250 Million…
That is the number of people who walked off the job in India in November 2020.
Not thousands. Not hundreds of thousands. 250 million.
They shut down the country. Banks closed. Trains stopped. Ports went dark. The government ground to a halt. It was the largest general strike in human history, and it happened because workers decided they had enough of being fed to the grinder. They were fighting three farm laws designed to hand the food supply to corporations and four labor codes that would strip them of their rights. They won. The government repealed the laws.
We are told this is impossible here. We are told strikes are disruptive. We are told the economy is too fragile to handle a real withdrawal of labor. India proved all of that is a lie.
The economy does not collapse because the workers stop working. It collapses because the workers stop accepting the terms of their own exploitation.
We see the same play happening here. The Supreme Court fired the opening shot with the Janus decision, a calculated blow that stripped public sector unions of funding and invited workers to free ride on the movement’s dime. It was a tactic designed to starve the unions of resources, turning solidarity into a liability just as corporations were escalating their assault. Amazon responded to the courage of workers in Bessemer and Staten Island with surveillance, propaganda, and firings, dragging out a contract battle they refuse to settle. They fought a trillion-dollar company that deployed an arsenal of anti-union consultants and mandatory meetings to break the human spirit. The rail workers faced a direct betrayal in 2022, threatening a strike for basic sick leave only to have the White House intervene to force them back to work. They didn’t intervene to ensure safety; they intervened to ensure the trains kept moving. They sent a clear message: your health is secondary to the system’s efficiency. And even when the PRO Act, a simple bill to protect the right to organize, passed the House with the President’s support, it was stalled in the Senate by two senators. The will of 160 million workers is being held hostage by a few, while the courts and the corporations dismantle the protections we built.
This is not a bug. It is the system working as designed. Our unions have been hollowed out by “right to work” laws that breed conflict. The result is a fragmented battlefield where rail workers, Amazon workers, and Starbucks organizers are forced to fight alone. They pit the warehouse worker against the teacher, the trucker against the nurse. They want us to believe our struggles are isolated incidents, rather than symptoms of a single rotting system. This isolation is the primary defensive strategy of the ruling class. They know they can defeat a million individuals one by one. They know they cannot defeat a unified workforce that understands its own power.
We need to stop waiting for a savior in Washington. We need to stop hoping that the next election will magically fix a system that is designed to exploit us.
We need a general strike. Not a symbolic walkout. Not a one-day protest. A shutdown.
We need to pick a date. We need to organize the sectors that matter. Transportation. Logistics. Supply chain. The people who move the boxes and stock the shelves and drive the trucks. When those workers stop, the illusion of the “free market” shatters. Imagine the silence. No trucks on the interstate. No freight at the docks. No supply chain humming in the background. When the shelves are empty and the trucks are parked and the ports are silent, the conversation changes.
The corporations will pay attention when it costs them money. They will listen when their stock price plummets. They will negotiate when they realize the experiment has run its course.
India proved it can be done. They proved that the power is always in the hands of those who do the work. We just have to stop being afraid to use it.
This is NOT a broken system! It’s working exactly as it was designed—to extract value from our lives and deposit it into the accounts of the few. The only way to fix it is to break it.
Shut.
It.
Down.
Follow the Vanguard on Social Media – X, Instagram and Facebook. Subscribe the Vanguard News letters. To make a tax-deductible donation, please visit davisvanguard.org/donate or give directly through ActBlue. Your support will ensure that the vital work of the Vanguard continues.
