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There was a time, not that long ago, when American government workers got so pissed off at the people running things that they called out of work and protested for weeks.
They rolled out SpongeBob SquarePants sleeping bags on marble floors that were usually filled with the clacking of legislators’ shoes. They brought in drums and vuvuzelas so they could make themselves loud. They chartered buses to bring in nurses and teachers; corrections officers and cops showed up too. In the end, their ranks swelled to 100,000, maybe more.
This wasn’t even all that long ago; it was 2011, in Madison, Wisconsin. Like now, a GOP executive had just come to power. Like now, one of the first things he wanted to do was undermine government employees. In the years since, thanks in part to this effort, the Badger State has been called the “GOP’s laboratory for dismantling democracy.”
Wisconsin was a good place to go after state workers—it’s the birthplace of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the first state to grant public workers the right to bargain as a group. Which explains why then-Gov. Scott Walker launched his attack by trying to hamstring public sector unions—jamming through a “budget repair bill” stuffed with rules that would cut off collective bargaining and make it difficult to keep workers unionized in the first place.
Like Donald Trump and his “efficiency” czar Elon Musk, Walker made his case in part by claiming he needed to rein in spending, and he demonized government workers in the process. He called out a Madison-area bus driver who made over $150,000 a year due to overtime. He said public sector employees were “haves” while taxpayers were “have nots.” Walker even said he’d call out the National Guard if that’s what it took to get his bill through.
Peter Rickman is the president of the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Organization now, but in 2011 he was a grad student and a member of the Teaching Assistants’ Association at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He remembers it was a Thursday when the governor “dropped the bomb”—which is what Walker himself called his bill dismantling unions. Rickman was in a meeting with other organizers at the time: “We all sort of looked around at one another and were like … this is our fight.” After all, teaching assistants were state employees, too.
They started small. Feb. 14 was just a few days away, so the first action Rickman and other students took was delivering hundreds of valentines to the governor, expressing their support for university employees. After that, they planned a “people’s filibuster” of the “budget repair” bill, and got hundreds of people to testify at the Capitol during a public comment period.
Some of those people didn’t leave, and more kept joining. It was the beginning of what became a weekslong occupation. At the height of it all, there was a children’s play area and a medical station inside the building to accommodate the encampment. Striking was against the law, so teachers who wanted to “call out sick” could get a doctor’s note from on-site university physicians.
Then, like now, Democratic legislators were outnumbered by Republicans, theoretically powerless. But as the occupation began to build, 14 Democratic state senators threaded through the crowds and got in a car pool.* Then they fled the state entirely. Vacating Wisconsin meant the Legislature was lacking the “super-quorum” necessary to pass the governor’s bill. The legislation was, effectively, put on ice.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened in Wisconsin in 2011 because here we are, a month into Donald Trump’s second term, and, well, what else is there to do? Do-good lawyers are hard at work, filing a blizzard of paperwork against one departmental purge after another; it’s unclear, though, if their lawsuits are doing much to slow things down. In Congress, most Democrats seem wedded to being the “adults in the room,” while Republicans seem wedded to Trump. Like a lot of people, I see the president’s self-coup and think: Is now the time folks hit the streets?
To be fair, these thoughts don’t come out of nowhere for me. My husband was one of the people fired in the gradual shuttering of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. His dismissal letter was so sloppy that his name and job title weren’t filled in. But even if you think, Who really needs another government lawyer?—it’s worth considering the CFPB’s caseload. My husband was suing to claw back excess fees charged to active-duty military members, and targeting financial services companies that prey on folks with low credit scores.
Russ Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget (and the CFPB), has spoken openly of wanting to put federal workers “in trauma.” I can tell you from personal experience: He’s gotten his wish. But these workers are also pissed. The real question is whether they are pissed enough to pull a Wisconsin.
