The term “general strike” is re-entering the vocabulary of more and more workers in the US today. UAW president Shawn Fain’s call for unions to coordinate their contracts to expire on May 1st, 2028 provided the initial impetus for this. Labor Notes, which hosts the largest union conference in the US and produces the labor movement’s most-read website, has published half a dozen articles over the last year about general strikes. Some union leaders, like Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants, have discussed and called for general strikes publicly in recent years. Trump’s lurch further right in his second term has emboldened many to call for a general strike to fight back. Even relatively mainstream political figures, such as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, have recently called for a general strike amidst Trump’s violent crackdown on immigrant communities and federal occupations of major cities.

A general strike is a work stoppage in a city or region that halts the majority of its economic activity. Historian Jeremy Brecher notes three essential features of such strikes: “an expanding challenge to established authority in workplaces and beyond; a tendency for workers to take control of their own activity; and a widening solidarity and mutual support among different groups of working people.”

As the most powerful action of the working class, general strikes are easy to invoke in theory as the solution to every major social crisis and exceedingly difficult to execute in practice. On the left, calls for a general strike are as routine as the morning dew and as hackneyed as a sun wearing sunglasses. 

Historical conditions are largely deaf to leftist battle cries. Yet, it is a mistake for the left to pretend general strikes don’t exist and should not be discussed. The history of general strikes is the history of the largest eruptions of class conflict and thus are of immense importance for understanding not only our past but for exploring large-scale tactical opportunities in the present.

This post provides a survey of general strikes in the US from 1862 to the present followed by a partial survey of general strikes from around the world from the 1990s to the present. Studying this history can expand our imagination of what’s possible in the US labor movement today, stimulate sober assessments of social conditions while preparing the ground for larger-scale action, and guide movement strategy when the next tidal wave arrives.

1860 – 1900: The Paroxysms of a Rising Urban Capitalism

In the US, slave labor and stolen indigenous land created the foundation of wealth that enabled capitalism to grow as well the racial terror and division that enabled capitalists to suppress wages. Gender domination violently forged in Europe was transplanted to the US. Without the brutality against and divisions within the working class that patriarchy and white supremacy provided, capitalism would not have been possible. These systems of oppression are often exposed and challenged during general strikes, which have succeeded or failed on their ability to unite workers across divisions.

In the US the first approximation of the general strike was the US Civil War from 1862-5. The Civil War was a military action but also an economic one. W.E.B. Du Bois and subsequent historians have shown how the fleeing of 500,000 former slaves, with 180,000 of them joining the Union Army, was absolutely essential to the Northern victory in the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. 

From 1800 – 1907 the urban population of the US grew 9x from 322,000 to 30 million, and from 1850 – 1901 the amount of railroad track in operation grew 20x from 9,000 to 200,000 miles. The density of workers in urban areas as well as growing industrial mass transport systems for raw materials and goods created the conditions for urban industry and large-scale strikes. The lack of regulation and government intervention in the economy in this period led to quick successions of booms and busts.

“The Great Upheaval” of 1877 began when the B&O Railroad Company announced its second 10% pay cut for workers in 8 months amid a crushing economic depression. In response, workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia struck and blockaded all the rail lines. A series of cascading confrontations between government forces and workers saw the strike spread to Baltimore, Pittsburg, Chicago, Buffalo, Louisville, and more, rippling out not only geographically but industrially as workers from other industries joined in. Strikes also spread to Southern cities, often starting among hyper-exploited black workers before being taken up by white workers. 

The wave of action culminated in the general strike of St. Louis, where nearly all economic activity was halted except for that permitted by the strike committee. Some local militias and National Guard deployments proved unreliable agents of repression as they refused orders to attack workers in whose communities they themselves came from. However, the strikers were not prepared to withstand the assault of federal troops, with the bulk of the available US army being mobilized to put down the strike, going city by city. 100 workers were killed. 

While most of the big strike movements of this era were defensive against wage cuts, in 1886 an economic recovery was underway and workers demanded higher wages and shorter hours. Despite the leadership of the Knights of Labor, the country’s largest union at the time, aggressively trying to keep their members on the job, a railway strike of 200,000 workers broke out across the lower midwest and southeast US. Amidst the backdrop of heightened strike activity, labor activists across the country formulated the demand for the eight-hour day, held hundreds of preparatory meetings and marches in the months before, and then launched a national strike on May 1st. This was the only mass strike of the period that was pre-meditated, with a date and demand set weeks beforehand. 200,000 workers participated and were broadly successful in winning reductions to their work week even if few achieved a complete reduction to eight-hour days.

