The Europeans are way ahead of the Americans in this regard.
It’s been a hot minute since a headline made me say “whoa” out loud
We need to stop paying taxes.
Untill they swear her in and while this government is shut down I’m not doing shit.
Her?
I believe a Congress women is not being sworn in since she said she would vote to release the files and the speaker of the house is blocking that. Without swearing in she is effectively unable to officially partake in votes.
Aaahhhh democracy.
I think they are referring to the US Speaker of the House refusing to swear in Adelita Grijalva after she won a special election in Arizona.
Sabo, the cat ;)
I’ve been holding on to a bunch of those exact stickers for awhile now. Hope I can start slapping them up places soon!
New event for the no kings movement. Along with taking to the streets people who normally cant make it or are to anti social can start calling out the same day.
Can we do the next one on a weekday?
Everyday should a be a part of the no kings movement. Week ends plus week days. Hell we got some holidays coming up. No kings day on halloween is going to be great.
I would rather spend their days than our days
There has never been a true, nationwide general strike in the United States, though a series of post-World War II work stoppages remembered as the “great strike wave of 1946” mobilized five million American workers demanding leaders to address economic instability and untenable working conditions.
In its aftermath, congress cracked down with the Taft-Hartley act, a legislation prohibiting a broad range of union tactics, including calling for political strikes. The 1947 law is still in place, despite repeated attempts to repeal it.
Oh, imagine that.
I got this question answered by the AI that’s trying to replace us:
What happened to the average American who participaten in the great general strike wave of 1946?
The average American who participated in the great general strike wave of 1946 experienced both short-term gains in wages and conditions and long-term setbacks in labor power due to political and legislative backlash. This period marked a crucial turning point in U.S. labor history. The Immediate Experience (1945–1946)
Following World War II, over 4.3 to 5 million American workers across industries such as steel, auto, coal, rail, and public utilities went on strike in 1945–1946, making it the largest labor upheaval in U.S. history. Most workers demanded wage increases to offset postwar inflation and to restore pay parity after wartime restrictions. Many strikes succeeded in securing modest wage gains and better benefits, including the United Auto Workers’ victory over General Motors, which resulted in increased wages and improved workplace conditions.
Everyday Impact on Workers
The strikes were often exhausting and financially challenging for participants. The average work stoppage lasted about 24 days, three times longer than wartime strikes, forcing families to rely on savings or community support. Nonetheless, solidarity and union membership surged temporarily as workers saw their actions bring some tangible improvements in pay and bargaining power.
Political and Economic Consequences
Successes were short-lived. Media and political elites increasingly portrayed labor as disruptive, especially as nationwide strikes affected transportation and goods distribution, leading to food shortages and logistical chaos. This backlash fueled anti-union sentiment, culminating in the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947, which curtailed key labor rights such as secondary strikes and sympathy actions, required union leaders to sign anti-communist affidavits, and enabled “right-to-work” laws in several states.
Long-Term Outcomes
By the early 1950s, many of the workers who had gone on strike returned to relative economic stability, but with weakened collective bargaining power. Union growth plateaued after 1948, and labor’s political influence declined as conservative forces gained control of Congress in 1946, shifting U.S. labor relations toward employer dominance for decades.
In essence, the average worker from the 1946 general strike wave gained short-term material benefits but ultimately saw the labor movement’s power constrained—ushering in a postwar order defined by limited union influence and the rise of corporate-led industrial relations.
Did you compare this against a reliable source before sharing? If so, could you share a source?
I’m not necessarily disputing these particular factual claims — since I’m
onnot an expert on this moment in history — but please, please don’t rely uncritically on AI for factual questions.Edit: a typo
No I did not. The AI had references and I removed them. I think it behooves us to use their machines against them and in the process pollute the pool so that AI companies cannot easily dig up facts from our daily conversations.
Its not important to tell where the info came from. Its more important to learn that all this has played before. We are on the brink of economical collapse and soon will be loosing our voice to even talk about the subject.
Its not important to tell where the info came from. Its more important to learn than all this has played before.
See, without verification (or a reader already being aware of the factual accuracy or inaccuracy of this AI output), what you posted is about as reliable as fanfiction. It is not appropriate to make a statement like “it’s important to know this has happened before and how it went” even as you say you’re unwilling to provide evidence for your claims.
The AI history output sounds reasonable. But if any of it is skewed in favor of the ruling class - or was manually edited in such a way - then the potential effect is readers having just a little bit more sense that any action in favor of Labor is doomed to fail. Quite shitty if that’s the takeaway of something not actually accurate.