Because in the next few months there will be one tiny point of leverage to lean into: a looming government shutdown. It will take Democratic votes to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling, a reality that’s gotten lost in Trump’s blizzard of executive action. Some have suggested Dems refuse to work with the GOP at all, sending whatever’s left of the government workforce home. But given their relatively toothless actions so far, I think Democratic leadership will need their spines stiffened to play hardball.
That’s where a strike comes in. Which, in essence, would be the government sending itself home.
Over the past year or so, my daily news podcast has covered protests around the world that have seemed to actually succeed—general strikes in smaller countries experiencing democratic struggles, led by workers.
In March of 2023, hundreds of thousands of Israelis pressed pause on regular business in a bid to stop Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from overhauling the country’s Supreme Court. All takeoffs from Israel’s main airport were halted for several hours; restaurants closed; the country’s largest port stopped working. The country’s biggest union, Histadrut, was behind the action, and in the end, Netanyahu blinked—at least temporarily.
Then, back in December, after South Korea’s president declared martial law, unions pressed for consequences. When an initial effort to impeach the president failed, a strike effort gained steam. The Korean Metal Workers’ Union called off work at a Kia plant, joining the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions’ calls to oust the president. In the end, the impeachment seems to have succeeded.
So: Could it happen here? And if so: How?
I’ll admit to having a mixed relationship with protest. On the one hand, when I dug up my old calendar from senior year of high school, I’d definitely marked the “March for Women’s Lives” on it. (My dad took me.) On the other, I still remember my initial reaction to Occupy Wall Street, as a young news producer: I rolled my eyes. Occupy started on, of all days, a Saturday. It struck me as goofy as hell. “No one is even on Wall Street on a Saturday!” I remember telling a colleague. This take didn’t age well.
My beef has always been with the limits of protest—what marching around can actually achieve. And for a long time, I didn’t have to think about protest, personally: I’m a journalist—I don’t do things, I write them down. (I note this with a bitter chuckle.)
But this is why the strikes in Israel and South Korea stood out to me: They weren’t performative at all. Unlike, say, the Women’s March that greeted Trump in 2017, these worker actions were associated with demands. And, you have to admit, it makes a certain poetic sense to stage a workers strike aimed at our “businessman” president.
At its root, what’s happening in the U.S. is about labor. Trump is firing people, or threatening to— tens of thousands of federal workers, yes, but there are also people who rely on federal grant funding who are out of work. There will be cuts at universities and hospitals that depend on money from the National Institutes of Health. Every day there are a few more stories: Catholic Charities in Houston has reportedly fired a quarter of its staff. A research nonprofit in North Carolina is “temporarily” laying off more than 200 workers. A tree-planting organization in New Orleans is worried it will need to close its doors.
The question is how to bring these workers together. The United States is far bigger, geographically, than Israel or South Korea. And unions aren’t as baked into our culture as they are in, say, Israel—where Histadrut was fundamental to the founding of the country.
Then there’s the fact that even if government workers are unionized, they are prohibited by law from striking. In fact, the Office of Personnel Management can decide that a federal worker who strikes can never have a job with the U.S. government again.
Still, there’s energy building. For now, it may be limited to resistance lawyers and very online NBA players. But the head of the American Civil Liberties Union has just said that if legal efforts to constrain Trump fail, we’ll need to “shut down this country.” And every time a government agency closes its doors, staff members download Signal so they can chat. Then they hit the streets. Imagine if the government shutdown in March isn’t driven by the Democrats—it’s driven by the workers?
Fun fact: A general strike never got called in Madison, back in 2011.
Instead, the tens of thousands of workers who showed up at the Capitol were there as volunteers. Early on, Wisconsin’s South Central Federation of Labor (that’s SCFL, or, charmingly, “scuffle” for short) actually went so far as to authorize a general strike—which would have forced employees to stay home, or, better yet, join a picket line. They didn’t have the authority to enforce it, though. And it never happened.
A couple of weeks later, the protests in Madison failed.
Gov. Walker found a way to modify his union-busting bill and pass it without Democrats. Afterward, GOP state senators left the Capitol through an underground tunnel to avoid facing protestors.
