In 2023, fresh off its Big Three strike, the UAW under Shawn Fain called on American unions to line up their contract expirations for May Day 2028 — so that instead of one union striking at a time, a coordinated season of action could create a crisis for the billionaire class. Jacobin’s Luis Feliz Leon checks the ledger a year and a half out. The aligned dates are real, but partial: Labor Notes counts 830,000 workers whose contracts are planned or expected to expire between March and July 2028.

What is actually stacking up:

  • 150,000 autoworkers at the Big Three
  • 153,000 American Postal Workers Union members, though they are unlikely to strike
  • 95,000 grocery workers represented by the UFCW
  • 77,000 K-12 educators in the California Teachers Association
  • Expirations also spread across logistics, manufacturing, and the building trades

And what has changed since the call:

  • About one million federal workers have lost collective bargaining rights
  • The NLRB and other labor-protection agencies have been left unable to do their jobs
  • Tens of thousands of immigrant workers, union members among them, have been stripped of legal status and subjected to detention
  • Millions-strong weekend protests organized by Indivisible and No Kings have not reversed any of it — which is pushing the resistance toward economic disruption rather than one-day marches

The model Leon points to is the Twin Cities in January 2026. When federal agents swarmed Minneapolis, unions organized the response the way they organize a strike — building-level leaders, regional leads, parent captains paired with educator captains. On January 23, at least 100,000 people marched downtown and close to a million across Minnesota skipped work, including nonunion construction and restaurant workers. The agents pulled back. With 90 percent of private-sector workers in nonunion shops, that breadth is the whole point.

What the piece argues is still missing is machinery: sympathy-strike language, of the kind in Article 9 of the Teamsters National Master Freight Agreement, so unions can honor each other’s picket lines; unions spending down reserves to back workers with no strike fund; and the May Day Strong coalition’s 750 “Solidarity Schools” training people in election defense. House Republicans, meanwhile, are subpoenaing union financial records and DHS-linked surveillance has already touched Minnesota unions, the CWA, and the SEIU. Whether May 2028 becomes a reckoning depends on how much organizing happens between now and then — the date itself does nothing.