In New Orleans in 1892, a strike began when streetcar workers walked out demanding union recognition and reduced hours. A series of conflicts and partial victories emboldened more workers to strike over similar demands, growing to include thousands of packing and transport workers. Deadlock in negotiations led the city’s gas, water, electrical, and many others to join the strike in solidarity. 30,000 workers, half the city’s workforce, were on strike at the peak. While some unions broke their contracts to join the strike, many of the more conservative unions refused to break their contracts, preventing the movement from engulfing the entire working class. The strike was conducted by a multi-racial coalition of workers and unions despite employer attempts to stoke racial hatred through the city’s newspapers. In response to the threat of martial law, the strike leaders settled, losing on their demands for union recognition but winning demands around wages and hours.

By the mid-1890s another economic depression was in full-swing alongside widespread wage cuts. In 1894, the American Railway Union (ARU) was growing as an industrial union for all railway workers. Many had become disillusioned with the old rail brotherhoods that placed workers in smaller unions divided from each other by job class and tended to be conservative in their politics. When workers at the Pullman factory that manufactured rail cars in Illinois were threatened by the company against joining the ARU and three workers were fired for speaking out, a boycott of Pullman train cars and accompanying strike movement spread like wildfire. Soon 500,000 rail workers across the country were on strike.

The inability of the employers alone to repress the strike led to calls for militias and troops to intervene. Chicago, one of the centers of the strike, soon saw 14,000 government forces occupying the city on July 4th. On July 7th, the Chicago Trades and Labor Assembly promised all 150,000 of its members would go out on strike in solidarity if the ARU called for it. When US President Grover Cleveland effectively declared martial law in Chicago on July 8th, unions set the city-wide strike date for the 11th. However, the delay was too long and gave authorities the opportunity to arrest all of ARU’s leaders in the interim. Samuel Gompers, national president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), came to Chicago and was urged to call a national general strike. However, Gompers cowardly sided with the conservative rail brotherhoods and rejected calls for solidarity action. He later recounted that had he given the greenlight for all of the largest national unions to strike, they would have gone out. 

1900 – 1950: Rising Worker Power Amid Growing Mass Industry and World War

1919 was the next large strike wave to hit the US, partly inspired by the Russian Revolution and partly arising from the social strife accompanying the end of World War I. Veterans returning to the economy and the removal of price controls led to skyrocketing inflation and unemployment. Four million workers struck that year, including more than 300,000 in each of steel and coal. This was the largest per-capita rate of strike activity the US has ever seen, before or since.

In Seattle that year, when 35,000 striking shipyard workers saw their wage demands rebuffed and when the federal government sided with the employers in refusing to cede any ground, the city’s working class was backed into a corner. 110 union locals in Seattle, in defiance of their national AFL union leaders, voted in favor of a city-wide general strike. 65,000 workers went out and the general strike committee was in nearly total control of the city, determining which essential services (such as hospitals, garbage collection, and fire stations) were allowed to continue and providing 30,000 meals a day. After a few days, some of the unions started going back to work under threat from national union leaders and escalating threats of military intervention. The strike was called off after its sixth day, without winning any of its immediate demands and with the federal government shortly cancelling all of its shipbuilding contracts in Seattle. Nonetheless, the experience of the strike emboldened workers and union membership grew in the ensuing years. Canada’s third largest city, Winnipeg, conducted a six-week general strike of 30,000 workers a couple months later. 

The Red Scare that President Woodrow Wilson initiated in 1917 created intense repression of the left. Additionally, during the war the largest migration to date of black people out of the South and the returning of black soldiers from the war stoked white racial fears. Wilson’s support for a resurging KKK, including a screening at the White House of the pro-Klan film Birth of a Nation in 1915, fed into a wave of white supremacist riots in 1919 in dozens of major US cities. 100s of black Americans were slaughtered and lynched, and recently returned black servicemen led armed community defense efforts. Ultimately, these anti-communist and white supremacist elements in the working class, amplified by economic and political elites, undermined the solidarity that would have been needed to secure major wins in the post-war strike wave.

Over the 1920s and 30s, the Fordist assembly line was being widely implemented, de-skilling jobs, slashing wages, and imposing mindless drudgery on workers. The Great Depression of the 1930s brought the next great cauldron of labor strife.

Major strikes in 1934 exploded in the auto industry in Toledo, in the trucking industry in Minneapolis, in shipping on the West Coast centered around San Francisco, and in the textile industry across the South and Northeast. In Minneapolis, truckers striking under the rank-and-file leadership of a radical Teamsters local halted the distribution of all goods throughout the economy, and dozens of other unions walked off the job in solidarity. At its peak, as many as 40,000 were refusing work and it had become a general strike. In San Francisco, dockworkers tying up the ports and sailors refusing to man the boats similarly deprived the coastal cities of their economic engines. After police attacked and killed two union members at a protest, mounting pressure from rank-and-filers forced the San Francisco Federation of Labor to declare a general strike and 150,000 workers walked out. Each of these strikes encountered stiff resistance from employers determined to keep their workforces free of unions. Hired thugs, local police, deputized citizens, and the national guard were all used to violently attack picket lines. At least 24 workers were killed in labor disputes that year.

