Seven Million Turn Out for “No Kings” Protests Nationwide. Next Up, Massive Disruptions Backed by Unions?

But despite the overtures to work in coalition, coordination between unions and liberal groups still proved challenging — even as the coordinated economic disruption that unions are best equipped to organize becomes increasingly necessary against an authoritarian threat.

NO KINGS DAY, OCTOBER 18

The main organizers of October’s weekend demonstration were progressive groups like Indivisible, MoveOn and the 50501 movement, alongside more than 200 other national organizations and thousands of local groups.

“Authoritarians want us to believe resistance is futile, but every person who turned out today proved the opposite,” said Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, co-founders of Indivisible, in a statement. ​“This movement isn’t about a single protest; it’s about a growing chorus of Americans who refuse to be ruled.”

In New York City, people returned to the streets wearing tricornered hats, colonial wigs, and makeup, holding up handmade signs decrying the country’s slide into, by turns, fascism, tyranny, dictatorship, autocracy, and monarchy. The same irreverent air of the carnivalesque was in full display across the country.

Adults dressed up in inflatable costumes was another common sight, a whimsical rebuke of the Trump regime’s efforts to smear protestors as domestic terrorists. In Alabama, cops arrested a 53-year-old woman for ​“lewd conduct” because she dressed as an inflatable penis and held a sign that read ​“No Dick-tator.” The inflatables have emerged as a symbol of resistance through mockery since, at a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Portland, Ore., on October 2, federal agents pepper-sprayed a protester clad in an inflatable frog costume directly through his air vent.

“I’ve definitely had spicier tamales,” the frog-costumed protester said afterward.

Less prominent, compared with the June protests, were calls to take on the billionaire power grab. Palestine solidarity, except for a number of banners in the labor march, was largely absent, as well as remarks about a potential U.S. military invasion of Venezuela.

But the protest’s main themes were also more diverse than the June mobilization — especially the labor march — involving a defense of democracy, immigrants, and health care. The tenor of the messages were mainly denunciations of Trump sending masked federal agents into America’s cities, the Republican shutdown of the country’s government, and the health-care cuts to public programs like Medicaid.

ENTER LABOR

The rally organizers also partnered with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), National Nurses United and the American Federation of Teachers, as well as labor coalitions May Day Strong and Labor for Democracy, to drive turnout of union workers and their communities. In New York, a coalition of the city’s biggest unions turned out thousands, including the Communications Workers of America, 1199SEIU, 32BJ SEIU, the United Federation of Teachers and the Professional Staff Congress. 

Vishally Persaud is a certified nursing assistant at Staten Island’s Richmond University Medical Center and a member of 1199SEIU. She came to the No Kings labor march after a 16-hour shift in the intensive care unit. ​“We’re here to support our health-care workers,” Persaud said. ​“We want to keep fighting so that we don’t get hospitals shut down, nursing homes shut down and Medicaid cut.” She also works in home care and worries whether the health-care cuts will prevent her from working the 130 hours a month necessary to maintain Medicaid benefits. 

Since the COVID pandemic, the understaffing crisis has only worsened the working conditions of health-care workers. ​“We can’t take it anymore,” Persaud said. ​“We’re all very tired.”

Jamie Partridge, a retired member of the National Association of Letter Carriers Local 82, said the labor feeder march in Portland brought about 1,000 people, joining about 40,000 No Kings protesters. SEIU served as the main organizer of the labor contingent and featured speakers from the Oregon AFL-CIO and the Federal Unionists Network, the scrappy group leading the response to the Trump administration’s attacks on federal workplaces.

“While exciting to see unions step up, the number of union signs and banners were few,” said Partridge. Among the unions and labor groups present in Portland were Oregon AFL-CIO, SEIU, Oregon Nurses Association, AFSCME 88, and the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, which just ended a 5-day strike against Kaiser.

