or agency of the federal government by the Congress. The damage that Musk and Doge have wrought is enormous. They must go.

Stop Funding Israel’s Genocide and Support Palestinian Rights

Although Trump brokered a ceasefire in Gaza as he was about to begin his second term, he has reversed course and has given the green light to renewed genocidal attacks and ethnic cleansing. The U.S. needs to stop weapons deliveries and end military assistance to Israel. We for the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel).

The U.S. should follow the lead of 146 United Nations member states and recognize Palestinian statehood.

End the Ukraine War

Although Trump did not end the Ukraine War before he became president, as he had promised, he has begun negotiations to end the conflict. A continuation of the war is in no one’s interest. Achieving a quick end to the war and beginning a normal diplomatic relationship with Russia would be important steps in ending the forever wars of the last quarter century.

Cut Military Spending in Half

The U.S. leads the world in military spending. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the U.S. spends three times what China spends, nearly nine times what Russia spends, and more than the other top ten spenders combined. Its expenditures on its military are 37 percent of the world total.[11] The U.S. has military bases in 750 countries. According to NATO, the U.S. spends $2,200 per capita on “defense.”

On February 13, 2025, Donald Trump spoke with reporters in the Oval Office about his hopes to reduce nuclear weapons spending and overall military spending. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons, we already have so many,” Trump said. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”

“We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully much more productive support rather than oppose South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice,”

Trump declared that if states use nuclear weapons, “that’s going to be probably oblivion.”

He added: “One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia. And I want to say, ‘let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that. And I think we’ll be able to.”

Unfortunately, Trump has not followed through on these ideas. While Trump gives “lip service to denuclearization,” Mike Merryman-Lotze of the American Friends Service Committee points out, “the changes demanded by [Defense Secretary] Hegseth and supported by Trump explicitly exclude cuts to ongoing upgrades to U.S. nuclear weapons systems.”

We need a vast outpouring for peace ad against nuclear weapons on the scale of the nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s.

Tax the Rich

The rapid growth of wealth at the top and inequality in the U.S. has led to calls to increase taxes on billionaires, on corporate profits, and on the wealthy in general.

Senator Bernie Sanders’ website describes the situation and the benefits of his proposal to tax only a small group of the super-rich: “Over the last 30 years, the top 1 percent has seen a $21 trillion increase in its wealth, while the bottom half of American society has actually lost $900 billion in wealth. In other words, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from those who have too little to those who have too much. For the sake of our democracy and working families all over America who are struggling economically, that has got to change.

“. . . the time has come for the United States to establish an annual tax on the extreme wealth of the top 0.1 percent of U.S. households.

“This wealth tax would only apply to net worth of over $32 million and would raise an estimated $4.35 trillion over the next decade. Anyone who has a net worth of less than $32 million would not see their taxes go up at all under this plan.

“The revenue raised under this plan would be used to fund Bernie’s affordable housing plan, universal childcare and would help fund Medicare for All.”

Conclusion

Struggles to defend the interests of working people and to maintain and expand democratic rights have been going on throughout our history. We can draw strength from knowledge of that history. That is why the far right has been attacking libraries, books, critical race theory, and civil rights, African American, and women’s history. The fight to protect academic freedom, and libraries must go hand in hand with the fight to protect freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, the right to vote., and the integrity of our legal system.

We must save ourselves. Only grass roots action in every form and by every means will enable us to end the depredations of Trump and his allies. Talk to your neighbors, your friends, your family, members of your unions and associations. It will take the mobilization of both existing organizations and new groups to launch and sustain a general strike and force the Trump Administration to abandon its attempt to destroy democracy and the constitutional order. At stake are the interests of poor and working people and of all those who value fairness, caring for one’s neighbor, and the democratic system.

NOTES

[1]. Ben Gangon, “McGovern Also Headlined Day of ‘Peace, Love, and Protest,” Montague Reporter, March 20, 2025, A1, A6.

[2]. Mike Jackson, “’We Need to Start Thinking About’ General Strike, Says Congressman,” Montague Reporter, March 20, 2025, A1, A4.

[3]. Ibid.

[4]. Martin Halpern, Unions, Radicals and Democratic Presidents: Seeking Social Change in the Twentieth Century (Greenwood Press, 2003), 105-6.

[5]. Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 249-253.

[6]. Martin Halpern UAW Politics in the Cold War Era (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 75.

[7] . Kim Moody, “A General Strike in the Heartland?” Labor Notes, March 18, 2011. https://labornotes.org/2011/03/general-strike-heartland

[8]. Chris Carlsson, “The General Strike of 1934: Historical Essay, The San Francisco Digital History Archive. https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_General_Strike_of_1934, accesed March 23, 2025; Martin Halpern, “Labor,” in William Pederson, The Blackwell Companion to Franklin D. Roosevelt (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2011).

[9]. Stan Quast, “How the fight to free Tom Mooney fueled the nation’s first general strike.” Seattle General Strike Project,

https://depts.washington.edu/labhist/strike/quast.shtml

[10]. Mike Jackson, “’We Need to Start Thinking About’ General Strike, Says Congressman,” Montague Reporter, March 20, 2025, A1, A4.

[11]. Nan Tian, Diego Lopes da Silva, xiao Liang and Lorenzo Scarazzato, “Trends In World Military Expenditure, 2023. SIPRI Fact Sheet, April 2024. https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/2404_fs_milex_2023.pd