Minnesota Is About to Make History, And We All Need to Pay Attention

This Friday could witness the first statewide general strike in American history. Here’s what’s happening, why it matters, and how you can help.

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Let me be clear about something: what’s building in Minnesota right now is unprecedented in modern American labor history.

On Friday, January 23rd, labor unions, community organizations, faith leaders, and working people across Minnesota are calling for a complete shutdown. No work (except emergency services), no school, no shopping. Nothing.

They’re not technically calling it a “strike” for legal reasons, but let’s not play semantic games here, this is a general strike in everything but name. And if it happens at the scale organizers are planning, it would be the first statewide general strike in U.S. history and the largest general strike since Oakland in 1946.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. This is what happens when a community decides it will not live under siege anymore.

Renee Nicole Good

On January 7th, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three, in Minneapolis. She was just legal observer, watching federal agents swarm her neighborhood with her wife when she was killed.

One week later, another federal agent shot a Latino immigrant from Venezuela in the leg.

Last Wednesday night, ICE detonated a tear gas canister underneath a family’s car as they were trying to get home from basketball practice. The baby in the back seat, strapped in his car seat, was knocked unconscious.

Read that again. A baby. Knocked unconscious. By federal agents deploying chemical weapons against civilians.

ICE has been spraying chemical agents directly into protesters’ eyes. They’ve been battering down doors, raiding small businesses and forcing them to close, trailing school buses, dropping tear gas outside schools, circling hospitals. Trump has even threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to Minneapolis.

Somali, Latino, and Asian communities are living under what can only be described as an occupation.

And Minnesotans have had enough.

This Is What Organized Labor Stepping Up Looks Like

The coalition backing this action is massive and growing:

• Minneapolis Federation of Educators Local 59
• Minnesota Nurses Association
• SEIU Local 26
• UNITE HERE Local 17
• OPEIU Local 12
• IATSE Local 13
• Graduate Labor Union-UE Local 1105
• Macalester Undergraduate Workers Union — UAW Local 5105
• Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation AFL-CIO

And it’s expanded beyond the Twin Cities to include the Saint Paul Regional Labor Federation, West Area Labor Council, North East Area Labor Council, and East Central Labor Council.

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This matters because no general strike in U.S. history has ever succeeded without the backing of organized labor, particularly local labor federations. The fact that the AFL-CIO bodies throughout Minnesota are endorsing this is enormous.

As JaNaé Bates Imari of Camphor Memorial United Methodist Church put it at Tuesday’s press conference:

“We are not going to shop. We are not going to work. We are not going to school on Friday, January 23. For some people they call that a strike. For many of us, this is our right to refusal until something changes.”

“This Is Not a Real General Strike”, Or Is It?

Now, I know what some people will say: “No union has officially voted to strike, so this isn’t a real general strike.”

Here’s what one union organizer from the Minneapolis Federation of Educators told Labor Notes:

“We have not voted on a strike, but our union is calling on people to support this call. People can say, ‘This is not a real general strike.’ This is a mass mobilization. To me, at a certain point, a mass mobilization becomes something qualitatively new.“

Exactly. History backs this up.

The legendary 1934 San Francisco general strike, one of the most successful in American history, started as a mass funeral procession after police killed two strikers and beat thousands more. Longshore workers and their supporters shut down the city’s commercial district, and what began as a protest became a strike that shut down the entire city.

Mass protests can absolutely grow into mass strikes. The momentum is already building. On January 10th, 10,000 people turned out for a protest in downtown Minneapolis. The energy is there. The organization is there. The moral clarity is there.

The Demands

The coalition is demanding:

1. ICE immediately leave Minnesota
2. Jonathan Ross, the agent who killed Renee Good, be held legally accountable
3. No additional federal funding for ICE in the upcoming Congressional budget
4. ICE be investigated for human and constitutional violations

These aren’t radical demands. These are the bare minimum requirements for a society that claims to believe in human dignity and constitutional rights.

This Could Spread, And It Should

Here’s what should terrify the Trump administration: this could be contagious.

Jackson Potter, Vice President of the Chicago Teachers Union, speaking for May Day Strong, a national coalition of unions and community groups, said this week:

“May Day Strong stands firmly in support of our affiliates in Minneapolis who are doing tremendous organizing to stand up a day of no school, no work, and no shopping next Friday. The way things are going, we will have no choice but to emulate this fearless example as a nation on May 1st.“

Read between the lines: organized labor nationwide is watching Minnesota. If this succeeds, May 1st could see coordinated strikes across the country.

What You Can Do

If you’re in Minnesota: Use your PTO. Call in sick. Do what you have to do. No work, no school, no shopping on Friday, January 23rd.

If you’re not in Minnesota:

• Amplify this action on social media
• Contact your representatives and demand ICE accountability
• Support Minnesota mutual aid organizations
• Show solidarity however you can
• Start conversations in your own workplace and community about what mass action looks like

This is organized labor saying enough is enough to authoritarian overreach. This is working people pushing back against a government that is harassing, terrorizing, and killing them.

Why This Matters Beyond Minnesota

We are living through a moment where the federal government is deploying chemical weapons against babies, shooting poets in the street, and turning entire communities into militarized zones. And all of this could come to your neighborhood.

If Minnesota pulls this off, it will prove that organized mass refusal works. It will demonstrate that working people still have the power to shut down business as usual when the government becomes tyrannical.

The last time we saw anything approaching this scale of labor action was nearly 80 years ago. An entire generation of Americans has grown up never seeing what coordinated working-class power actually looks like in practice.

Friday could change that.

This is what resistance looks like when people decide they’ve had enough. This is democracy defending itself, not through institutions that have failed to protect the vulnerable, but through the collective power of ordinary people refusing to participate in their own oppression.

Minnesota is showing us the way forward.

The question is: will the rest of the country follow?

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About Aalia:

I’m a writer, organizer, and the founder of independent media, the Liberation Project.

My work sits at the intersection of climate justice, policy, politics, tech, and AI.

I started out in campus climate organizing, taking complicated science and turning it into language people could actually act on, pushing for real systems change rooted in degrowth.

Now I also focus on state violence, genocide, ecocide, war, policing, ICE, everything that shapes how people live and survive.

And honestly, this work keeps going because readers support it.

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