Chicago’s protests were massive, drawing 100,000 people. Isaac Silver, a self-employed repair person who also runs an archive of union buttons, said the march filled 6 lanes of traffic for many blocks. (Disclaimer: Silver has been hired by In These Times for a variety of projects). ​“The march looked much more like a cross-section of the city than the Hands Off rally in April, although it would be great to see a more organized presence by unions,” Silver said via text message. ​“Most signs were homemade, and like the chants, foregrounded defense of immigrants, trans people, and Palestinians alongside the official messaging opposing the billionaires’ attacks on democracy.”

In New York City, where more than 100,000 marched across all five boroughs, a dozen unions organized a feeder march up Sixth Avenue that ended in Union Square in Manhattan. But the main march, starting from 47^th Street down Seventh Avenue, never linked up with the union contingent. Workers milled about waiting until the crowd thinned, as many just went home with no clear next steps.

I bolted to Seventh Avenue, where I saw a huge yellow banner that read, ​“Our March is Over: Keep Resisting. NoK​ingsNYC​.com.”

“That’s it?” an incredulous man said to the No Kings demonstration marshal at the intersection of 14^th Street and Seventh Avenue. ​“Aren’t there going to be any speakers?” Through a blowhorn, the marshal repeated: ​“The march is over. Go to brunch!”

BUILDING POWER

The ​“We marched, now what?” attitude is emblematic of the limitations of loosely organized protests without clear next steps for demonstrators to plug into more organizing opportunities. No Kings has knitted together a broad coalition against authoritarianism by harkening back to the country’s revolutionary founding in resistance to the rule of autocratic kings.

But how can it build the organizing infrastructure necessary to stay in touch with these millions of people, involve them enough for them to develop as leaders in their own right, and plug them into efforts that bolster their confidence and understanding of building power?

Fortunately, the liberal groups making up the No Kings coalition already have key partners who can help shift away from the mobilizing model into an organizing approach geared toward disruptive escalations.

Those partners, of course, are organized labor.

Rebecca Givan, associate professor of labor studies and president of the Rutgers chapter of the American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT), points to the increased participation of unions in this round of No Kings protests as part of the maturation of the resistance to Trump. The AAUP-AFT marched with other union contingents in New York City.

“Local unions are turning out their members, and national unions are signing on as supporters,” Givan says. ​“If No Kings marches are to turn into meaningful change, they will need organizations with roots in neighborhoods and workplaces. Organized labor has a key role to play in translating single-day actions into a sustained movement for change.”

Faye Guenther, president of United Food Commercial Workers Local 3000, notes how, during Trump’s first term, the country saw one of the largest marches in history around women’s rights, then the largest racial-justice marches after the murder of George Floyd. She says it’s not too difficult to feel as though every advance has been beaten back, as women have fewer rights today and federal agents are snatching people off the streets with greater impunity than ever. Federal budgets for repression have increased, while funding is being slashed for health-care and food assistance. Protests are important, of course, but, Guenther wonders, how do we make them work?

“The No Kings protests help work this country’s mass-action muscle, and we’re going to need mass action to disrupt business as usual,” Guenther goes on. ​“But without strong, permanent infrastructure in place to maintain and build on our victory over this authoritarian regime, then we’ll just be back in the streets next year blowing off steam. That’s why the labor movement is central to this moment — we know how to build durable, democratic power structures.”

As president of the Baltimore Teachers Union, Diamonté Brown thinks a lot about how to build — from the bottom up, rather than from the top down — democratic structures in which members are in command of their union. She bristles at the assumption that unions are already democratic; they need to be transformed to truly become so. She also doesn’t embrace the whole spiel of how what’s needed is a return to normalcy, but an advance for a broader transformation of longstanding systemic issues.

“What labor can do is take it a step further and start talking about, what are the systemic structures, processes, that are creating these situations, over and over again?” Brown says. ​“Whoever we’re fighting, whoever our target may be at any given time, it seems like they’re always on offense, and we’re always on defense.

The No Kings Day mobilization is also risk-averse, being part and parcel of a reactive-activism pattern that prizes the speed of mobilization over everything else. ​“We’re not willing to put everything on hold to make sure all of our members turn out for No Kings Day, because that’s just not what’s been bubbling up in our membership,” Brown adds. ​“What’s been bubbling up in our membership is that people feel like there’s a retaliatory culture within our school system. We have a 45% chronic absenteeism rate and no school-bus fleet for our students.”

