Attention, union members and union supporters:

Stop this dictatorship drawing by Sonia Mitralia

History has placed a tremendous task on your shoulders. You did not ask for it. That does not matter because here it is. It may seem overwhelming. It is not. In fact, there never has been a time in the last 80 years in which there was both a greater opportunity and a greater necessity for carrying out that task. We are talking about the task of organizing independently of and in fact in opposition to the union leadership. The purpose is to make our unions do what the unions, and the unions alone can do: stop the Trump/Vance/Miller imperial presidency in its drive towards absolute dictatorship.

Let’s review the situation. We will start with where Trump and Corporate America are at, and then discuss the enormous potential power of the labor movement, why it is not being mobilized, and how we can change that situation:

Trump’s learned from his first term
During Trump‘s first term in office, he was partly held in check by advisors such as then Chief of Staff John Kelly, then Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and even then Attorney General Bill Barr. Among other things, they stopped him from ordering troops to shoot protesters in the legs during the George Floyd protests. They also stopped Trump from declaring martial law, calling out the National Guard and seizing the voting machines after the 2020 elections in order to overturn those results. 

Trump learned from that experience. In place of such advisors, he now has absolute toadies like Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth, and actual committed fascists like his vice president JD Vance, and his most influential advisor Stephen Miller. 

Top capitalists, who under normal circumstances would be able to restrain any president, have been brought to heel by Trump. These include the likes of Tim Cook of Apple, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, and Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos.

The imperial presidency
Trump first leaned on Elon Musk to cut the legs out from under any potential opposition within the federal bureaucracy. He then turned Stephen Miller loose to carry out his white nationalist agenda. The administration first tested the waters in Los Angeles and Chicago to see how far they could go. Once the Trump Supreme Court majority ruled that they could use racial profiling to stop anybody who looked like they might be an immigrant the reins were off. They used the scandal of some evidently corrupt NGO’s, which according to reports were largely controlled by some Somali Americans, to invade Minneapolis.

Minneapolis fight back & the “general strike”
Thousands of Minneapolis residents responded heroically. They came out into the streets to warn their neighbors about the presence of ICE and CBP. Minneapolitans recorded many of the crimes that the invading army was committing. They made the invaders feel totally unwelcome, at times chasing them out of restaurants and making noise in front of the hotels where they were staying. The local residents organized themselves at the molecular level to do all of this. Had they not done so, an absolute dictatorship would have settled over Minneapolis, largely outside of the public eye and not covered by the media.

Trump had already told his invading army that they had free rein. They used that impunity to commit crime after crime and then on January 7 they executed one of the protesters, Renee Good. This led to the gigantic march of January 23 in which an estimated crowd of 50,000 participated. This is of a population that is a little over 435,000, meaning that about one in eight residents participated in the bitter, freezing cold. The attitude was exemplified by one resident who said, “I will be out here until my balls freeze.”

Mass march and rally in Minneapolis on Jan. 23. Let’s hope it is just the start.

That giant protest was called a general strike and much was made of the fact that four different union locals endorsed it. Those were SEIU local 26, UNITE HERE local 17, CWA local 72,50, and the Saint Paul Federation of Educators local 28. It was claimed that the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005 head endorsed it, but in fact, the leadership of that local put up a statement on their local Facebook page explicitly disavowing that endorsement. As far as the other locals, they may have endorsed it somewhere at some point, but not a single one of them had a word up about this situation in general, nor about the January 23 protest on the front page of  their websites prior to January 23rd. So, while that mass protest certainly showed the willingness of the masses of people of Minneapolis to stand up and fight back, that willingness was not reflected in the role of the union leadership, which still controls the unions.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti, executed by ICE/CBP

The result was that less than 24 hours after the protest, the Trump/Vance/Miller imperial presidency had their answer: they executed ICU nurse Alex  Pretti. Administration spokespersons – the ever tone deaf Kristi Noem, and Nazi lookalike Dan Bovino – got up on TV, told outright lie after outright lie about that execution, and then committed the unpardonable sin in the eyes of Trump supporters: they attacked the right to carry guns in public. As a result, Trump had to replace them with the so-called border Czar and bag of cash recipient Tom Homan. Homan talked about reforms, but his real attitude was shown when he referred to the situation in Minneapolis as a war “theater”.

Before we pass on to what the labor movement could have and should have done both in Minneapolis and nationwide and why they failed to do it, we have to make one point: among other things on January 23 a protest was mounted outside the Minneapolis Saint Paul airport. Contrast that with what happened at airports around the country in 2017 shortly after Trump first took office in his first term. One of his first acts at that time was to impose the infamous “Muslim ban”. Protests were mounted, mainly by young people, not at the airports, but inside them. For example, here at the San Francisco airport, thousands of people, mainly youth, flocked inside the international terminal. Nobody destroyed any property nor did they commit any other sort of violent acts. But it was impossible to distinguish them from regular passengers, and therefore they could not be arrested nor could they be teargassed. The result was that flights from SFO were canceled. The airport was in effect shut down! That peaceful tactic was not utilized on January 23 and as a result, the airlines continued functioning more or less as normal.

