Socialist Forum editorial board member Todd Chretien caught up with union organizers at the Socialism 2024 Conference in Chicago over the Labor Day Weekend to discuss the meaning of UAW president Shawn Fain’s call for a general strike on May Day 2028. Jackson Potter is the vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Brandon Mancilla serves as director for UAW Region 9, and Sarah Hurd is an organizer with the Illinois Nurses Association and co-chair of DSA’s National Labor Commission. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Todd: Let me start with you, Brandon. UAW president Shawn Fain has called for a general strike in 2028. Can you explain what he has in mind?

Brandon: Our Big Three contracts in the auto industry expire on May Day 2028, which sets us up for a strike deadline. But we want the rest of the labor movement to join us, just like we do in other countries. When the labor movement moves as one, workers have more power, and the labor movement has more power to demand changes in working conditions and living conditions, but also political demands to change the country.

So we’re seeing May Day 2028 as that horizon. We’re calling on the rest of the labor movement to start having these conversations and strategize and work together with us just to make it happen.

Todd: And the UAW has recently been on strike, so this isn’t coming out of the blue. We’re here with another union, the CTU, which has been on strike many times in the last decade or more. Jackson, when you hear a call from auto workers, does that resonate with you as a teacher? The need for a general strike, for workers to come together across unions?

Jackson: I think for us, the call to eat the rich was probably even more prominent than the call for a general strike. We’re not necessarily automatically interested in a lot of hoopola around a general strike if it’s not based in real structures that allow us to win things concretely. We’ve done one-day strikes with other locals, unions, and community forces, and that’s been important. But I think what’s different here is we’re talking about applying structure tests, aligning demands, and having coordination in ways we haven’t seen across geography and across sectors.

Todd: Sarah, you’re somebody who organizes nurses, some who have contracts, others who are organizing for their first contract, and others who are just starting on campaigns. How do you see this call from the UAW and other unions helping the process of people who are fighting for their first union?

Sarah: I think that something that I saw during the UPS campaign of 2023 and then the autoworkers campaign later that year was the ability of these big demands that are very publicly discussed to inspire people and raise their expectations. I think we have a moment that we can really seize here. We have energy around new organizing and kind of stripping away the crusty old labor movement of the past that has not been able to serve members because the unions haven’t been as vital as they need to be. And so having this combination of something that we can put forward as a North Star with the scaffolding necessary to really build up our rank and file to get there, that’s kind of the goal of the project, from my perspective.

Todd: People may or may not know, but the United Auto Workers really got its start in a series of mass strikes. There was a long, slow, patient organizing campaign for many years beforehand, but the UAW emerged as a historical force when it got the first contracts through sit down strikes in 1937-38. How can this call for a general strike help bring that history of the UAW and other unions back into the popular consciousness?

Brandon: I think working-class people understand that in order to get by, they have to fight to (barely) survive. The organizing challenge for organizers and unions is to take that instinct, right, that people have and actually channel that towards organizing for power. Not just to get by as one union, not just to get our contract, but to build working class power broadly.

So I think you’re absolutely right. We look at the history of the labor movement, and it’s a history of struggle, of blood, sweat, and tears. That history of the sit-down strikes was the inspiration for our stand up strike. We needed to go about bargaining in a different way to make sure that we could reverse so many of the concessions that have been given up over decades but also start charting a new path forward.

And also bring along workers with us who don’t have a union yet. That’s what we’re setting out to organize the rest of the auto industry that’s unorganized in the South, especially, and also the electric vehicle and the battery industry. So I think that every single labor union in this country can ask those same kinds of questions about their own.

Todd: Jackson, in terms of what Brandon just mentioned, how do you see organizing for power here in Chicago? Brandon Johnson, a former member of the CTU, is now the mayor, and a series of progressives and socialists have won seats to the city council. Can you talk just a little bit about how the CTU sees its own position within the broader Chicago community and maybe how that relates to what this sort of strike could mean for labor, amplifying those lessons nationally?

Jackson: To Brandon’s point, their stand up strike really inspired our members. We had members saying, “Can we get 32-hour work weeks based on the UAW’s demand?” We’re bargaining now for housing for 20,000 homeless students, which is completely outside the bounds of what labor law permits. It’s a prohibited subject of bargaining. 

We’re dealing with austerity at the city level andstate budgets that aren’t sufficient or adequate. And so we’re going to need enough motion and movement and alignment to have redistribution from the top to working families, to get free college, to get free health care, to get affordable housing, to get those students homes. It’s not going to be sufficient for us to do it by ourselves. So in some ways, this is full circle.

Todd: Sarah, you had talked before about the strike ready campaigns by the Teamsters at UPS, and then obviously, the support for the UAW stand up strikes being a really important mechanism to get people prepared for going on strike in their own unions. And just like UPS workers, everybody in the country knows a nurse, everybody in the country knows a home health care worker, everybody in the country knows an LVN. How do you see the potential bridging of those differences between groups of workers?

Sarah: Obviously, everyone is always going to have their own particular terrain. And I think healthcare feels like one of the trickiest. Just like teachers, you have to deal with this. You’re providing a public good, and when you withhold your labor, there are consequences for the people that you serve.

We’re also in a situation in healthcare where there’s a huge pool of scab labor. They’re called travel nurses. We have to give ten days notice before we ever go on strike so that the employer can find a bunch of scabs to come in and take over people’s jobs. So not only that’s a challenge in healthcare. Another challenge in healthcare is just the fact that there’s huge pockets of workers that are basically completely unorganized right now.