Its not important to tell where the info came from.
In other words: there’s no point in continuing this conversation. Later 👋
I’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.
I fear that the average american can’t afford to strike, because of the lingering threat of poverty from losing employment and getting crushed by outstanding debt. But this is a sign, that there are already not enough worker’s rights.
From far away it looks like a construct.
Far too many Americans don’t even get sick leave at their jobs.
The 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.
What is the point if scheduling a strike so far in advance? Also, aren’t UAW leadership aligned with Trump?
What they are doing is asking all unions to set May 1st 2028 as the expiration date for their next labor contract. They aren’t actually scheduling a strike, just laying the groundwork.
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.
It was planned before the election, and they likely didn’t anticipate Trump would win again.
From what I’ve seen the UAW leader is fairly left leaning.
Basically letting the turnip destroy the country for nearly 4 years…
When the economy falls we can organize enough to strike to hit critical mass, not yet.
The article says that a 1947 law makes it almost impossible for unions to organize a general strike.
Anything that would cause real economic damage and put power back in the hands of workers will be treated as “illegal” regardless of what the books say. But what could they realistically do, arrest everyone in their homes who didn’t go to work that day?
Wildcat strikes are “illegal” in the sense that your employer is allowed to retaliate with firing you or docking pay if you do so. I highly doubt someone’s going to prison for not showing up at a regular job.
But what could they realistically do, arrest everyone in their homes who didn’t go to work that day?
Considering that the US has the highest incarcerated population in the world, it’s not like they aren’t trying to do this very thing.
Most strikes were illegal by polit definitions. Teamsters got into pitched club battles with cops and mob organized strike breakers.
Had guys with guns on standby in case of escalation too.
And they won, circa 19teens.
Just corporate dictatorship things…
It’s preferable to break that anti-labour red scare law if it means avoiding the country getting to the point where civil war happens instead.
It’s never happened before because the working class has never been unified nationwide before. Soybean farmers in Utah are not connected to teachers in Boston or steelworkers in Pittsburgh or auto manufacturers in Michigan or nurses in San Diego. There’s never been a singular cause that affected all of those groups of people at the same time.
If it ever could happen, it would be because the President was a colossal dipshit who fucked every aspect of the economy across the country, except that would almost certainly cause the legislature to put an end to such rampant and corrupt tyranny.
Right?
The last time people across the country organized general strike of sorts the government went into action to make a law that made it illegal for unions to organize such a thing.
And with this corrupt Congress and this idiot president and this ridiculous SCOTUS, I think it’s likely they will worm their way into making a law that makes it illegal for any citizen to strike for any reason.
Trump already illegally outlawed government unions. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was done about it.
The people strike.
Congress says: that’s illegal now!! Go back to work!
Why the fuck would we? Literally what could possibly convince people that the gov is going to arrest a million people for striking? Genuinely, how braindead are people that that is a concern?
I would suggest you not underestimate just how unbelievably stupid our current president is and how likely he is to actually use the United States army against its own people regardless of how legal or illegal it actually is. Not to mention his sycophantic Congress that will blithely stand by and let him do whatever the fuck he wants. This is what corruption looks like.
Right?
no, the official party platform of the GOOP is “whatever Drumpf says”.
this party also controls the legislatureAnd its donors haven’t felt it yet. Or if they have, they’re pretty sure they can buy up the wreckage after it all fails. Like they did after every other recession and depression since the 70s.
There’s never been a singular cause that affected all of those groups of people at the same time.
The attack on Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both pretty unifying. The former had an immediate and unambiguous opponent with Imperial Japan. 9/11 took weeks and months to figure out what happened and who did it, so it didn’t have as immediate a response.
For sure, there have been events that affected all Americans in various ways, good and bad, but the context of the conversation is events that would encourage a general labor strike. The moon landing, world wars, the Great Depression, the Macarena, big things happen. I probably could have been clearer by saying that nothing in history has unified the American working class as a singular political group to use our power as a labor force to exert pressure to stop oligarchical abuses by means of a general strike, but that seems overly pedantic.
You think soy bean farmers are working class?
I’m seriously curious, why do you imply they aren’t?
Being working class doesn’t just mean you perform work. It’s a social class defined by the relation to the means of production.
Soy farmers in the US own their fields, own their equipment, set their own hours, and directly profit from selling commodities on the market. They’re small business owners, they are not workers. Workers don’t own or control shit, they sell their labor to someone else who actually owns capital and land. Workers toil under a boss and soy farmers do not, they are their own boss.
Yes, farmers do labor to produce things. That makes them workers.
