Just over a century ago, the city of Seattle went on strike. Some 25,000 workers walked out of their jobs and hit the streets, joining another 35,000 shipyard workers who had already been called out. For five days, nothing moved but the tide in the Puget Sound. The citywide action marked the first general strike of the twentieth century; it was also one of the last (save for Oakland, California, which mounted admirable if short-lived efforts in 1946 and 2011). The ensuing decades of post-WWI labor unrest, mass strike actions, and pitched battles between workers and bosses created a powerful modern legacy of widespread working-class organizing and robust political thought on the American left. (A real, live socialist even ran for president—five times.)

The Great Depression and America’s 1941 entry into WWII posed some complicated challenges to this legacy, as labor militance took a back seat at times of national emergency. And the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 struck a major blow against the kind of solidarity strikes that had proved indispensable in earlier mass actions. Since then, the idea of a general strike has mostly faded into nostalgic revery and wishful fantasy amid the dismal conditions of rampaging late capitalist inequality and plutocratic exploitation, as labor organizers battle the collapse of basic wage and job protections. But what’s happening in Oregon right now just might change that.

On Monday, September 30, following a breakdown in months-long contract negotiations, 5,000 workers at all seven Oregon state universities will walk out. Unlike previous strikes convened under the activist #RedforEd initiative, this action involves the “classified staff”—educational support workers who are paid an hourly rate instead of a salary and whose duties follow a regular routine. These workers are represented by SEIU Local 503; as organizer Shane Burley says, their ranks include “everything from custodians and food service to legal and academic counseling to healthcare workers and engineers and agricultural workers and scientists,” as well as grounds and building maintenance, student registration and financial aid assistance, IT, and tech support.

This kind of campus-wide organizing reflects the growing shift toward rank-and-file unionism within the #RedforEd movement. For example, at Iowa’s Grinnell College, student workers attempted to expand the existing dining service workers union to cover all student employees in 2018; that same year, students at New York City’s New School occupied the cafeteria in solidarity with Unite Here Local 100 cafe workers.

Now, the Oregon university support staff are taking an industrial approach more in line with the “one big union” organizing model of the Industrial Workers of the World than the trade unionist model long pursued by the AFL-CIO.