The textile workers strike, while the largest by sheer numbers that year at 400,000, was also the least successful. The weaker initial union presence in the industry meant an absence of more experienced rank-and-file organizers to lead the strike, the geographic sprawl of the industry made it easier for police and national guard to overwhelm isolated pockets of strikers, and the lack of vulnerable supply chain choke points in the textile industry all contributed to the failure of the textile strike to win its demands.

However, the Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco strikes all effectively won union recognition and wage gains. These victories built some of the largest and most radical unions of the 1930s and 40s, such as the United Auto Workers, the Midwestern Teamsters, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Together, the social explosions of these 1934 strikes were the critical cause in pushing the federal government to legalize unions and establish a framework of union rights in the private sector with the passing of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935.

However, employers’ determined resistance to these new union rights made them effectively unenforceable by the federal government over the next couple years. The pent-up working class agitation and militancy that had exploded in 1934 became pressurized again, exploding in a wave of sit-down strikes in 1937. The sit-down tactic involves workers “sitting down” and occupying the workplace instead of going outside the workplace to picket. This is considered an escalation because it keeps workers safer from outside attacks, seizes control of company property, and is not very far from the socialist dream of workers taking full control of their factories and running them for themselves.

Auto workers led the charge when 137,000 workers participated in sit-downs and occupied key factories in the supply chain of General Motors, the largest employer in the most profitable industry in global capitalism. But it wasn’t just auto, with as many as 350,000 other workers participating in sit-down strikes in their workplaces throughout 1937. The militant sit-down strike became a socially acceptable response to the lawlessness with which employers were violating labor law.

That year auto workers won their key demand of union recognition and followed that up shortly with pace-setting contracts for industrial workers. The sit-down strike was broadly effective across many industries. Under pressure to concede rights in exchange for social peace, the state again re-asserted the legitimacy of union rights when the Supreme Court upheld the major provisions of the NLRA later in 1937. This time the employers complied, taking the short-term defeat of legally recognizing unions and thus shifting their strategic goal from abolishing union rights immediately to chipping away at them over the long-term.

World War II brought massive investments to stimulate the war economy. This put pressure on employers and the state to respect union rights and put pressure on unions to keep production running. While there was still plenty of worker unrest over the terms of these WWII economic pacts, they didn’t explode into general strikes just yet.

The end of WWII halted war production, removed price controls, ballooned unemployment, and again added powder to the keg of class struggle. Five million workers struck in 1945-6, the largest strike wave in absolute terms in US history, as both employers and workers sought to define the economic terms of the post-war era. 750,000 steel workers struck in 1946 in what is the largest single-industry strike in US history, shutting down production of essential raw materials to much of the rest of the national economy, including auto production, electronics, and construction. Localized strikes escalated quickly into city-wide general strikes in Oakland, Houston, Stamford, Rochester, Lancaster, and Pittsburgh. These strikes were largely successful at winning wage gains to keep pace with runaway inflation and to maintain union recognition.

1950 – 2010: Official Unions Partner with Capitalism and then Are Betrayed

The political tide turned hard against unions in 1947 with the lingering patriotism of the war, ascending McCarthyism, and negative middle-class reaction against social unrest. Continuing their strategy from 1937, employers and politicians sought to tame unions and integrate them more fully into capitalism. Communist leaders were chased out of the labor movement, and more moderate union leaders were given the green light from the National Labor Relations Board to raid unions with militant practices and Communist leanings. 

From 1947 to 1980, de-radicalized unions and employers in the mass production industries negotiated union contracts that raised worker standards of living through wage gains and benefit packages but sacrificed ambitions connected to worker democracy over the economy and broader social issues. Bread-and-butter unionism became the dominant form. Solidarity strikes and boycotts of the kind that fed previous mass strike waves were made illegal in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. In the following years the courts increasingly narrowed legitimate union activity to more ritualistic and bureaucratic forms.

Public sector strike waves in the 1960s and 70s brought many into the official labor movement for the first time, including public school educators, postal workers, sanitation workers, and clerical workers. Public sector unionism overlapped in part with the Civil Rights Movement and feminist movements of those decades and brought increasing workers of color and women into the union movement. But while public and private sector strikes of the latter half of the 20th century were often large and militant, they never quite ballooned into the class-wide general strikes seen before 1947.

