DSA leadership plans for a 2028 nationwide general strike: A ‘perfect storm’ for organizing

“We are building toward May Day 2028 (and looking ahead to the 2028 Presidential Election, too),” DSA co-chairs Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique wrote in a May newsletter, referring to plans for a general strike.The political movement that spawned Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has enjoyed a string of successes in the 2026 midterm elections. But elections are only one piece of the DSA’s broader strategy, which sees organized labor as a vehicle for advancing socialist politics beyond the ballot box. “This is kind of like a perfect storm for greater organizing,” Stu Smith, an investigative analyst at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank who closely tracks the DSA, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s something they really do talk about quite often.”Unlike a traditional strike targeting a single employer, the DSA wants to trigger a general strike that halts work across multiple industries at once. If successful, the plan could grind the U.S. economy to a halt. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 restricts the scale of potential work stoppages, including by restricting so-called “sympathy strikes” in which employees walk out to show solidarity with another striking group.The DSA has long viewed unions as not merely voting blocs, but institutions capable of shifting political power outside elections. Official DSA documents repeatedly emphasize organizing workplaces, placing members in strategic industries, and expanding labor militancy as a path toward broader socialist change.Socialist Majority, one of the DSA’s major caucuses, encourages the DSA to continue “building our national capacity for salting and placing networked comrades in key industries to support organizing the unorganized and union reform.” “Salting” is a labor strategy where an activist applies for a job at a non-union workplace to organize workers from the inside.“If the average person realized how often this comes up as a topic, they would really see this as something that everyone across the Left is really working towards,” Smith, the Manhattan Institute analyst, added. He noted that the idea has penetrated “normy spaces” like the Sunrise Movement, a Gen Z climate activist collective.The DSA did not originate the idea of a nationwide general strike in 2028. The effort instead began within organized labor.United Auto Workers union president Shawn Fain first floated the idea of a massive strike in a 2023 speech. At the time, Fain announced that his union had approached the big three automakers — General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis — with an April 30, 2028 contract expiration date. “This allows us to strike on May Day, or International Workers Day,” Fain continued. May Day has its roots in the American labor movement, tracing to the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, where workers striking for an eight-hour workday gathered for a rally that turned deadly when an onlooker threw a bomb at police. The confrontation, which took place on May 4, left seven police officers and four to eight civilians dead. Fain’s proposal has gained momentum with leadership of other unions, including the American Federation of Teachers and the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. Several of those unions were involved with a January strike in Minneapolis, which came after two Minnesotans died in confrontations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.Robert LeVertis Bell, who is headed for an uncontested general election for the Kentucky state House of Representatives, described how the program fits into the DSA’s strategy of pushing the labor movement left.DSA ENDORSEMENT TRACKER: HERE ARE THE SOCIALISTS RUNNING FOR OFFICE ACROSS AMERICA“It calls for democratic interventions at work, for empowering workers to organize, strike, democratize their unions, take political action,” Bell said. “That means we talk to our coworkers. You bring this platform, this program as an anchor to talk to your coworkers.”Unions were a base of left-wing political power before atrophying in the later half of the twentieth century. Only 10 percent of wage and salary workers were union members in 2025, down from 20.1 percent when the Bureau of Labor Statistics first collected comparable data in 1983.