Name: General Strike 2028: Building Unions and Confronting the Climate Crisis
Start: 2025-04-05T17:00:00-0400
End: 2025-04-05T18:30:00-0400

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Saturday April 5, 2025 5:00pm - 6:30pm EDT

Talbot Lecture Hall

Unions provide a voice and potential political power for working people. As climate change accelerates and climate impact grows, the economy will be forced to adapt. If we want this coming transition to be socially just, economically responsible, and politically viable, unions will have to play a big role. When a union is, as Jane McAlevey says, “Strike Ready,” they have a lot more leverage at the table. Becoming strike-ready requires building strong solidarity. Changing the course on climate will require both of those things – solidarity and leverage. Building for a general strike would require organizing beyond unions. Challenges include that our organizing ability is still weak, even in most unions, and of course it is usually even more difficult outside unions where workers – or anyone – don’t have an organizing infrastructure to support them. Building for a solidarity action of this size demands finding the common ground and building people’s interest and ability to support action to win that common ground. The opportunity is that a clear goal – general strike – will help define which actions are moving toward the solidarity goal and which aren’t as organizations and individuals decide toward which actions to allocate their resources and capacity. This framework is even more important now that the Trump administration has throw so much into flux, including electric vehicles and battery production, and a long list of ecologically critical infrastructure and production.

Moderators

Todd Chretien

Speakers

Cynthia Phinney

President, Maine AFL-CIO

I am the president of a statewide federation of labor organizations representing approximately 40,000 workers in our mostly rural state of 1.3 million people. Our organization has supported single-payer universal healthcare for a long time. For the past three years we have had an... Read More →

Brandon Mancilla

Director, UAW Region 9A

Meg Sinclair

RN, MSNA, Maine Medical Center, Steward

Saturday April 5, 2025 5:00pm - 6:30pm EDT
Talbot Lecture Hall 85 Bedford St Portland, ME 04101 United States

Plenary

Just Transitions Summit

Todd Chretien

Cynthia Phinney

Brandon Mancilla

Meg Sinclair

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