Ronald Reagan’s attack on air traffic controllers in the PATCO strike of 1981 signaled to employers that federal labor law would no longer be rigorously enforced against them, and presidents since have done little to reverse that policy. The Federal Reserve policy of unprecedented high interest rates in the 1980s, known as the Volcker Shock, was used to roll back the wage gains of the US labor movement and return profitability to employers facing stiffer competition from abroad. To avoid as much as possible whatever wage premiums remained in the bastions of union strength in the US, employers relocated factories and outsourced production to the US South, Latin America, and East Asia.

While the years 1947 – 1979 still saw a moderate frequency of large, single-industry strikes, the period from 1980 – 2010 saw a steep decline of strike activity of all kinds. 

2006 – Present: A New Dawn

With the aim of making this survey relevant to workers contemplating mass strikes today, here I’ll relax my more narrow focus on general strikes in the US. This section will look at impactful single-industry US strikes, some almost-general strikes in the US, as well as general strikes from around the world from the 1990s to the present.

An important precursor for the re-introduction of mass strikes in the US was the Day Without an Immigrant on May 1st, 2006. This was organized in response to “Sensenbrenner Bill” H.R. 4437 which would have made it a felony to reside “undocumented” in the US. The Day Without an Immigrant saw an estimated 1 million people across the country withhold their labor and significantly disrupt entire industries–including meat processing, construction, transportation and logistics–in states with high proportions of immigrant workers. Millions more attended marches and protests that day. While the bill passed the house, it died in the senate, giving immigrant workers a major victory.

In the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the global economy went into freefall in 2008 and 2009. Social protests began to ricochet around the world starting with the Arab Spring in late 2010.

In mid-February 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker proposed a bill that would severely restrict public sector collective bargaining and union rights. Protests at the Wisconsin Capitol building grew daily, eventually growing to include an occupation of the main rotunda. The statewide teacher union called on its nearly 100,000 members to join the rallies on February 16th that saw total attendance as high as 150,000. While the statewide teacher union didn’t advocate a strike, many rank-and-file teachers called for sickouts. Thousands of teachers didn’t show up to work that day, fifteen school districts closed, and informal teacher sickouts continued for weeks after. 

Opposing politicians and the growing protests were not enough to stop the bill. In response to widespread rank-and-file agitation and calls for escalation, the Madison-based South Central Federation of Labor voted to start “educating” union members and the public about a general strike. But in the following weeks, no union ultimately called for a strike as the fears of public sector unions having their assets seized if the strike were declared illegal proved too intimidating for union leaders to overcome. While protests continued after, the Capitol building was surrendered by the occupying workers on March 3rd. State Democrats channeled movement energy into a recall vote of Walker, which ultimately failed. The Wisconsin Uprising was the first large-scale revolt in the US after the onset of the Great Recession and helped set the stage for the Occupy Movement that kicked off later that year.

The 26,000 Chicago teachers who walked off the job in 2012 put strikes back in the playbook of the mainstream US labor movement. But it was the statewide educator strikes of 2018 that gifted the labor movement the closest this country has seen to a general strike in more than a half-century. 

In West Virginia, school budget cuts and increases in health insurance costs had spurred educators to create large Facebook groups for rank-and-file members to share their agitation. After weeks of gradually escalating moves, 80% of WV school employees (including teachers, paras, custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria staff, and more) voted to strike. On February 22nd, 20,000 school staff across the state struck, and all 55 counties in the state closed their schools. 

After five days, one of the statewide union presidents announced that a partial agreement with the governor had been reached and that everyone was going back to work. Crowds of strikers booed the announcement of the agreement that deferred action on some of the key issues. Workers instead voted overwhelmingly to stay on strike until the demands were met. On March 6th, the strikers won the rollback of the insurance cost spikes, defeated provisions introducing charter schools and weakening seniority, and secured an across-the-board 5% raise. The educators emerged victorious and ended the strike on their own terms.

Educators in Oklahoma and Kentucky also led multi-day, state-wide strikes. However, they lacked a sufficient level of rank-and-file leadership to overcome their state unions’ decisions to end the strikes. Strikes in both states won some wage concessions from legislators but were unable to secure victories on their top demands of capital gains tax increases and pensions.

The last of the statewide strikes was launched in Arizona in late April. The statewide educator union initially opposed the strike and tried to call it off, but rank-and-file leadership pushed forward and kept virtually all of the state’s public school districts shuttered for eight days. Struggles over ethnic studies in the preceding years and a strong cohort of teachers of color cohered a more multi-racial rank-and-file leadership that was essential for a state with more racial diversity than the other states that experienced major strike waves that year. The educators won their key demands, including a $440 million increase in the state education budget and a 20% raise for teachers.