“Unfortunately, no matter who the president is, no matter what type of government we’ve had in my 43 years of living, none of those things have changed where I live. The things that we’re seeing now happen to Black people so much that I think sometimes I’ve normalized tragedy. I’ve normalized oppression. I’ve normalized violence just because I’m Black. So seeing it happen on a bigger scale, it’s something I’m reckoning with.”

“Yes, we want to participate in protests, and we want to show our strength and our unity and our solidarity by making sure we are participants in the No Kings rally, but we just want to highlight that there is so much more that needs to be done, and we have to start connecting the dots. Does this action lead us to the outcome we want? Have we even determined what outcome we want? I haven’t heard that.”

STRIKING QUESTIONS

Trump isn’t an anomaly in U.S. history. He’s like a piece of shit traveling down sewer pipes and becoming denser as he’s agglomerated sediments of other excrement. That makes all the special-pleading about democracy sound like a load of crap. ​“All I’ve heard was we’re fighting for democracy,” says Brown. ​“We don’t want an authoritarian government. But what do we want? What is it that we want that is important?”

To answer — and to win back members drifting away in search of other political homes, members who often don’t feel their unions are the means to transform their workplace and society — the labor movement needs to make union democracy the cornerstone of what it means to be a trade unionist.

Brown gives the example of bringing questions back to her members from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and how ​“it never turns out to be what Randi wants when we ask our membership, when we do it from the bottom up, and that’s when we’re always met with that tension — because we asked our members. And I think that should be scaled across all locals, state feds, and even the national and international unions.”

“And that means we have to go slow. You can go fast alone, but you can go further together, and we’re not moving together.”

In other words, if unions are to organize massive disruptive actions with majority participation from their members and the broader community, then they need to find a way to bring members along with them and loosen the reins for them to lead. 

That’s what makes unions more than one more letterhead-coalition partner in a demonstration.

“Labor is the essential part of society,” says Dominic Renda, a Verizon call center worker with CWA Local 1101. ​“So without labor, nothing moves, and we could really put our foot down. We could stop the Trump administration’s worst excesses. If a protest of this size doesn’t succeed, you know, maybe something bigger will: strike actions.”

Unions offer a path to disruptive escalations that continue to grow the movement while remaining nonviolent and oriented to the broad mainstream coalition offering it legitimacy. Jessica Tang, president of the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts, wants to scale up the resistance by using official union channels to build the institutional infrastructure. She says the union is coordinating efforts across the state, including resource fairs and school safety watches, to sustain activism and resistance.

“I do think that there is a purpose for public actions that bring visibility to an issue, and do let others, who may be more quiet in their criticism at home or thinking that they’re alone, realize that they’re not, actually — and that the majority of people are against the current policies that are harming immigrants, that are hurting the economy, that are stripping away due process rights, rule of law and eroding democracy,” Tang says.

Tang cites the research of political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who argue that just 3.5% of a population taking to the streets in peaceful resistance is enough to block an authoritarian takeover. In the United States, that would mean about 12 million people. The 3.5% number isn’t necessarily an automatic prediction, but it reflects the kind of sustained, nonviolent mass mobilization that has worked in the past.

Tang also notes how the AFT passed a resolution to support this weekend’s large-scale protests, including supporting efforts to do more political education within unions and engage members in nonviolent actions. She mentions the possibility of rolling strikes.

The historian Nelson Lichtenstein offers the possibility of teachers’ unions saying that schools have to be shut down because it’s unsafe to hold classes with armed federal agents roaming the streets. ​“Imagine if the Chicago Teachers Unions said it’s too dangerous to have the kids in school,” Lichtenstein says. ​“They’re been picked up by ICE, so we’re urging all our teachers and students to stay away for the rest of the week.” Short of that action, No Kings organizers can also call the next mass demonstrations for a workday when there will be more potential for disruption.

