For Real Strike Action on 1/23!

Union leaders, propelled by opposition within the ranks to the ICE occupation of Minneapolis-St. Paul, have endorsed the call for Minnesotans to stay away from work on January 23. This significant but halting step must be directed into the strongest possible display of collective union power. It’s high time Trump’s anti-immigrant terror campaign gets the kind of response it deserves. The attacks on immigrants are an attack on the entire working class and are intended to cow us into submission while living standards collapse. The brazen killing of Renee Nicole Good by the ICE gestapo cannot go unanswered: Labor must take a stand in a show of force of our own! A general strike that shuts down the Twin Cities would make ICE think twice and point a way forward for the anti-Trump resistance.

Instead of looking to confront the obstacles to a real strike, the left is busy misrepresenting the protest currently being organized as a general strike. That is not going to cut it or do anybody any favors—it certainly is not going to bring about a general strike. A real general strike is not a parade, it’s not simply another protest march—it’s the collective withholding of labor on a large scale across industry. It is not isolated individuals calling in sick out of moral conscience, it is the mobilization of the membership as a group to remove their hands from the wheels of the economy and bring it to a halt in defense of working-class interests.

Clearly, a layer of unionized workers in Minnesota wants to do something to stop ICE. This sentiment is a break from the norm across the country, where the working class has overwhelmingly kept its head down or outright sided with the anti-immigrant crackdown. At the same time, in Minnesota itself there is still plenty of support for Trump within the trade unions.

Even there, to prepare a general strike, the impulse to fight must be broadened—not through moral exhortation, but through appeals to class interests. Liberal shaming that demands workers struggle and sacrifice because others are suffering is what drove many workers into Trump’s arms in the first place. All too often, the left resorts to just such appeals, which can only fuel divisions in the class. To build union action and put it on firm footing, the defense of immigrants must be linked to the defense of the material conditions of the union membership. The left, though, simply acts like a revolutionary situation is upon us and calls for a national general strike on January 23. This is utterly fatuous and a setup for failure.

Then there is the matter of the union leaders themselves, who talk up the need to defend immigrant workers, only to shrink away from bringing union power to bear in their defense. Take ATU Local 1005 (Metro Transit) President David Stiggers. He says ATU supports a “collective refusal to work” but is advising members to work because of the no-strike clause in the union contract.

Rather than expose the double-speak of the union tops and encourage the ranks to force their hand to act, groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation simply hail the “general strike,” while Socialist Alternative and Left Voice talk about how the unions are not calling it a “strike” for legal reasons. No, the union leaders aren’t calling it a strike because they are not organizing strike action. Some are calling on individuals to call in sick on January 23 if they want, and no doubt many will. But this is neither a general strike nor a very effective form of protest because the onus is on the individual, not on mobilizing the union as a whole. Rather than cite chapter-and-verse the legalese union bureaucrats use to avoid a confrontation, the left must go to the rank and file and say: Trump and his stormtroopers don’t give a damn about “the rules” and neither should union leaders when the defense of our immigrant brothers and sisters and ourselves is posed pointblank!

At bottom, the union leaders don’t want a confrontation because they don’t want to upset their relations with liberal Dems like Jacob Frey and “tear gas” Tim Walz. Much of the left can at least repeat the Dems are no good and say that labor must mobilize independent of the Dems. But again, they give union leaders a pass on their Democratic Party links. The Twin Cities DSA is typical. They correctly denounce the mayor and governor for having done nothing meaningful to stop ICE but remain buried in the very Democratic Party that looks to maintain a large pool of cheap immigrant labor for the bosses to exploit. A genuine working-class defense of immigrants cannot proceed in alliance with liberal Democrats.

This Friday is an opportunity to build an immigrant rights movement on a solid working-class foundation—but only if the left draws a line against the union bureaucrats and the Dems and makes a real push for collective union action. Socialists: no more excuses—let’s fight to get labor out as an organized force on 1/23!