General strikes involve workers across multiple sectors shutting down production simultaneously. The strategy is simple, but effective: disrupt routine services until workers’ demands are met.

While the concept may sound foreign to Americans today, our country has seen general strikes many times before. Consider just a few examples:

+ The dockworkers of New Orleans sparked a three-day city-wide strike in 1892, partnering with other unions to form a multiracial coalition of over 25,000 workers that secured both a shorter workday and a wage increase.

+ Over 100,000 workers across Seattle joined a six-day strike in 1919, and although it was undone by red-scare hysteria, it proved that workers could effectively organize essential services without bosses.

+ After police shot two strikers in 1934, San Francisco longshoremen started a strike that grew to 150,000 workers throughout the Bay Area, sparking a wave of unionization up and down the West Coast.

+ As recently as 1998, the privatization of Puerto Rico’s public telephone company triggered an island-wide strike involving some 500,000 workers.

+ Large scale strikes were once a core element of the American dissident’s repertoire.

In the absence of representation in formal political circles — and in the face of repression by those same circles — workers turned to mass walkouts to assert their will.

We can think of general strikes, then, as a kind of people’s veto. It is the means by which workers harness their collective power to stop business-as-usual when ballot boxes and legislatures prove unresponsive.

It should not surprise anyone that the American political system is largely indifferent to public opinion. Corporate lobbying and concentrated wealth tilt the playing field so steeply that even popular reforms struggle to clear Congress.

This dismal reality has, understandably, precipitated a number of protest movements in recent years. And while protests can sway hearts and generate headlines, only economic leverage can disrupt the flow of profit.