But I do think that’s why some of these demands really get at what 99% of people are facing right now across many industries, and they can unlock a lot of power that hopefully we can use to put some of this necessary organizing into overdrive. After all, U.S. labor law is not favorable to us right now, but we can’t wait and hope that it will get better or fix itself. We have to struggle with that and make changing that law part of our project as well.

What does it take to organize in such a big and bold way that we’re able to challenge some of these laws that are definitely designed with ruling class interests in mind?

Todd: Brandon, you said today that things can change quickly. The UAW is not acting like it was four years ago. And whether or not people are in unions, the idea of a general strike in 2028 might seem almost impossible. What elements give you some confidence that this is not just a slogan, but this can actually be translated into real world action and preparation for that action in the coming few years? I mean, that’s not much time.

Brandon: I see it in the concrete examples. Who knew that we would have a teachers union in one of the biggest cities in the country leading fights for the social good? For the common good, not just for contract demands as they usually traditionally used to. Who knew that a UAW strike could force the company to, in writing, commit to reopening a closed factory? They idled Belvedere with no plans of ever having any work there again. And right now, we’re having a struggle to actually have Stellantis live up to their promise to reopen Belvedere and put product in that plant.

So these are all things that just not even four years ago, two years ago, people would have said, oh, you’re crazy to think that we can do this. So there are concrete examples, and if we all commit to a common mission and work to make it happen… well, there’s no guarantees in life. But that’s power. Building power is what leads to even bigger, more ambitious ones.

Todd: CTU went through a transformation some dozen years ago, but I think most people in the country are in a position more akin to what CTU was like before it changed. Do you have any advice for people who are reading this, where they’re maybe the only one, they’re the only person in their union who’s thinking about this, or they’re not even in the union yet?

Jackson: I think part of it is having conversations about what the possibilities are and having rank and file meetings where we can identify root causes, for example, why do we have such high class sizes? Why are there not enough art courses? Why are there no librarians or waning numbers of them? What are the needs of our school communities?

For example, if you’re a small town local, maybe you’re facing a budget constraint. So that’s why you need a greater network of support so that you can break loose some state funding or alter the way that the federal government supports public education. Those things that seem like barriers or impossible demands, all of a sudden, doors open. I do think UAW has shown the way, right?

And the nurses have done this, too, with their strike last week. In CTU, we haven’t even begun to have a conversation among our members around how healthcare costs are one of the main drivers of why we have to cut back on other demands when we’re in negotiation with the district. Maybe the nurses want to say, “Well, we want our services to be free for all other workers.” And we can say, “We want art for the children of nurses, nurses that go to public school, and we want auto workers to have access to that as well.” And so those types of conversations are coming. and I think it will give people opportunities to participate in new and different ways.

Todd: Just a quick follow up, it’s almost a silly question from the point of view of Chicago, but if you’re one of those people in a rural district, what is, literally, the first thing you do?
Jackson: I think if you are in a school community, you can organize your colleagues to start imagining what could be different. Pull out an American Federation of Teachers resolution that, supposedly, your local supports in some way, shape, or form and start talking to people about it tell them that this just happened. And that opens doors, too. It’s like, Randy Weingart, our national president, supported this. The Illinois delegation supported this. Why can’t Granite City, right? 

Todd: Sarah, this article will mostly be read by DSA members. Do you think there’s a specific role that socialists should try to play in this growing movement, either as a national organization or locally? We’ll need a giant coalition to pull this off a strike in 2028, but just from the point of view of DSA members, what’s the most important thing that we can do?

Sarah: I introduced myself as an organizer with the Illinois Nurses Association, but we’re all DSA members, and I am on the national leadership body of the Labor Commission of DSA. We have been pursuing a three-pronged strategy over the past few years of trying to do solidarity projects for people who, for whatever reason, can’t join a union. It’s not the right time for them or their union. Or their union is just not in a place where it can be moved. I’m getting them involved in struggle by supporting other big union fights through providing food showing up on the picket line. 

But we’ve also been trying to support people in doing what we call the rank and fall strategy. We encourage DSA members to get a job in a strategic industry and build your life around the long haul of building the labor movement while doing a job that has a useful function in society as well.Rank-and-file caucus formation is also something that our membership has been working on even before the big influx into DSA in 2016.

What you can do depends a lot on how you’re positioned. If you have a local labor formation, get involved with it. If you don’t, start one. And we’re also trying to do more and more stuff on the national level that can kind of coordinate this so that DSA can intervene in a positive way. I think we had a really good practice run with the stand up strike, just seeing what it can look like to organize a base of community support for a labor struggle, but there’s a lot of building yet to do.

Todd: Any last thoughts?

Jackson: I would just say that as a result of this panel today, I had a couple of folks come up who were involved in community organizing, housing and justice campaigns and were like, I would like to set up a meeting to talk more about how we can participate. So I just want to encourage all of the readers to get in where you fit in. I think there’s more to come.

Brandon: And just to Jackson’s point earlier about our union and his union getting together, the president of his union came to our picket line and said, “Can I help you guys?” So it’s not just theoretical. It is happening, and we should keep up that work. I’m sure all DSA members, democratic socialists, work for a living. So this is the time to start a union, to organize your workplace, if you haven’t already. Have those conversations with your coworkers or get a strategic union job. And push for these bold, broad-based ideas that we’re organizing around.

Image: UAW Picket Line at the GM Willow Run Distribution Center in Belleville, Michigan on September 26, 2023.