The people of Minneapolis are showing us the way forward. On Friday, January 23, they staged what even The New York Times is calling a “general strike organized by residents, faith leaders and labor unions.”
Donald Trump’s ICE, a Gestapo-like agency, has run rampant for weeks in Minneapolis, snatching thousands of people and even children off the streets, citizens and immigrants alike, breaking into peoples’ homes, shooting and murdering people, and trying to suppress lawful protests. In response, the people of Minneapolis have organized a massive fightback, flooding the streets to confront ICE agents and protecting the people from the transgressions of the state-sponsored neo-Nazis who are trying to occupy the city.
There is truly a grassroots mass movement that has sprung directly from the people of Minneapolis. This is the city that spearheaded the resistance to the racist murder of George Floyd during Trump’s first term as President. Minneapolis is also where thousands of workers, led by Teamster truck drivers, staged the historic, hard-fought and months-long 1934 General Strike that won huge gains for the workers of the region and laid the basis for the labor movement that is an integral part of the anti-fascist front in Minneapolis today.
On Friday morning, January 23, thousands of people occupied the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, through which ICE has deported over 2,000 people. This demonstration was led in large part by Local 17 of UNITE HERE, the sister Union to the San Francisco Bay Area’s Local 2. Demonstrators held up photos of Local 17 workers abducted and deported by ICE. Those abducted Local 17 members included workers at the airport. Many airport workers did not show up for work on Friday. One hundred faith leaders were arrested in an act of non-violent civil disobedience during the demonstration. This action materially affected operations at the airport, slowing everything down for hours.
At the same time, thousands and thousands of Minneapolis workers heeded the call from labor and community leaders to stay away from work on Friday: “No work, no school, no shopping, no ICE.” The Minnesota AFL-CIO and dozens of local labor unions endorsed this day of action. “Labor is the community and the community is labor,” proclaimed David Stiggers, President of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005.
More than 700 Minneapolis businesses shut down on Friday. The University of Minnesota cancelled in-person classes. Minneapolis public schools were closed. Cultural institutions – including the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Minnesota Children’s Museum – closed their doors.
Then, in the afternoon, more thousands and thousands of people braved sub-zero temperatures to march through downtown Minneapolis, chanting “No hate. No fear. Immigrants are welcome here!” Organizers had predicted that the turnout for the march would be limited by the frigid weather, but Minnesotans are a tough bunch. Estimates of the marchers range from 50,000 to 100,000.
On the morning of Saturday, January 24, Department of Homeland Security agents shot and killed another person in Minneapolis, a 37-year old white citizen and Veterans Administration worker and union member named Alex Pretti. One video of this shooting can be viewed here. The governor of Minnesota and the mayor of Minneapolis have once again called for Trump to pull his goons out. People in Minneapolis are still out on the streets demanding justice.
In an email, a Department of Homeland Security official called the Minneapolis general strike “beyond insane.” But the truly insane are those who believe that they can impose a fascist regime on this country without a fight. Christa Sarrack, President of UNITE HERE Local 17 said it all: “We must use every tool that we have to fight back.”
Or, as Malcolm X famously said, “We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary.” To think otherwise is what would be truly insane.
The general strike in Minneapolis inspired actions in more than 300 other cities and towns around the country, according to the well-respected Payday Report. Several mass actions took place in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Oakland and San Jose. On Thursday, faith leaders began a 24-hour hunger strike on the steps of San Francisco City Hall.
On Friday, there was a huge rally in San Francisco, spearheaded by several labor and community organizations. This action targeted the Target store in the Metreon at Fourth and Mission Streets. Target appears to have given free rein to ICE agents to snatch people in their parking lots in Minneapolis, where the company is headquartered.
San Francisco nearly became a major target for ICE last October. But that ICE action was stalled by mass resistance that moved even some of Trump’s billionaire supporters and billionaire Mayor Daniel Lurie to appeal to Trump to call it off.
For the last year, UNITE HERE Local 2, one of the leading sponsors of the Target action on Friday, has been engaged in contract negotiations at Oracle Park, the home of the San Francisco Giants. One of the first set of demands that we put on the table was an attempt to beef up our contract language to protect ballpark workers from any possible predations by ICE and federal immigration officials.
But Aramark, the ballpark food service contractor that the Giants hired at the beginning of the 2024 season, has dodged and weaved and failed to agree to many of our demands on immigrant workers’ rights, including a demand as simple as insisting that any alleged federal immigration agents who might turn up at the ballpark show identification.
The Giants put ballpark workers on the injured list when they brought in Aramark at the beginning of the 2024 season. Since then, the Giants and Aramark have instituted a major effort to automate food services at the ballpark, and have been seriously understaffing operations. Our contract negotiations are ongoing. Immigrant workers’ rights are a fundamental part of this fight. Will the Giants and Aramark be the next target in San Francisco of the rising mass movements of labor and community?
Minneapolis is rising. That rising is built on earlier resistance movements to ICE in Chicago, in Portland and many, many other places. It is built on the NO KINGS movement. It is built on the day-to-day resistance of millions all around the country, struggling to end the Trump regime and the rotten system of terror and exploitation that he leads.
What the people of Minneapolis are telling us is that there is no going back. There is no going back until, as Martin Luther King said when he paraphrased Amos 5:24 in the Bible, “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Marc Norton’s website is at MarcNortonOnline.wordpress.com. He has been a soda jerk, a dishwasher, a steward, a cook and a bellman. He has been a cashier at the Giant’s ballpark since 2013. He is a proud member of both UNITE HERE Local 2 and the Bay Area branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
