Some Thoughts on Sara Nelson’s General Strike Call

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

3-18-25

Some  Thoughts on Sara Nelson’s General Strike Call

 

‘We Have Very Few Options But to Join Together to Organize for a General Strike’ AFA President.

 

Fighting words from American Flight Attendant’s union president Sara Nelson in response to the Trump Administrations’ threat to take collective bargaining rights away from the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) workers.

 

But I have heard this sort of rhetoric from top labor officials on various occasions in my 30 or more years active in the US labor movement. When John Sweeney defeated Tom Donahue for the president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, the Federation’s first contested election in history, he came out guns blazing, “We must first organize despite the law if we are ever to organize with the law.", he said, and talked about blocking bridges as Martin Luther King did in the Civil Rights Movement. Sweeney went quite rapidly from blocking bridges to building them with the employers through the Team Concept and the disastrous policies that flow from it.

 

Andy Stern took over at the helm at SEIU after Sweeney’s election as AFL-CIO head. "We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn't work, we try the persuasion of power" Sweeney told the WSJ in 2008. He’s big in the hedge fund industry these days.

 

I listened to Sara Nelson’s interview on Work Bites where she was asked about the comments. She talked of the assault on federal workers and what it means for all of us. She stressed that privatization is at the core of a lot of the attacks and how important unions are in providing security and safety on the job and also in the communities we serve. This is particularly the case for workers in the airline industry. This is all good stuff. 

 

The interviewer raised the lessons of PATCO the 1981 strike of Air Traffic Controllers that was crushed by Ronald Reagan, a nasty anti-worker anti-union president. Reagan fired more than 11,000 of the strikers for refusing to return to work and forbade them from working in the industry for life (the ban was removed in the late 90’s).

 

I recall that strike very well and the AFL-CIO leadership did nothing of any substance to help win it. PATCO was demanding a 32-hour workweek without loss in pay and significant wage increases. As always, the mass media made the strike all about money but it was much more than that; stress and time off was a major issue. I spoke to one PATCO striker about the issues at our Labor Day Picnic, and he said safety, stress and time off were important. “Do you play PacMan?” he asked me. I told him I loved PacMan and he responded, “Well when two blips collide on my screen I lose 400 people”

 

After the AFL-CIO leadership’s refusal to mobilize to defend PATCO and generalize the battle (Remember Carter had begun the deregulation binge before Reagan) the bosses figured they had a green light and went on the offensive. There were numerous attempts through strike action to push back. Eastern Airlines, Greyhound and the year-long Hormel Strike by UFCW P9. PATCO and the strikes that followed were defeated through a powerful combination of the employers and the refusal of the trade union bureaucracy to bring the national power of oragnized labor to the war.

 

And This is not the first time Nelson has raised the issue of a General Strike. Back in 2019 at an AFL-CIO awards dinner she, “….asked AFL-CIO leaders to talk to their locals about a general strike…” as TSA employees were working without pay. “Go back with the Fierce Urgency of NOW to talk with your Locals and International unions about all workers joining together - To End this Shutdown with a General Strike.”

 

Perhaps Sister Nelson was a bit naïve expecting the vociferously pro-management labor hierarchy to go back to their members (most of them never ever meet member’s) and talk about a General Strike, but I don’t think so. In her interview and other comments I’ve read she basically addressed workers in general reminding us we have, “very few options but to join together to organize for a general strike.”

 

She does not address her colleagues atop the AFL-CIO. After all, building the momentum for a general strike in the US, a nation the size of a continent, will take some effort and organization. It will also take money and the resources the AFL-CIO has are in their hands. Most important; it will need some real demand and a strategy for winning them.

 

Collective Bargaining Rights.

So I take Sara Nelson’s comments with a grain of salt and the fact that it seems her main focus is the right to bargain. This is an important right indeed but it’s not the most powerful weapon the working class has, withholding our labor power and working class unity is key.

 

Collective bargaining rights are important to top labor officials, Sara Nelson included, because without them the union officials have no job. Not only do they have no job, they have no legitimacy at all in the class war between labor and capital. Central to the Wisconsin events in 2011 when thousands of people surrounded and occupied the State Capital the two issues that mattered were collective bargaining rights and dues check off where the employer collects the dues through payroll. These two issues are paramount for the paid officials as without them they have no money and no seat at the table. 

 

Using Sara Nelsons Statement

 

I think those of us in unions can, as a Facebook friend pointed out, use her statement in our union activity and the internal struggle we are forced to have with the present leadership and its class collaborationist policies, Sara Nelson included. 

 

We can introduce resolutions in our locals centering Sister Nelson’s call and supporting it. But we should go beyond her focus on just federal workers and their jobs or the right to bargain. Most Americans want Medicare for all. Most Americans want mass transit rather than more roads and vehicles and three-hour commute times. Most Americans want decent housing and affordable rents. Most Americans care about the environment and want environmental protection. Most Americans believe the $7.50 federal minimum wage is a disgrace and even a $15 an hour wage poverty wages. Most Americans oppose the US war machine’s endless wars and the Gaza genocide. We live in a democracy apparently but have no way of realizing our desires.

 

A general strike will have to be built over a period. Resolutions should be introduced at the local level, sent to local labor bodies, District Councils, Central Labor Councils and call for funds and resources to be used to call regional and statewide meetings to discuss and prepare for a 24 hour national work stoppage at a set date. The money and resources the AFL-CIO gives to the Democratic Party can be used to organize ourselves instead. The Democratic Party should play no role in such a development.

 

Now we know the present leadership will not take such a path. That doesn’t matter. Whether a resolution passes or not is somewhat secondary as the debate around it and the ideas discussed will begin to take on a life of its own. If a small local, or groups of rank and file workers and allies can muster the resources and organize a meeting then do so. Get locals that will endorse it. The debate will influence consciousness.

 

This is the way we can take Sara Nelsons fairly innocuous comment and make some hay with it.