How a “Plan 2028” Could Bring Labor and Social Movements Together

Over the last year, Fain’s call has spread. Some unions, base-building organizations, and political organizations are talking about how they can use May 1, 2028 as a compression point to bring together a broad coalition of groups fighting around shared bold demands through shared corporate campaigns and electoral work. In These Times executive director Alex Han, a long-time labor organizer and strategist, has coined the term Plan 2028, highlighting the need to plan for such a coordinated action and build power, grow impact, and increase capacity through elections, issue/​policy campaigns, and street heat in the build up to May 2028. But we can’t wait until 2028 to take action! ​“Plan 2028” can begin with May Day 2025.

Can labor pull off a general strike?

Anyone who has been around the Left is used to regular calls for a general strike. But actual general strikes are rare in the United States and difficult to pull off. Only 10% of workers belong to a union, and even where workers are unionized, they face barriers to striking. For many public sector workers, it is illegal to strike, and while some unions have defied the laws and struck anyway, there can be heavy penalties and consequences. Union contracts usually include no-strike clauses, meaning that workers can only strike under certain conditions when the contract is up. Workers lose money while on strike, and in some cases they are replaced and lose their jobs permanently. And many unions don’t have adequate strike funds or other forms of support in place.

Given the challenges, it seems unrealistic to picture May 1, 2028 as a full-blown general strike. Rather, Plan 2028 could look more like a series of escalating actions over the next several years, including engagement in the 2026 elections and coordinated fights against the implementation of Project 2025. Those could build to a month or several months of national protests in early 2028 that could include big strikes, rallies, protests, and legislative campaigns. Disruptions may take other forms beyond a strike — workplace actions like slow-downs, sit-downs and walk-outs, or the kinds of community boycotts and direct action as we saw in the Civil Rights movement. Any real disruption will still involve risks — arrest, harassment and surveillance, for example — and, whether it’s strikes or otherwise, must come with careful planning and collective care.

Plan 2028 — though it’s still in early planning — is more realistic than many previous calls because it comes from a large union, the UAW, which has major contracts expiring at that time. So whatever happens, there is a possibility that some or all of the 150,000 UAW members at the Big 3 auto companies will be on strike.

Also, unions with a history of successful strikes are aligning with the call. Most notably, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has endorsed it and will work to line up their contract talks with UAW’s. CTU worked with the Baltimore Teachers Union to support a resolution at the 2024 American Federation of Teachers (AFT) national convention, calling on AFT locals to support the call. The resolution passed overwhelmingly. The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) also passed a resolution in support. Other unions and labor councils are joining in.

There will be plenty of unions who can’t set up their contract expiration dates for May 2028. Perhaps their agreements will expire in the months before or after, or perhaps not in the same year. Still, the 2028 date gives unions lots of time to do the slow and steady organizing work needed to build capacity to pull off coordinated action of other kinds, such as support for legislative campaigns aligned with May 2028.

Bringing in social movement organizations

Plan 2028 needs to build a coordinated national effort going beyond unions, and beyond the usual suspects. This could begin with May Day committees in cities around the country that are led by union, social movement and political organization leaders ready to work together against shared electoral and non-electoral targets. Ideally, 

Plan 2028 could provide a path to building visionary and strategic partnerships between unions and organizations with a real base like Mijente, SURJ, the Working Families Party, faith-based organizations and more. We must also involve unions haven’t been engaging in progressive coalitions and union members who have voted for MAGA candidates.

We’ve had a few examples of unions coordinating contract expiration dates in the last decade, and in some of those cases, from Connecticut to California, the unions also aligned with social movement organizations around shared demands that benefit all. This approach, known as Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG), opens up exciting opportunities for unions and social movement organizations to find common targets and overlapping demands. Many teachers’ unions have used BCG, fighting alongside parents and students for better working and learning conditions.

In Minnesota, 10 unions and base-building organizations have been working together over the past 10 to 15 years to align union contracts and community demands; as well as conduct a shared power analysis, identify common targets, build trust, develop leaders and take coordinated action. Unions aligned their contracts to expire around March 2024, and working with one another and local social movement organizations, they developed coordinated contract and legislative campaigns around four shared themes — stable housing, good schools, dignified work and a livable planet.

While not all of the unions ended up striking, the groups in the alliance used contract expiration dates as a compression point. The alliance held a week of action with protests, rallies, leadership training and picket lines. And the unions and organizations won many of their demands, including substantial wage increases for janitors, teachers, and city maintenance workers. Base-building groups representing low-income renters and the worker center Centro De Trabajadores Unidos En La Lucha (CTUL) joined the weekly actions and called on developers to join their Building Dignity and Respect Program, which creates an independent monitoring group to examine working conditions in the residential construction industry.

Bargaining for the Common Good invites a long-term approach that builds trust over time and takes on demands no group could win on their own. But the work is challenging. Unions usually have more power and resources in these relationships, and the legal framework of labor law and collective bargaining can dictate the timeline. It is easy for one partner to cut a deal and leave others out, or to exit an alliance. To build durable coalitions, relationships between organizations must go deeper by bringing in members rather than just being leader-to-leader.

The Minnesota alignment attempted to pre-empt some of those pitfalls with guidelines on how to work together. For example, they agreed that if any one partner in the alignment got a deal from their target, they were allowed to take it, rather than having to wait until everyone got a deal. But each organization still had to participate in the Week of Action, support other groups’ pickets and actions, and send members to leadership schools.

Bargaining for the Common Good is not a magical solution for unity; rather it is a tool or framework that can be used well or used poorly to deepen alignment among social movements and labor. The examples of where it has been used well are inspiring, and provide a model of what we might see building towards 2028.

