Writer’s Note: For the purpose of this article, the term workers will be used to refer to the general public that performs labor across all sectors. It is imperative for the American public to drop the “skilled” vs. “unskilled” labor dichotomy that has been ingrained in greater society — doctors and university professors are workers in need of union representation just as much as line cooks and housekeepers are.
The last four years of American history have been marked by an unprecedented rise in action from members of Generation Z — individuals born between 1997 and 2012. Being raised in an era where police violence, racial injustice, international apartheid, wealth inequality and other forms of injustices have plagued society more publicly than ever, Gen Z has taken over as the loudest voices in the fight against the neoliberal status quo. As an overly pacifist method of solving multi-demographic struggle, neoliberalism has plagued the United States’ left wing for decades. In doing so, the most obvious way to assemble a truly radical movement nationwide has been laying in plain sight for decades, nearly untouched until the past 24 months.
However, this assertion assumes that the push for a just society is radical. When you peel back the layers of young peoples’ demands, the “radical” change that progressives want is truly not all that radical — are the ideas that workers should only have to work one job and not worry about being homeless from medical bills radical? Is it radical to demand that elected representatives follow through on the platforms they ran on? Is it radical to say that genocide is bad?
If the American progressive movement is wrong, it does not want to be right.
Stoking the first embers in what will have to be a fully emblazoned society ready for revolution has been the new American labor movement — and this is just the beginning of the fight for liberation.
Luckily, the labor movement is alive and well after a fruitful 2023 that saw an uptick in both union activity and media coverage of workers taking action. However, the decentralized progressive movement is unsustainable as it stands.
Interconnected by the fight for higher wages and the battle for ethnic, religious and personal liberation are labor and progressive movements. As a whole, student organizers have come a long way in recognizing labor as a battle cry for progressivism. Despite the ongoing activism amongst young people, the work by leftists has been limited by individualizing each cause. Young people have not capitalized on the intersectionality of issues such as the Palestinian liberation movement, campaigns for single-payer healthcare and union organizing.
To put it in layman’s terms: All left-wing issues are connected.
Unfortunately, deciphering these connections has been contentious within leftist circles for years. Discussing the specifics of progressive infighting would be counterintuitive, but one thing is clear, student organizers have not figured out a central issue to campaign for.
No amount of activism around singular issues will bring about the revolutionary change that young radicals desire. Evidence of this has been centuries in the making, culminating in a 2024 American presidential election between a genocidal maniac clearly in mental decline and an open fascist with plans to turn hundreds of federal employees into human manifestations of his own horrible politics.
Labor may appear as an atypical foundation to base the ongoing fight for liberation on, especially as union membership has steadily decreased since the mid 1900s. Americans don’t appear to know too much about unions either, and the majority of them certainly aren’t trying to organize their workplace. As workers stray further away from collective action, the chances to capitalize on the momentum of the left are drifting away.
Despite this, the argument for the new American labor movement to be at the center of progressive organizing is simple: If Americans cannot organize themselves against evil in the places they spend most of their waking days at, how can they organize against evil in other places of the world?
Organizing workers against genocide and politicians that are actively countering their consituent’s demands is not as easy as phonebanking or peacefully protesting. There are numbers that the progressive movement has yet to achieve and has not come close to achieving. More than ever, dirty money is flowing into the pockets of American politicians — it makes sense that the majority of them are either implicit in or explicitly supporting an ongoing genocide in Palestine.
This movement has a lot of work to do internally. Contrary to what liberal identity-based politicians would like society to believe, workers’ most important asset to society is not their gender, racial, ethnic, cultural, social or religious identity — it is their labor. America has a long history of racism, homophobia, xenophobia and every other form of bigotry rooted in its government and broader society that persists today. While the fight for equity in every demographic is equally important, it is impossible to free all members of a society so strikingly divided by class without focusing on class itself. The new American labor movement must lean into intersectionality amongst workers as a tool for equity and understanding, but not as the sole means to an end.
It is time to seize this opportunity as both workers and organizers. A general strike has been planned for May 1, 2028 and has the potential to reorganize the American political power structure. The United Automobile Workers (UAW) and Unite Here! have already bargained for organized their contracts to expire on April 30, 2028 and have called on other unions to do the same. With new organizing by unions such as UAW and Workers United, the potential for a true nationwide general strike is growing.
This strike should not be a reformist measure. A general strike may be the greatest tool in our lifetime to organize for issues like single-payer healthcare and the death of the military-industrial complex.
The victories that come from a successful general strike and having organized workplaces are endless, but are only possible if workers realize that they wield more power than their bosses even in the most capitalist societies.
Perhaps the most important victory would be the possibility for workers to care about external issues once living wages are a universal standard in America. The numbers needed to rally against large scale issues such as international apartheid that America actively participates in will only be achieved when workers are able to channel more of their minds and labor to general activism. It is asinine to expect a family that works multiple jobs to support themselves and their children to be able to take action against other evils.
Americans collectively face much mistreatment and evil. Labor has to be the guiding figure that continues to give us the best chance at true freedom — and a chance to help others liberate themselves.
Jacob Ramos is a 2024-2025 Managing Editor. He can be reached at jacobtr@uci.edu.
Edited by Trista Lara and Annabelle Aguirre.