cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/41890395
January 18, 2026
[contains 3 parts: an editorial by World-Outlook; an article from In These Times and Workday Magazine; and a press release from the Minneapolis Regional Federation of #Labor, AFL-CIO.]
MINNEAPOLIS — #Unions and community groups gathered in front of the Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, this morning to announce a day of “no work, no school, no shopping” on January 23 to oppose the ferocious assault on the state by federal #immigration authorities.
“We are facing a tsunami of hate from our own federal government,” Abdikarim Khasim, a Minnesota rideshare driver, told the crowd. “We’re going to shut it down on the 23rd. We’re going to overcome this.”
Wow, that’s like partway to a general strike, I hope it makes an impression!
Do people expect this to make any difference?
Don’t get me wrong, we need to take action, and a strike would do it (and be hard on the participants) . But a strike for one day? What would this do?
I’m supportive, but not particularly optimistic about this
But a strike for one day? What would this do?
To quote one of the most charismatic environmentalists of the 90s:
Think globally, act looooocally
It will get local business owners (including national chains) attention, that gets the mayor’s attention, that gets the govenors attention.
If any city with any ice presence had this type of boycott where only essentials were purchased and no other money spent…
It would have an effect on the type.of response ICE gets on the same level as the strike.
Be it local/city/state/whatever/nationally
The money doesn’t care till you fuck with the money, and this does in a way that they can’t exactly lash out in retaliation.
The money doesn’t care till you fuck with the money, and this does in a way that they can’t exactly lash out in retaliation.
This is true, but this doesn’t fuck with the money. A one-day strike just moves the spending to a different adjacent day. People still need their food and stuff.
Data-wise, this would come up as a tiny blip in an otherwise unchanged pattern of spending. Easily rejected by most analysts as an outlier.
I guess I have more faith in a massive crowd demonstrating than I do in a one-day strike. At least one of them puts on a public spectacle
It’s a warning shot fired at the money. If spending on that day drops 80%, it shows the money that the strike threat has teeth. It also puts that population on the street that day, and i would bet AFL-CIO in Minneapolis outnumbers the jackboots on the ground 10:1
Sounds like you enjoy the politics of strongly worded letters then.
It might be a one day strike and then they do it again with an even bigger crowd spanning two days. Then the next time the crowd size doubles and it’s a three day strike. Then…
Compared to “Fuck you, I’m not buying my groceries until tomorrow”?
Yeah, the words have more impact than that
See my edit
deleted by creator
Learned about it from this episode of the Team Human podcast
But what is happening in Hong Kong is they come up with a slogan, which is translated as Do Not Split, which is, we know that some people are willing to be confrontational with riot police.
And when they are, that’s going to cost the state in terms of not only resources, but it’s going to cost the state in terms of political capital and support. And we know that there are some people who are not willing to do that. And we are going to abide by the protocol of Do Not Split, which means that we’re not going to criticize them openly, and they’re not going to criticize us openly.
If we’re the pacifists, we’re not going to have them criticize us for being sort of like, I don’t know, limpid or flaccid or not courageous or whatever. And we’re not going to criticize them for being more confrontational. And the thing is that the support is also tacit.
It’s not like they have to come out and tell the media, oh, we approve of our more sort of confrontational colleagues. They just keep quiet. They just keep quiet.
Understanding that a range of tactics is probably going to be necessary. Nobody really knows what’s going to work. But if everybody’s pushing back against a particularly violent state, then everybody’s really on the same side.
I don’t think it’s inappropriate to discuss how effective a protest will be. If anything, it should inspire more ideas and action.
I already said I support doing something at all, but if you’re saying we shouldn’t try to make protests more effective, then you have lost me