In those same months in early 2018, calls for statewide strikes led to multi-district walkouts in each of Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. West Virginia educators also pulled off another statewide strike a year later to defeat a bill that would have legalized charter schools and funneled money into vouchers to fund private schools.

These strikes turned the political geography of US worker power on its head, as educators in Southern Red states led the largest and most militant strike wave in decades. While educators were hardly new to the US labor movement, the woman-dominated field and often women-led strikes revealed a different image of the leading edge of militant labor than the burly men of our industrial manufacturing past.

While these educator strikes were confined to a single industry, shutting down public education is inherently more political than most private industry strikes for a number of reasons. Educator strikes are conducted against public employers, putting pressure on governments to meet demands. The teacher strikes in 2018 were conducted without the legal authority to do so, with some of the strikes being explicitly illegal according to state laws. Public education serves a multiplicity of functions beyond educating children, including looking after children while their parents are working, and so school closures tend to have much broader social and economic effects than factory closures. The wider impacts of educator strikes bring alliances of families and other community groups together against alliances of elite business interests resisting tax increases to fund public education.

The Red State Revolt of 2018 was the re-awakening of the mass strike in the imagination of the US working class. (Relevant here but deserving of its own post, I plan to discuss the mass strikes in the Twin Cities against the ICE surge in future writings.)

On the same continent a few years later, an enormous strike wave hit Quebec in late 2023. A multi-union coalition called the Common Front containing public education, healthcare, and social service workers were involved in a back-and-forth escalation with the provincial government led by the right-wing Premier François Legault. An initial wage offer of 9% over five years was significantly below inflation, came after decades of austerity amid massive shortages of teachers and nurses due to terrible working conditions, and was flatly rejected by the unions. Some of the Common Front unions had already struck in the weeks prior, and they all came together for a seven-day mass strike from Dec. 8-14th that involved 420,000 workers. 

A few days into the strike, the government increased their wage proposal to 12.7%, but the workers stayed out. The strike ended while negotiations continued, and a week later the Common Front unions blockaded for a day the ports in Quebec City and Montreal. In early January, with the threat of another mass strike looming, the government raised its wage proposal to 17.4%, and the unions settled. 

Europe

One group of labor researchers writes, “General strikes against unpopular policy reforms have occurred with increasing frequency across Western Europe since 1980,” documenting 112 national-level strikes. Like in the US, union density and strikes against employers have declined significantly in Western Europe since the onset of neoliberalism in the 1980s. General strikes in Europe in recent decades have mostly been organized against unpopular social reforms, like raising the retirement age or cutting social security.

In France, for instance, there have been a series of major general strike waves there since 2010 in response to government attempts to raise the retirement age at which workers can access pensions. France has one of the lowest official retirement ages and highest rate of people with pensions in the world, a legacy of generations of militant class struggle. Each attempt to raise the retirement age has been broadly unpopular according to opinion polls.

In response to a 2010 proposed reform to raise the retirement age from 60 – 62, French unions organized a series of 14 general strikes starting in March and increasing in frequency through October. Participation rates increased as the year went on, and the five general strikes called in October each had between 2 – 3.5 million strikers. These strikes, like subsequent general strikes, saw major disruptions to heavily unionized sectors like education, oil refineries, pharmacies, airlines, trains, and city services like buses and garbage collection. This strike wave failed to halt the retirement age increase to 62.

French President Emmanuel Macron proposed increasing the retirement age again in 2019 from 62 – 64. A general strike of 1.5 million was the major action that successfully forced Macron to back off his reforms. In 2023, Macron again proposed raising the retirement age to 64, eventually using a special government article to force the policy through without a vote by parliament, inflaming an already disapproving public. A dozen or so days of mass protests and strikes between January and May of that year culminated in a strike of 2.3 million on May 1st. 

The next general strike wave hit France in September 2025 against major austerity reforms. 300,000 struck on the 10th, and 1 million struck on the 18th. In response to general popular pressure against austerity, Macron and the French Prime Minister decided to pause raising of the retirement age to 64 until after the 2027 election.

It’s difficult to assess the effectiveness of individual general strikes, as sometimes the larger strike waves have failed on their demands and smaller strike waves have won, certainly owing to many other factors such as the fragility of governing coalitions and the willingness of corporate elites to stomach unrest under varying economic conditions. While the class struggle in France over pension reform has been largely a defensive fight in recent decades, it has been moderately successful in slowing austerity reforms, maintaining militant social movements, and saving tens of billions of dollars in pension money for the French working class. 

