‘We Have Very Few Options but To Join Together To Organize for a General Strike’
Arguably the most potent and powerful figure in the labor movement today has just declared that American workers—no matter what you do or what sector you’re in—now have “very few options but to join together to organize for a general strike.”
“What we have to understand is the people in charge, the people doing this, are doing this to make the federal workforce miserable—to make us all miserable and demoralized, and shrink into our own space—to inspire scarcity and competition among workers so that we don’t rise up together to stop them,” Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA-AFL-CIO, told “What’s Going On?” host Bob Hennelly over the weekend.
Nelson made her comments following the Department of Homeland Security announcement on Friday that it is stripping Transportation Safety Administration [TSA] workers of their collective bargaining rights.
“The attrition of the workforce will continue at TSA and anywhere else as long as workers do not have their pay and benefits and collective bargaining rights that gives them the ability to actually do their jobs,” Nelson said.
The AFA president further warned that the DHS’ move is all “about authoritarian control” and that her biggest concern is that the airline industry will experience a “tragic event” because of it.
“We cannot just allow this to happen and think this is someone else’s problem,” she added.
Nelson, of course, successfully pushed back on Donald Trump in 2019, and helped end the longest government shutdown in American history when she threatened a nationwide airport strike to reopen the government.