by Joe Berry, Delegate from AFT 2121 and Helena Worthen, Delegate from NWU
A general strike on May Day 2026 – what does that bring to your mind? Thousands of workers marching with picket signs and shouting angry slogans? That’s the classic media image. But it’s not actually what a general strike mostly looks like.
What a strike does is withdraw labor: people stop working. The sound of people not working can be many things. It’s not necessarily noisy. When you read the historical accounts of general strikes like the Seattle General Strike of 1919 or the San Francisco General Strike of 1934, people were saying, “It was amazingly quiet.” There were rallies, but there were also food kitchens. In some, there was music. In the 1946 Oakland, CA Work Holiday, there was dancing in the street. In Minneapolis last month there was mass singing that went on block after block across the city.
The real essence of a general strike is that it includes everyone, in their own way, and the message is, “We’ve got your back.” This is where the power comes from. You don’t work, and it feels safe in a way that many people have never felt before. The security that you get in a general strike, even if you are a non-union at-will employee, is that we’re all in this together. In our anxious age, just feeling safe in a voluntary crowd can be liberating.
A general strike is a response to targeted brutality
The calls for a general strike on May Day 2026 are in response to the brutality and stupidity of the current administration. As a country, we are well into a disaster that has been looming for at least a decade, if not since the 1980s. Advance warnings about this disaster have been met with repression: the kidnappings and punishment of pro-Palestinian protesters, attacks on people and institutions of the left, the dismantling of higher ed, and the revenge taken against political leaders who tried to stand in the way. These attacks targeted people and groups who spoke out against the disaster they could see coming. They warned us, in other words.
The administration also targeted these resisters one at a time, as if there was no collective motive and rationale behind all of them. We must note that mirroring back a one-by-one response, after the fact, has not worked. Taking the initiative in a broadly inclusive, unified way, as in a general strike, is what we need.
Unlike demonstrations, strikes are led by labor
There have been recurring demonstrations like No Kings, that grow each time they occur. But when the crowd is labor-led, it is grounded in work, where wealth of all kinds originates, without which nothing happens. No construction, no art, no food, no next generation of educated citizens. This is a power that civil disobedience by itself cannot muster.
Workplaces have different rules about free speech as compared to public spaces. There is no one to fire you for participating in a demonstration, but employers often fire workers who protest, even if it’s about a safety issue or a manufacturing problem. But this threat makes worker’s protests resonate as even greater acts of courage.
A protest coming from a workplace comes from knowing what has been going on in that workplace. They are actually not just protests, they are warnings: “Something bad will happen if this doesn’t get changed!” A regular stream of warnings like this has made it to the top of the media noise. They may start in the workplace but then impact the public.
Some examples: the environmental disaster that that followed the train crash in East Palestine, Ohio, the Boeing 737 airplane crashes or near crashes, the deaths and casualties due to hospital and emergency service worker understaffing. Workers in these industries warned us about all of these. In 2025 we were warned about personal emergencies caused by the layoffs of thousands of federal workers. Researchers and scientists warned us about critical data collection that was interrupted. Public health workers warned us about loss of herd immunity. We must include among the disasters the longer-term educational crisis due to restrictions on what can be taught and learned in schools and colleges. The recent New York and CA nurses strikes were over not just pay and benefits, but patient safety and workplace violence.
Workers can see how what goes on behind workplace walls, invisible to the public can culminate in a public catastrophe. These are warnings that originate in a workplace but have public impact and significance.
So a general strike led by labor comes from the place where wealth is created and expands into the public space. Ultimately, all these protests converge and must be understood to be different aspects of the same problem.
A strike across the higher ed sector
Higher ed as a sector has been one of the most frequently targeted workplaces. The range of attacks is huge: knocking out university presidents, clipping and censoring curriculum, eliminating tenure, kidnapping students off the streets, pulling back essential research funding; there is hardly any aspect of work in higher ed that has not been injured. Workforces are used against each other, too – for example, when custodians were asked at one university to clear the pro-Palestinian student encampment.
Why is higher ed so severely targeted? Quite likely, it is because of what we do. Like some of the other targeted sectors (like the press, the media, and the arts) we are a sector where discussion takes place that is capable of producing ideas that are new, different, and based in reality. In fact, our whole sector exists for the purpose of creating that conversation, from peer-review to the classroom to governance to public testimonies. This is a conversation that creates warnings everyone should listen to!
While we prize free speech as critical to this conversation, and we even make it a condition of faculty work, it is really only tenured faculty and unionized workforces that can truly practice it. This is where HELU comes in, with our wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast organizing mission. If joining a strike is an exercise of free speech, then let all the workforces on a campus exercise it together and provide the cover for the contingent, insecure and gig workers who make our sector run.
“General” means “wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast”
HELU, which is committed to organizing campus workers across-the-board, has an investment in preparing members and member organizations to join in actions on May Day 2026. Just among faculty, 75% of higher ed workers are contingents. Many campus workers are subcontracted. In many states, workers cannot do collective bargaining. A “general” strike on a campus would include everyone who works there, plus the students and the community, many of whom are probably also campus employees. A general strike across the entire sector would highlight the stark differences in higher ed from state to state. In all of these situations, the cover and protection provided by the fact that the action is “general” would benefit everyone, from the most secure and privileged to the most vulnerable.
It would also be a public statement about what our wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast mission looks like in practice. What is your campus going to be doing on May 1, 2026?