Another significant example is the one-day general strikes and protests in Italy from mid-September to early October 2025 against the genocide in Gaza and attacks on Italian aid flotillas to Gaza. The general strikes were called by Italy’s largest union, the CGIL with 5.1 million members, and several smaller unions. Millions participated in protests and strikes, which also included blockades of ports and weapons factories.

Asia

Pivoting away from the North Atlantic region, while the Arab Spring played out very differently country by country in 2010 and 2011, the main union federations calling for general strikes in solidarity with protestors helped bolster the broader movement to topple the regimes in Egypt and especially Tunisia. 

India has been the site of the largest general strikes in the world over the last 30 years. With the widespread introduction of neoliberal policies of privatization and subcontracting starting in the 1990s, union power has been under assault.

Since 1991, there have been 22 one- and two-day general strikes in India called and conducted by the main union federations. These general strikes have varied widely in scale and by geography and have sometimes been conducted in cooperation with farmer and student unions. The two largest, and the largest strikes by number of participants in world history, have been an “All-India” general strike in 2020 and a Bharat Bandh, or “nationwide shutdown,” in 2025, each of which claimed 250 million participants. Both of those strikes were launched in response to major anti-union legal codes that were being introduced. The strikes failed to stop these reforms and at best slowed and tweaked their introduction.

Commentators on India’s labor movement have noted both the strengths and weaknesses of these strike movements. S. M. Fahimuddin Pasha writes,

“These strikes are neither the romantic harbinger of instant revolution nor a pointless charade. They are better seen as part of a continuum of struggle – a high-profile tactic that complements other forms of organising, such as local strikes, litigation, political lobbying, and community campaigns.”

After noting the inability of the strikes to stop anti-union reforms, Surendra Pratap argues,

“However, this is not to say that the general strikes have been complete failures. They have been successful in building solidarity in the trade union movement around the issues listed in the common charter of demands…. Moreover, the general strikes were successful in bringing together both informal and formal sectors and also the farmers and industrial workers. Some general strikes witnessed spontaneous and radical participation of non-unionised workers such as in the garment industry.”

Perhaps most important when compared to the US context, India’s general strikes have so far been ineffectual in halting the slide towards Hindu nationalism and authoritarianism since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. Conversely, Modi has not been able to successfully prevent or repress these strikes either. The 2025 strike was the largest and broadest of all the general strikes conducted in India so far and might suggest improving fortunes for their labor movement in the years ahead.

Brazil

Brazil has a long history of general strikes, winning the eight-hour day in the late 1910s and protesting IMF-imposed austerity and helping bring down the US-supported military dictatorship in the 1980s.

After a “soft coup” removed left-leaning Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, the right-leaning government introduced unpopular labor and pension reforms in 2017. Many of Brazil’s labor federations united against the reforms and jointly called for a general strike on April 28th, leading to as many as 40 million workers to walk out. The massively successful mobilization and high public approval of the action led some unions to call another general strike in June, but diverging union politics and strategies resulted in fracturing and low turnout. The reforms passed into law.

In 2019, former military officer and far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro became president. Early in his first year in office, he proposed pension reforms and large funding cuts to schools. Union federations called for a general strike in protest and as many as 45 million Brazilians participated, making it likely the largest strike action in the Western Hemisphere in history. While the reforms and cuts were passed, the general strike helped cohere and escalate resistance to Bolsonaro, who lost the 2022 elections and was subsequently found guilty of fraud, corruption, and an attempted coup. He is currently serving a 27-year sentence.

Puerto Rico

A major exception to the lack of general strikes in the US in recent decades, albeit outside the North American continent, is the US colony of Puerto Rico. In 1998, two unions representing 6,400 telephone workers went on strike against a proposal to privatize the state-owned telecommunications company on the island. The strike lasted 41 days, punctuated in the middle by a two-day general strike called by 50 unions on the island that saw 500,000 workers walk off their jobs in solidarity. The strike was ultimately unsuccessful as the company was sold to a private telecom corporation.

Puerto Rico was particularly devastated by the Great Recession, which saw control of the island economy given over to an unelected board of managers, extreme cuts to social security, and the closure of a quarter of the island’s schools. In 2017 Hurricane Maria throttled the island, killing 4,000 people. 

On July 8th, 2019, hundreds of pages of text chats between the governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, and members of his cabinet were leaked. The chats were racist, misogynist, anti-LGBT, and joked about disabled people and those who died in the hurricane. Protests started at the governor’s mansion and swelled enormously over a period of weeks, with the largest protests being estimated at over a million and shutting down schools and closing countless businesses. While unions supported the protests and provided their organizational muscle, they were not leading the stoppages and did not call a general strike. Rather, the protests organically became a general strike as people protested instead of going to work. Rossello resigned on August 2nd. 