In Chicago’s lakefront Grant Park, Mayor Brandon Johnson ended his No Kings Day remarks with a call for a national general strike. ​“If my ancestors, as slaves, can lead the greatest general strike in the history of this country, taking it to the ultra-rich and big corporations, we can do it too!” Johnson said. Ten days earlier, Trump demanded he be jailed in a post on Truth Social. In his reference to a general strike, Johnson was citing an argument by W.E.B. Du Bois — advanced in his book, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880—which made the case that enslaved workers had freed themselves in a great general strike that won the Civil War.

“General strikes aren’t planned three years in advance,” Lichtenstein says. They require a galvanizing occasion, similar to the example he offered about the dangerous environment created by the federal agents in Chicago. But unions aren’t there yet.

“The general strike discussion, while much needed in these authoritarian times, was being put forward not by the unions but by the youth climate movement, Sunrise, with the slogan, ​‘Visualize a general strike,’” said retired letter carrier Jamie Partidge. ​“Despite the most brutal assault on unions in my fifty years in this movement, we have yet to rise to the challenge.”

But the term ​“general strike” is on more lips than usual. Indivisible’s Ezra Levin told Bloomberg that, in the group’s weekly planning calls, participants often ask about organizing a general strike, perhaps a growing recognition that economic leverage is necessary. ​“It is possible to execute on that, but it requires a much greater level of planning and infrastructure” compared with weekend rallies, he said. But ​“I suspect it is where we are going.”

IN SOLIDARITY

In his second term, Trump’s authoritarian gyre is spinning faster and wider. But demonstrators and organizers say, to defeat the authoritarian consolidation of power in Trump’s hands and those of a cabal of tech oligarchs, they are building a stronger and more resilient fightback against the escalating attacks on working people, deepening their networks and bolstering their organizations.

Unions are key not only to standing up to Trump, but to offering an alternative economic and social agenda to address what attracts people to Trump’s brand of authoritarian power.

In response to criticisms about a narrowly defensive approach that emphasizes resisting authoritarianism and defending democracy, Tang says: ​“This is actually about fighting for working people and a working people’s agenda over a billionaire’s agenda, which is what we have now, and making the connections between how this is related to making lives better for working people.”

The largest health-care workers’ union in New York and the country, 1199SEIU — representing nearly 450,000 workers — decried the slashing of health-care funding to give tax handouts to billionaires while also pouring money into ICE raids. A University of Pennsylvania study released in June found that health-care cuts could cause the deaths of 51,000 Americans annually.

Trump isn’t just instituting the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history for the benefit of his billionaire pals; he’s doubling down on the economic and political repression of the working class by cutting food assistance and health insurance for working people; by eroding collective-bargaining rights for millions; by sending armed federal agents with military-style weaponry to racially profile and abduct workers and children from their homes, workplaces, parks, and schools; and by detaining more than 170 who are U.S. citizens, but of the wrong color.

At the same time, Trump is developing a refugee policy that favors Europeans; murdering Venezuelan civilians in the Caribbean Sea by bombing alleged drug-smuggling boats; starving millions through cuts to humanitarian aid; and bailing out Argentina’s far-right libertarian president with $40 billion (almost the same amount he’s cut from food aid for the entire world). He’s not just tossing the United States, but the whole planet, into a vortex of repression and misery.

Trump isn’t unprecedented in the annals of American history, which is drenched in the blood and sweat of enslaved people, indigenous slaughter, and ethnic cleansing — but he does mark something uniquely malignant in the modern era.

MOVING CAPITAL

How best to make sense of Trump’s authoritarian escalation?

Roman emperor Caesar’s rampage gave us the word Rubicon to describe a point of no return. Trump’s autocratic regime hasn’t given us any neologism yet, but his escalating authoritarianism has called back into popular usage old German words like blitzkrieg, meaning lighting war, to describe his administration’s dizzying assaults on immigrants, LGBTQ people, women (especially Black women), democratic norms, labor rights, and public programs.

Among the panoply of signs people held aloft at nationwide protests, a set of words stood out from the bunch: king, tyrant, fascist.