Union leadership’s 80 year war against best traditions of labor movement
This self imposed limitation arose in part from the role of the union leadership over the last 80 years. That role has been to suppress all of the best traditions of the US labor movement, one of which was mass defiance. It was that mass defiance that won the day for the Minneapolis Teamsters/General Strike of 1934 and that won the day for the other mass strikes of that year as well as the 1937 sit down strikes. As we saw in the 2017 airport occupations and the occupy movement of a few years earlier, while those traditions are deeply buried, they still live on.

Also included in the tradition of mass defiance are the traditions of general solidarity, as well as the struggle for political independence through a working class party, and the struggle for socialism.

For 80 years, the union leadership joined with all the forces of corporate America to suppress those traditions. They ridiculed, ostracized, helped black ball, expelled from the unions, and at times even physically assaulted those union members who struggled to keep those traditions alive in actual practice.

Union “organizer” at that time and current CEO of Northern CA Council of Carpenters Jay Bradshaw, shaking hands with cop as he tries to send striking carpenters back to work. The carpenters were wildcatting against a rotten contract that Bradshaw’s boss had pushed through. Bradshaw is a classic example of a union bureaucrat.

By collaborating with the employers on the job, and with the employers’ politicians in politics, they managed to thoroughly alienate the great majority of union members from their own unions. This left a vacuum into which entered the worst traditions of the American working class. – racism, bullying, selfishness and greed. That is what MAGA represents, and yes, it has a base amongst millions of US workers, mainly but not exclusively white workers at this time.

There have been struggles which expressed those traditions and were actually felt inside the unions. Occupy Oakland (in 2011) was one example.
It is inconceivable that the shock of what is happening in Minneapolis has not started to affect a layer of the union members. Now, history itself requires that those members start to organize to make the unions step up front and center. Consider what is at stake, after all:

The Trump/Vance/Miller imperial presidency shows no signs of backing off in Minneapolis despite the plunge in overall support. And despite electoral defeats like the most recent one for a state senate seat in Texas, where a union member machinist ran as a Democrat and decisively defeated a Trump aligned Republican in a formerly strongly pro Trump district.

Imperial presidency’s threat to November elections
The imperial presidency is responding exactly as can be expected. They sent a team of DOJ representatives to Fulton County Georgia, which is the center of black and pro Democratic voters in that state. They confiscated all the voting records from the 2024 election. This comes after Trump has commented that he regrets not having canceled the election of 2020. His plan is to build on the invasion of Minneapolis and do whatever he thinks necessary in order to prevent the House of Representatives and possibly even the Senate from escaping his dictatorial control in November‘s election elections. That will include voter suppression on a scale unheard of since the civil rights movement,  having his flunkies at the state level take control of evolving elecction procedures, and even possibly seizing voting machines should he conclude that that is necessary and possible.

Top capitalist may “morally “oppose him, but they will capitulate. The liberals and the Democratic Party as a whole will whine and moan, but they will do nothing to stop him. Masses of people may mobilize in the streets, but the imperial presidency will feel just as unconstrained as it has been in Minneapolis, in fact even more so. And if the imperial presidency is able to get away with this, a Rubicon will have been crossed. A decisive new era in American society will open. The American people will be facing a situation much more similar to what the Iranian people are facing today than we ever have in the past. Ever.

Imperial presidency’s weaknesses
It’s one of the great ironies of history that when a dictator, or it would-be dictator, starts to crack it is often exactly at the moment when he or she feels the most threatened that they try to crack down even harder. That is the case for the Trump imperial presidency. Let’s start from the international situation: Trump has made much of the support that he has received in Europe from parties like the AFD in Germany, ReformUK  in Great Britain and National Rally in France. Since his attempt to annex Greenland and the open contempt he has displayed for Europe as a whole, that international support has collapsed. Here in the United States his opinion poll readings are at an all-time low. And possibly more important than anything else, a mood is starting to develop among ordinary everyday Americans that we have to do something.

Task of rank and file
That “something“ has to be among other things inside the unions. That can start with the union members who understand these dangers joining together to discuss the situation within their own unions, including both the position of their leadership and the mood and the thinking amongst the members. It also should be stressed that the leadership’s failure to speak up against the Trump imperial presidency goes hand in hand with that same leadership’s failure to really fight to defend the membership on the job, including the failure to fight for and fully enforce the contracts the members need and want. With this in mind, there are some specific steps that they can call on the leadership to take and when and where possible take some of those steps on their own to the extent that they can. These include

1. launch member education campaign to inform all workers about the dangers posed by the Trump imperial presidency
2. publish and share clear materials on union websites, newsletters, and social media to expose this threat and rally solidarity across industries.
3. hold union, meetings and forums for all union members and supporters where what is that stake is clearly presented and discussed
4. Call for and organize a national day of protest – on a workday and during work hours – led by unions, to demonstrate our unity and determination to defend democratic rights and solidarity.

Often a period of great danger is also a period of great opportunity. This is one of those times. Ordinary rank and file union members cannot wait any longer. In honor of those who came before us, and in consideration for the next generation including our very own children and grandchildren, the time to organize now. Tomorrow may be too late.

Oaklandsocialist has long experience in doing exactly this sort of organizing inside the labor movement. We are happy to help others. Contact us if you want to discuss the next steps in your own situation.