South Korea

South Korea’s recent history of national labor action begins in 1987 with the Great Workers Struggle. After a mass protest movement had overthrown the US-backed military dictatorship and won the right for direct presidential elections in June, workers brought the struggle into their workplaces. A three-month wave of strikes erupted, nearly all of which were illegal. One of the primary demands was the right to elect their own union leaders instead of having their union leaders selected for them by the ruling party who colluded with employers to keep wages down. At its peak the strike wave saw 1.2 million workers participating. 4,000 new unions were formed that year and strikes won major wage gains.

In late 1996 the country’s two largest labor federations called an indefinite general strike against anti-worker labor reforms that would make firing workers and hiring strikebreakers easier. The strike lasted four weeks, was concentrated in heavy manufacturing, peaked at around 700,000 participants in mid-January, enjoyed broad public support, and was called off on Jan. 21st as the South Korean president withdrew the bill and promised to alter its contents. However, the re-written bill introduced six weeks later contained only minor concessions to the union movement. Too battered financially from the earlier general strikes, the unions were unable to re-mobilize their forces to stop the bill from passing.

On October 20th, 2021, the largest labor federation in South Korea called a one-day general strike against the erosion of worker rights and working conditions. South Korea has the third highest rate of hours-worked-per week and workplace deaths among the 24 countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Despite the strike being declared illegal by the government, 30 union leaders and staff being jailed in the days before, and special police being mobilized to suppress rallies that day, 500,000 workers participated.

Amid worsening economic inequality and deepening crises of employment and housing, Yoon Suk Yeol was elected president in 2022 as a conservative with strong ties to a surging far-right rooted in pro-corporate/anti-union economics, misogyny, and ethno-religious nationalism. But Yoon’s right-wing populism failed to address the ongoing economic crises and his approval ratings dropped from 53% shortly after his election to 19% by November of 2024. Facing mounting opposition from striking unions, rival parties, and within his own party as well as serious investigations for corruption, Yoon abruptly declared martial law late at night on December 3rd, 2024. Justifying this move by citing government impasse and supposed national security threats from North Korea, Yoon’s martial law order suspended the National Assembly and all political party activity, declared the independent press illegal, ended many worker and civil rights, and sought the arrest of political rivals and union leaders.

A dozen military helicopters, over 100 military vehicles, and 1,580 soldiers were instantly mobilized to shut down the National Assembly. Special forces arrived first and repelled down from military helicopters to shut down the Assembly building, but their numbers were insufficient to block off tens of thousands of protesters who spontaneously rallied to keep the Assembly open. Facing down these crowds on one side and an extremely unpopular president on the other, the police refused to collaborate in closing the Assembly, adherence to martial law orders faced passive resistance among soldiers, the legislature convened an emergency session before more military reinforcements could arrive, and the 190 legislators who made it into the Assembly room voted unanimously to block the imposition of martial law. Hours later, realizing the attempted coup had failed, Yoon and his cabinet rescinded the martial law order.

A movement immediately arose to remove Yoon from office and prevent any further attempts to impose martial law. Many South Korean unions conducted illegal rolling strikes in the following days to help push Yoon out of office. The strikes targeted economically central corporations like Hyundai and Kia as well as public sectors of transportation and schools, each including tens of thousands of workers. Daily protests were held outside the National Assembly for weeks, the largest reaching a million people. The unions publicly kept their finger on the trigger of a national general strike if progress towards removing Yoon stalled. Due to the recent history of general strikes in South Korea, this was not an empty threat.

Yoon dug in his heels, rallied his far-right allies, and pledged to fight to the end to stay in power. Yoon survived a failed impeachment vote by the National Assembly on Dec. 7th but was finally impeached on Dec. 14th. He was subsequently arrested, removed from office, and then sentenced to life for violating the constitution and attempting a coup.

Conclusion

General strikes are best thought of as one part of a balanced breakfast. The object of this history is not to exhort workers to drop everything and focus only on general strikes, but to see general strikes as part of an array of effective actions. Those labor movements that have grown and become among the strongest in history saw a flourishing of organizing and actions at all scales, from shop-floor contests to employer-wide fights, to inter-class brawls. 

Calling for general strikes without making concrete plans for organizing them is futile. Furthermore, larger-scale actions have always depended on years and decades of persistent smaller-scale organizing. While general strikes typically expand far beyond the confines of existing union infrastructure and thus pull in many previously non-politicized workers, they are carried by a layer of long-term worker organizers who are rooted in key industries. 