These words indicate a broad but inchoate understanding of a dictatorial political regime tightening its hold on society. There’s also an economic dynamic at play, upending old shibboleths about the capitalist management of the economy and replacing them with an older model of brute political force that appears to subordinate the economic structures of capitalism to the whims of a strongman. Call it authoritarianism, corporatism, or fascism, but we are facing a calamitous onslaught of reaction that is reshaping the world.

At root, it’s about capitalism.

Which is how the involvement of labor unions in these broad liberal coalitions becomes pivotal.

In a review of Melinda Cooper’s book Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance, historian Kim Phillips-Fein wrote in The Nation, ​“Trump’s politics and his appeal are not only inspired by far-right ideologies, culture-war passions, age-old xenophobic prejudices, and a long-standing Republican animus toward the welfare state. They emerge out of a capitalist order that has ceased to be constrained by any of the institutional, intellectual, or professional limits that defined corporate capitalism in an earlier era.”

If one thing could have been even more prominent at the No Kings protests, it was a recognition of how hollowed out democracy becomes when billionaires rule under capitalism. Forget Trump’s boorish personality antics and hedonistic relishing in spectacles of cruelty; take note of corporate ownership structures — namely, privately owned firms.

As Phillips-Fein continued: ​“E-mails demanding that workers justify their jobs or face layoffs; scolding and humiliation of underlings who dare to disagree; drastic cuts to programs just because the boss doesn’t like them; arbitrarily lobbing tariffs anywhere he pleases; insisting on payback for those perceived as enemies — these signature Trumpian actions all echo the practices of business owners in their private fiefdoms, who do not have to answer to shareholders or, for that matter, anybody else.”

But if they don’t answer to moral suasion, they do answer to massive and coordinated disruptive actions to stop business as usual.

​“Successful and dynamic social movements create a gravitational field that pulls into its orbit a strata of the body politic that would be hostile or disinterested,” according to Lichtenstein. ​“During the red-state revolt seven years ago, school superintendents, local politicians, parents and students were all mobilized in support of that social movement.”

EARTHQUAKE MOMENTS

Might we be seeing a similar shift in the structure of old social hierarchies? It’s not simply that material conditions have been intolerable for the working class; there has to be a social earthquake that makes the existing order intolerable for both the working class and the dominant classes who jockey to re-establish authority and stabilize the quaking social edifice. There’s no guarantee that, in these tectonic shifts, workers will come out on top, but open conflict for a new legitimacy can potentially reorder the battle lines, even if temporarily. That’s the opening we must seize without any illusions that the outcome is already predetermined.

Cooptation occurs in any mass movement. But any genuine mass movement still needs more than the usual suspects who agree on everything. To defeat a greater threat, it sometimes even takes a cross-class dynamic to create the conditions for a social revolt.

As Trump’s attacks on labor rights and unions have intensified and threats to the U.S. constitutional order increase — including pressing misdemeanor charges against SEIU leader David Huerta for observing an immigration raid, unleashing the Justice Department to indict political enemies, and commuting prison sentences for allies — the burgeoning pro-democracy movement must continue to expand its ranks.

Nowhere more than among organized labor.

Unions have largely stayed out of the spotlight, fearful of uttering even the mildest criticisms and incurring Trump’s wrath. Many have preemptively bent the knee to curry favor with the administration in the hopes that their groveling self-abnegation might spare their own members from broader attacks on working people. But that’s beginning to change, and more union leaders are speaking out against the president without mincing words.

At a recent union conference, Brian Bryant, international president of the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers, spoke directly to pro-Trump members who may have voted for the union-buster who has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

“I know nobody in this union voted for President Trump thinking that he was going to take away bargaining rights for over a million people in the federal government, because that’s just flat-out wrong,” Bryant said. ​“I know they didn’t vote for President Trump hoping that he would defund OSHA and incapacitate the NLRB and other critical departments that our members need.”

Bryant continued: ​“If you voted for him, you’ve got to make sure he knows that you don’t agree with what’s happening, because when it comes to union rights, there are no ifs, ands, or buts. There’s nowhere to be but on the side of workers. Unfortunately, President Trump and his billionaire buddies do not like organized labor, because they know we’re the only voice for the working people.”