Small business owners do labor too, but that doesn’t make them working class. Workers don’t own shit, but these farmers own capital and land and directly profit from their own labor rather than being forced to sell their labor on the market.
It’s a social class, defined by their relation to the means of production.
“Farmer” has come to mean the corporate owner of fields in which crops are grown, rather than the people waking up at the ass crack of dawn to tend to the fields and bring in the harvest.
“Farm workers” are now the ones doing all the labor.
Yeah, the guy who owns the farm that borders my yard is just some dude with a full time job. He spends a couple days driving a big tractor thing planting in the spring, and several more days in the fall driving a different big tractor thing around to harvest it. Soybeans and corn on rotation.
Farmers do plenty of work besides driving their tractor around, but class relations are defined by their relations to property and capital and profit rather than how much work they do. He owns the land, and the tractor, and reaps all the profit. He’s small business owner, and his politics probably align with other small business owners.
Yeah, there’s certainly a fair petite bourgeois population among farmers, but I think you overestimate its size. Many farmers might own the land… if it weren’t still under morgage to the bank. The tractor is almost certainly also still on loan from the dealership since the same “trade in for new, better equipment” scam is as prevalent there as it is for personal vehicles. The corn and especially soybeans aren’t something that can be sold directly at scale (farmers’ markets can only support so much) unlike dairy which you can theoretically turn to regional groceries for – you’re selling to one of a small number of processors and aggregators, and if they decide they don’t need as much as you sold them last year you’re left scrabbling for something to do with a lot of worthless product. At the end of the year, most of the profit has gone right back to the financiers rather than to the farmer themself.
The evident situation is different for a farmer than for a factory worker, but tenant farmers are proletarian, and modern commercial farming is often closer to tenant farming than it’s advertised as being. The financial systems nowdays (especially around farming) are set up to give the trappings of small business ownership, without the degree of self-determination that came with that status back when the foundational theory was being written.
The value these small farmers obtain is still derived from their labor. They aren’t passively owning a profit creating assets.
Jesus. Since when does BuzzFeed own HuffPost?
That hurts my brain. what!?
Finally someone calling for it. Let’s hope we can get it done and make it happen.
Summoning people of all backgrounds to unite and take a stand against President Donald Trump’s “tyranny,” the “ultra-wealthy” and corporate greed, Johnson said, “We are going to make them pay their fair share in taxes to fund our school, to fund jobs, to fund healthcare, to fund transportation.”
“Democracy will live on because of this generation,” he proclaimed. “Are you ready to take it to the courts and to the streets?”
It was an audacious declaration from the mayor, who has risen to the top of Trump’s list of enemies as he resists the vicious immigration operations and arrival of hundreds of National Guards currently shaking Chicago.
I don’t think Americans have it in them to do a general strike. Too much apathy and cowardice.
Or anyone else for that matter. People are extremely stupid.
It’s really needed at this point
Honestly massive applause for Brandon Johnson. There are so many performative voices that call for a general strike, but it’s so rare to see someone with political power and a national stage call for one.
Unironically let’s go Brandon!
Let’s goooooo
Finally some political leadership. Now get UAW and teamsters and longshoremen on board. The teachers and nurses. The rest will fillow
The guy is a mayor, and finds himself on the national stage. He is now a target of trumps. Staying in the public eye is self preservation. Not saying it can’t lead in the right direction.
That said, the major unions are run by poloticians as well. And laws don’t favor them on this. So they will stay out of it unless you get some new little guys who get elected to leadership by claiming they will do these things. But trump supporters are common enough in such unions that it would be challenging for that to happen. It’s more likely the unions unofficially join in after critical mass is achieved. Thier leaders don’t want to go to jail.
The UAW I could see getting onboard, but the Teamsters are so full of MAGA members and Trump loving leadership, I’d be astonished if they did.
I think you misunderstand teamsters. Why do you have this perception?
I have this perception from:
- Sean O’Brian trying to cozy up to the republican party by speaking at the RNC
- The leadership choosing not to endorse Kamala during the election (since it would piss off their conservative members)
- the locals repeatedly endorsing local republican politicians this year, despite seeing the destruction of federal unions and anti-worker rhetoric from the republican party
- First hand account from many left-leaning teamsters that so many of their fellow members are self-procliamed MAGA or right wing Trump voters (according to a source from wikipedia, 60% of the membership voted for Trump) who are only in the union because it directly benefits them financially.
I’d love to see those right-wing members come to their senses and vote to join a general strike, but I just don’t see it happening. They even voted not to strike while negotiating their UPS contract, which resulted in (IMO) only modest improvements, and couldn’t even secure AC units to be retrofitted to their trucks to prevent people dying of heatstroke.