This post only covers a sliver of the entire history of general strikes around the world, yet there are trends to tease out nonetheless. It’s worth comparing and contrasting different kinds of general strikes and their specific histories, lest we confuse myth with reality, neglect the nuances, and pretend that all general strikes are the same. 

One type of general strike is the insurrectionary general strike, where the social order as a whole is challenged and workers take control of cities or regions. Insurrectionary actions were much more common earlier in the history of capitalism, such as the St. Louis general strike of 1877, the Seattle and Winnipeg general strikes of 1919, and in some ways the general strikes of 1934. These strikes often featured more direct confrontations with law enforcement and armed forces, often had strike committees that assumed many of the functions of government, to varying degrees threatened the economic and political system, and ended only when they could not be sustained in the face of political and armed counter-offensives by the state. 

While not covered in this survey, general strikes also played central roles in the revolutions of Russia in 1905 and 1917, Germany in 1920, Spain in 1936, El Salvador in 1944, Colombia in 1957, Iran in 1979, Brazil in the 1980s, and Sudan in 1964, 1985, and 2019. Over the last 100 years in the US and also around the world, the expansion of the repressive power of the state, the relative bureaucratization and weakening of labor movements, and the rise of economic regulation that has dampened economic crashes have made insurrectionary general strikes less common. While this kind of strike, which looms large in theories of revolution, is still relevant to long-term theorizing about a more radical future, it is of limited practical use today. The working class, in most countries, is a long way from being able to overthrow the existing order.

A second type is the decapitation general strike that aims mainly at removing a head of state from office. This political aim is much more modest than trying to overhaul society, and more often includes degrees of support from even liberal sectors of society when fighting against authoritarian leaders. In these movements work stoppages are often just one of an array of tactics being used to remove political leaders, and the weight of the strike action within the overall movement varies. For example, in Puerto Rico in 2019 and in Brazil under Bolsonaro, general strikes were used and significant but were just one part of the broader social unrest happening concurrently to unseat political leaders. While in Tunisia in 2010 and South Korea in 2024, organized labor was stronger and played a more central role in leading the movement against their finally ousted leaders.

Thirdly, the reform general strike is aimed at achieving some major change in policy. Sometimes the change in policy is more economic and focused mostly on employers, such as general strikes for union recognition, workplace control, and/or reduced hours and higher wages. Such was the case in Chicago in 1886, New Orleans in 1892, the major US strikes of 1934 and 1937. Even these more economic general strikes tend to have political dimensions because the state comes under indirect pressure to pass reforms to ameliorate class conflict (e.g., a law to reduce the maximum number of hours worked or to legalize unions). 

Some reform general strikes are more political in nature, in that they aim directly at governments to pass or stop laws. Such strikes include those around the retirement age in France and Brazil, the immigrant strike against the Sensenbrenner bill in the US in 2006, and around union rights in India and South Korea. While most reform general strikes in recent decades have been launched as one- or two-day actions, some of these strikes have also been open-ended and lasted weeks or months, such as South Korea in 1987 and 1996, and the red state educator strikes of 2018, and Quebec in 2023.

While the general strikes discussed above may feel distant in space or time to many workers today, the conditions that brought about those pre-1950 general strikes are starting to feel more familiar in the US. Artificial intelligence is transforming the production process in many industries today as the assembly lines did in the 1930s. Climate change and environmental destruction is wreaking mass migrations and violently reshaping human civilization, much like the urbanization and industrialization did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The almost total absence of general strikes in the US since 1950 has been due to enough workers having just enough to be invested in the status quo. But today union density is at its lowest and economic inequality at its highest since the 1920s.

A more critical view of general strikes sees them as spontaneous affairs, as things that happen to workers instead of things that workers make happen. The timeline on which general strikes are planned is typically much shorter than a conventional strike over the terms of a contract, which provides the illusion that general strikes contain no agency or strategy. 

However, the social conditions and worker consciousness that lead to general strikes are centuries in the making. Millions of workers acting together can only be the end result of countless preceding acts of resistance and solidarity, gradually knitted together into formal and informal organization, that then converge on a single moment. Against the illusion of spontaneity, nothing contains so much agency and strategy as the general strike, the very instance where the working class realizes their common interests and shared fate.

General strikes don’t come from nowhere and no one. They come from workers straining not to become numb to the horrors of modernity. From workers longing to realize their dream of a better life and a free society. From workers looking at the creases on our hands and standing awestruck at the immense power we carry inside ourselves. From workers discovering, slowly at first and then with accelerating intensity, that all future generations want us to succeed. From workers maintaining our resolve despite each being small and flawed, because there are just too damn many of us. From workers thinking together that the world is wrong but the time is right.

One day soon, one of those workers might be you.