Donald Trump’s attacks on working people — threats to send troops into major US cities, ripping collective bargaining rights from a million federal workers, an immigration enforcement terror campaign that borders on unconstitutional — have been so extreme that many people are talking about a general strike. These calls are coming not just from the usual suspects, but even from my own mayor, former Chicago Teachers Union leader and organizer Brandon Johnson.

We’ve all heard calls for a general strike before — usually not as a serious proposal or strategy, but as a reaction to the attacks that working people face on a regular basis from existing political and economic power. Such calls are easy to dismiss, because they tend to come from well-meaning people without the knowledge of how difficult a strike is to launch and win in a single shop, let alone across a country of 330 million people that hasn’t seen anything approaching a national general strike in almost 150 years.

Those of us who have done the hard work of organizing our coworkers, winning union recognition, and negotiating with recalcitrant employers have frequently dismissed the idea out of hand. But two years ago, in the wake of the “Stand-Up Strike” at the Big Three US automakers, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain put the idea on the table when he called on the labor movement to prepare to strike together on May 1, 2028.