Sean O’Brian trying to cozy up to the republican party by speaking at the RNC
See I knew this would be the first one coming. Sean O’brian took the time the RNC afforded him and delivered possibly the most progressive speech in the history of US political conventions. Not one of the most, but possibly the most progressive speech of all time, perhaps even eclipsing Roosevelt. They were offered a platform, they took it and did what they wanted with it, uttered not one iota of support for Trump or Republicans. He literally called corporation’s economic terrorists.
Since it happened there has been a bad faith interpretation on the part of some “leftists”, especially here, that because he took an opportunity afforded to them, it makes them “bad person”, because they utterly lack the curiosity to find out anything more than what their initial, team-sports reaction is. The reaction you are demonstrating says nothing about Sean O’Brian; it says everything about you.
As well, the Teamsters went on to not endorse Trump, even though it was the Republican convention they were invited to.
You didn’t address any of my other points.
I’m basing my opinions on repeated examples of Teamster leadership failing to fight back against the establishment, not ‘sports-team’ reactions.
When asked about Chavez-DeRemer’s stance on the right-to-work section of the PRO Act, O’Brien said that he is working with senators such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to come up with a version of the PRO Act that “may not include that.”
“That’s the beauty of having conversations with people from the other side, where you can collaborate and actually find out what works for that state, what doesn’t work for it—but more importantly, what’s going to work for the American worker,” O’Brien said.
In the same Fox News interview, O’Brien also said the Teamsters do not want to see anyone losing their job, but that “[Trump] thinks he’s within his right,” when asked about the personnel-slashing Department of Government Efficiency and the Trump administration’s widely decried deferred resignation program for nearly all federal employees. Multiple federal employees unions are currently battling the Trump administration in court over its actions targeting federal workers and federal agencies.
With those statements, O’Brian is publicly stating that he still thinks he can reason and plead with an out-and-out proven anti-labor party that just destroyed federal unions. That makes him either naive or an idiot, and for his sake I hope it’s the former.
We need all unions to come together as one movement to effectively fight this dictatorship from taking power, but based on previous evidence, a significant portion of the Teamster membership are unlikely to want to join that fight (obviously, some will, but they will be in the minority).
You’re ignoring that a majority (60%) of its membership are conservative, and not endorsing Trump doesn’t make it much better, since that lack of endorsement of Kamala (whom I don’t even like, but clearly was the harm reduction option) only speaks to the fact that they have so many right-wing members, the leadership had to fence-sit in fear of not getting elected again by their pro-Trump members.
If you’re a left-wing Teamster trying to steer your brothers and sisters away from MAGA, then more power to you. But don’t delude yourself that the Teamster leadership or right-wing members are going to be the ones leading the charge against this regime.
I would love to be proven wrong, but at best I could see them hopping on the bandwagon if the winds change and the regime begins to implode on itself.
You didn’t address any of my other points.
Because they were stupid points and not worth addressing, so they were dismissed. You’re mad because someone didn’t put on a jersey and cheer for your team.
Alternatively, If the Democrats wanted to get the teamsters endorsement, why didn’t they do more to show that they would be a pro-labor, anti-capitol party, as O’Brien laid out in the speech he gave (which you seem to be entirely ignoring the contents of). This same argument applies to the Muslim vote, to the progressive vote, to all the blocks that the Democrats failed to make appeals to in this election cycle because the they thought they needed to run on was “Trump Bad”, while constantly silencing criticisms of their own inadequacies.
What you are doing here is just repeating the same, failed logic that handed Trump 2024. And instead of blaming the people who actually had the power to change things, you want to blame “someone else”. Democrats could have invited Sean O’Brien to the convention, since they hadn’t endorsed, and see what they had to say and asked what it would have taken to get the Teamsters endorsement. Likewise, they could have given Palestinians a voice at the convention and asked them what it would take to keep them in the fold. And we can go on down the line.
But reality is that Democrats are the failure here. Not any other party is to blame other than the Democrats themselves for the outcomes of the election of 2024. If they wanted the Teamsters endorsement, they needed to do more to show up for it, and they chose not to.
And that knee-jerk, team sports, emotional response was exactly what I had hoped you would put on display, and it makes it all the more clear we should be dismissing voices that are only in this for their own validation.
Voters do not owe the Democratic party jack fucking shit, and the Democratic party owes its voters, literally everything. If the Democratic party, and the card carrying Democratic party member, have not gotten this through their thick, Blue No Matter Who skull, the Democratic party will never be fixed.