Labor leaders who look back on this moment have different views on how this went down.
Some talk about how workers’ own chants seemed to point the way toward what would happen next. What really got the crowds going, they say, weren’t calls to strike. They were calls to “RE-CALL WALK-ER!” A recall election was mounted the next year, and the governor was forced to campaign to stay in office, though he kept his job. (Donald Trump contributed $15,000 to help Walker survive the recall.)
Jim Cavenaugh, the retired president of SCFL, wonders whether things would have gone differently if protestors had officially called off work instead of trying to oust the governor: “It seems to me that some kind of withholding of services, by the affected employees at least—a jungle strike, a public sector strike—would have created more pain for the politicians.”
No one knows what a general strike alternative timeline would have looked like. One GOP senator I spoke with said protests ended up consolidating Republican votes—once they felt cornered, they were resolved to sign the anti-union bill into law. It’s possible a general strike would have made the public feel the same way, turning them against the workers once garbage sat outside for a few days and nurses refused to show up for shifts.
It’s possible some contingent of workers would have refused to call out of work at all—they had legitimate concerns that they’d be punished for doing so.
But it’s also possible a general strike would have been the leverage workers needed, and Walker’s legislation would have collapsed. It’s a small possibility. But it’s real.
I’m not ignorant of the enormity—perhaps even impossibility—of what I’m proposing.
A general strike requires a degree of aggressiveness and coordination I’m not sure exists, not to mention a strike fund to rival the size of Kamala Harris’ $1 billion election fund. Union officials told me that the time for government workers to organize was, frankly, yesterday—and that they’d do well to reach out across sectors and class to involve as broad a group of Americans as possible.
Organizers also warned of all the ways the government will try to manipulate and misrepresent what protestors get up to. In Madison, the governor openly mused about sending infiltrators inside the occupation to stir up trouble. In court, he claimed the protests were doing millions of dollars of damage to the Capitol building. (They were not.)
Punishment is real, too. In Wisconsin, university doctors who handed out “sick notes” to teachers so they could call off work were disciplined by their bosses—fined thousands of dollars and put on administrative leave.
The punishment this time could be worse. Vought, the same Trump appointee who talked about putting government workers “in trauma,” has advocated for turning the military on American citizens to control “riots.” And our new secretary of defense seems fine with that.
Before Trump assumed office last month, before I knew how bad or how personal this administration would be for me, I called up journalist Barton Gellman. He has been working with the Brennan Center for Justice to game out what the resistance to Donald Trump might look like. He even engineered a series of tabletop games with thought leaders and politicians—people like New Jersey’s former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and law school professor Rosa Brooks. Everyone was assigned a role: president, governor, secretary of defense. When his group tried to figure out how protests would go down, the only thing that stopped troops from firing on civilians was a group of faith leaders in full clerical garb. They essentially dared soldiers to shoot them first.
If this does not sound appealing, the alternative may sound worse. Over at Foreign Affairs, Steven Levitsky, the author of How Democracies Die, lays out the path forward—he calls it “The Path to American Authoritarianism.”
I am floating this general strike idea for a simple reason: Workers are running out of options. Unions are, too. Because if they represent a population of government employees who can be summarily dismissed for political reasons, then who, exactly, are they protecting anymore?
My husband loved being a federal employee. He thought a lot about what to put up in his office to make it feel like his own. There was a triptych of album covers—one red (Ray Charles), one white (Elvis), one blue (Joni Mitchell). And there was an enormous print of Faith Ringgold’s painting Freedom of Speech. It’s an American flag inscribed with the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” The flag is studded with the names of people who have pushed those freedoms to the brink, from Harriet Tubman to the John Birch Society.
We’re at the brink now, too. But the First Amendment still exists. I think it’s time to use it.
Correction, Feb. 20, 2025: This article originally misstated that in 2011 the Democratic state senators from Wisconsin boarded a bus to leave the state.