Some union leaders may be slow to join in. However, it’s possible that a labor upsurge can come from militant leaders at the local level. The late Dan Clawson, scholar and union leader, argued that upsurges don’t tend to come from the top leadership, but in spite of it. Mark Meinster of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) suggests that upsurges are more likely when you have a large number of ​“politically conscious working-class leaders who have experience in militancy …. and a view that the existing system is illegitimate.” If successful, the concept could quickly spread beyond the communities or workplaces where we’ve been working.

There are many constituencies skeptical of working with unions, and for good reason. Their organizations may have been cut out of deals union leaders made with politicians, or they’ve even had a negative experience of their own with a bureaucratic or inept union. And the vast majority of people don’t belong to unions. Plan 2028 could provide a way to bring new life to the labor movement: giving energy to militant members and leaders, and inspiration to workers looking to organize their own workplace.

Coordinated actions from 2025 to 2028

Starting this May Day, local labor and social movement leaders can begin coordinated actions in cities across the country, united around key demands or themes. We can start by focusing on a handful of regions where union and social movement leaders are willing to take risks and think creatively, and where they have a real base. The Chicago Teachers Union is working with ARISE Chicago and over 80 organizations to plan for May Day 2025. Leaders in other cities are joining the call to action. These aligned forces will ideally move toward a shared analysis of long-term targets and a shared infrastructure to support collective organizing in the coming years.

These shared actions will necessarily take a defensive character as Project 2025 is implemented, immigrants are attacked and public jobs and services are cut. But it is crucial that this effort includes visionary demands as well. The UAW’s demands are not just to defend Social Security and Medicaid, for example, but to expand them.

While the UAW’s call is for strikes, Plan 2028 should include an electoral strategy. We must make demands on not just employers but also the state, at the local, state and federal levels. Plan 2028 activities could help build independent political organizations and support progressive midterm candidates based around those demands.

It’s too early to predict what might be the most pressing need in 2028. Rather, the organizing needed to lead up to 2028 could be a vehicle for surfacing demands, candidates and engaged bases that could build the counterweight to corporate Democrats that we will need to effectively challenge the Right’s faux populism. But one direction is clear — given the growing authoritarian threat in the U.S. and globally, a militant politicized labor movement working with social movement organizations needs to take leadership in defending and expanding democracy, just as they have done in other countries.

What’s Needed?

We can learn from labor-community alignments in Minnesota, Connecticut, California and elsewhere about the components that can make these efforts more likely to succeed.

• A consolidated core of social movement organizations and unions. In the last 10 years in particular, the center of gravity for doing powerful electoral and non-electoral work has shifted and grown. It will be imperative that, in addition to UAW, some of these organizations will become the nucleus that can align and steer the broader Plan 2028 effort. Without a powerful and reliable center, Plan 2028 has less of a chance to maximize its national and state level impacts.

• Organizations with real bases. We cannot pull off a strike of any kind without real membership involvement. Union and workplace leaders need to build internally, using workplace mapping, structure tests and leadership development. Social movement organizations must also have real bases. While think tanks and advocacy non-profits might be allies, they cannot anchor a true alignment that is about building power.

• Organizations that are clear about their self-interest. Plan 2028 is exciting and many people are eager to jump on board for political and visionary ideas. But organizations need to have a concrete way to tie the 2028 actions to building their own power. The most successful alignments happen when organizations understand that they have big goals that they cannot win on their own.

• Involvement from members and the rank-and-file. Building coalitions or alignments requires making the time and space to bring in members. Offer political education and skills training. Involve them in decision-making. Run practice pickets or policy negotiations; pair up labor and community members to knock on doors.

• Shared research. We need to conduct power analyses of our communities and states. Who holds power? What are favorable or unfavorable trends that are shaping our terrain? Who controls production, who lends money, who makes decisions, who pressures politicians? Where do we have common targets?

• Shared calendars, staff, lists and resources. Working together long-term goes better if we move beyond shallow ad-hoc coalitions and into deep alignment. We need to be able to look under the hood of each other’s organizations to increase trust as well as capacity.

• Strike funds and mutual aid. Direct action is risky and can be expensive. We need to collectivize the funds, child care, food, healthcare and other care work needed to help people take risks. They need to know someone has their back. We’ll also need legal support and a sober assessment of potential infiltration and backlash.

• Guidelines for working in coalition. There have been countless labor-social movement coalitions over the years and we’ve learned a lot about potential pitfalls. Labor, which can often be the most well-resourced partner at the table, has not always participated through an equity lens in respect to other partners. The Minnesota alignment’s guidelines provide one model. Madeline Talbott, formerly with ACORN, has additional advice for working in coalition, such as: establish an agenda-setting committee, be clear about who has decision-making power, and talk about how to address power differentials between groups.

• Prepare for an upsurge. It is hard to predict an upsurge but it is possible to prepare for one. We can train thousands of workplace and community leaders to be organizers, strike captains, alliance builders and strategists. We can use tools like tabletop exercises to predict how bosses and the state might try to infiltrate, divide us, co-opt us or crush our actions. We can find on-ramps to bring in new people at any level.

In contrast to many calls for general strikes that are defensive reactions to attacks, the 2028 call is a push to go on offense. Labor and social movement organizations working in close alignment can build power inside and outside of workplaces. We can begin our joint work this May Day.

None of this is just about a day in 2028. That day provides a natural compression point for coordinated action, but building power will require a long-term strategy that starts with organizing now and goes beyond 2028; that aspires to build a labor movement and social movements that are strong, militant, and aligned; and that seeks governing power to change the rules of the game altogether.