There is one power organized labor craves above all others. One power to rule all workers, willing or not; one power to find the leftist cadres to lead street demonstrations; one power to shut down economic and social life. In the mind of leftists, this power would grant Big Labor the ability to secure Everything Leftism—open borders, Palestinian sovereignty, government-funded abortions and transgender surgeries, massive tax hikes, racial reparations, the anti-capitalist “warmth of collectivism”—and bind the nation to it all forever.
Crudely analogous to J.R.R. Tolkien’s One Ring, that power is the “general strike,” a union-activist led demonstration that shuts down a city, state, or entire nation for explicitly political activist purposes. It is worth interrogating that power, especially as activists—some of them on the ostensible right—propose to lift legal barriers Republicans of old placed in the way of general strikes.
What a “general strike” is
What makes a general strike “general” is that unlike a targeted work stoppage under American law (loosely, the National Labor Relations Act as amended by the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947), a general strike targets all employers. The work stoppage and public demonstrations (usually, but not always, accompanied by public disorder of a kind with which Minnesota residents are very familiar) is not aimed at pressuring any particular employer do anything. Instead, the objective is to force the government to capitulate to the demonstrators.
To discover what a general strike looks like in practice, look to Europe (especially France), where labor unions fueled by sectoral bargaining powers periodically try to overturn representative democracy by violence and intimidation. In Europe, unions (which are frequently aligned with radical forces like national Communist Parties) can shut down essential services (especially government-monopolized services like the railroads). French unions have tried to depose legislative leaders over tax policy and have asserted the power of social liberalism in an annual “General Feminist Strike.”
The precious
For leftists infatuated with the concept of the general strike, its power goes far beyond merely expressing disgruntlement with government policy. The New York Times looked upon it and marveled:
In many countries, labor unrest has often served as a political counterweight. A wave of public-employee strikes in France, in 1995, essentially shut down the country for weeks, forcing the conservative government to abandon several proposed cuts to the welfare state. And in 2024, South Korea’s second-largest union called for a general strike in the wake of the president’s declaration of martial law, a move that helped persuade him to back down.
The paper sought comment from union activists (mostly affiliated with the Federal Unionists Network, a coalition of labor union activist government workers), who expressed their wishes that French-style union-fueled street struggle will come to America. Commenting on increased activism by federal worker unions, which are barred by law from striking, it reports:
“If we could strike — I’m not implying anything — I think it would make a big difference,” Kelley, the president of A.F.G.E., told me. Federal workers have struck before, notably in 1970, when 200,000 postal workers staged a wildcat strike that won them higher wages and the right, unprecedented for employees of the federal government, to bargain for wages and benefits. But the legacy of the 1981 air traffic controllers strike, and the Reagan administration’s harsh reprisal, continues to cast a pall on the labor movement. (In 1980, there were 187 major strikes; in 2024, there were 31.)
One does not simply walk into the Paris Commune
There are barriers to the leftist workers’ paradise. First and foremost are the workers—a fact even AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler admitted to the Times. As it reports:
Liz Shuler, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., who represents 15 million private- and public-sector workers, told me that internal data shows workers are not ready for a general strike. “We are not there,” she said. “There’s a lot of deep education and mobilization that’s happening within our unions to get us ready for a moment where we might need to strategically call for a one-day strike or a strike in a particular industry.”
The writer’s disappointment drips from the Times page, and if the framing is accurate, arguably Shuler’s comment conveys it as well. Judge Glock of the Manhattan Institute pointed out that “For over a century the “general strike” has been seen as a semi-revolutionary act designed to fundamentally upset society. Liz Shuler is treating it as just a matter of time.”
The last alliance of Taft and Hartley
And there enters the second barrier to a general strike: the capstone legislation of the late Sen. Robert A. Taft (R-OH), the “Mister Republican” of the 1930s and 1940s. After a massive strike wave hit post-war America from 1945 through 1946—perhaps the closest the United States has come to a general strike—the public in its justified wrath raised the moribund Republican Party from the dead and gave it control of Congress. (The GOP had been locked out of federal authority since the Great Depression.)
With Sen. Taft running point, that Republican Congress, with support from union-skeptical Democrats, passed labor-reform legislation that would carry Taft’s name and that of his House counterpart, Rep. Fred Hartley (R-NJ) long after his 1953 demise. Their Taft-Hartley legislation came to define the Republican approach to labor relations for the following 80 years. The law contained numerous provisions (most notably the provision protecting state-level “right to work” laws allowing dissenting nonmembers not to financially support labor unions), but the one most relevant to the leftist dream of the general strike is the prohibition on “secondary boycotts” or “secondary strikes.”
Essentially, the Taft-Hartley Act bans unions from striking except to change their own employer’s behavior. (For a more comprehensive explanation of what is banned, the National Labor Relations Board provides one. It’s complicated.) Since a general strike targets someone else (usually the government), federal legal protections for strikes and strike-related damage do not apply.
Sectoral bargaining
Perhaps the worst move that would empower a “general strike” would be granting unions “sectoral bargaining” powers to speak for tens of millions of unwilling workers. (Sectoral bargaining permits collective bargaining against entire industries—sectors— rather than against specific firms within the sector.) In 2024, I presented four cases against adopting the practice; all apply to the general strike.
Practically, allowing sectoral bargaining all but guarantees general strikes, reversing 80 years of Republican (and frankly national) consensus that civilians and the national economy should be protected from the effects of work stoppages. Unions that would wield the general strike are overwhelmingly partisan for progressive Democratic interests, even though working Americans are as evenly divided as the country. (In 2024, even union households were only about as Democratic as the state of Maine, even as union political contributions were about as Democratic as the District of Columbia.) Those unions are fundamentally collectivist and hostile to traditional American individualism and exceptionalism. And the economic case that sectoral-bargaining unions that general-strike so often it becomes a national stereotype (cough *France* cough) hurt the economy remains as clear as ever.
Unmaking the threat
The dream of a general strike, and the AFL-CIO entertaining it, is yet another indication that as Big Labor becomes increasingly unrepresentative of American workers, its politics will become increasingly unhinged and leftist. And the leaderships of interest groups do not become saner and more centrist when given more power, as they would under a French-style sectoral bargaining regime. Such a policy would make the threat of the general strike for leftist ends more real, not less real. As I have written before:
Expanding union power through sectoral bargaining, whether or not that comes with bigger union budgets filled with forced dues, will further empower these left-wing ideologues. It is these ideologues, not the union membership at large and certainly not a minority (however substantial) of that membership, who decide how unions operate. Some have argued that organized labor can be a counter to the coordination of “woke capitalism” and the elite-class formal institutions. If anything, organized labor is a vehicle to increase the coordination of the elite formal institutions, and through ESG investing of pension funds organized labor is a perpetrator, not an opponent, of woke capitalism.
Keep French labor relations in France. Leave Taft-Hartley alone. Throw the “general strike,” a leftist dream, into the fire.
