Micaela is co-president of GEO Local 6297 (writing in personal capacity), Sammy is a student at Yale University, and Sophia is a student at University of Washington.
The Trump regime shows no signs of slowing down. Operation Charlotte’s Web sent a swarm of federal agents into North Carolina to brutalize immigrants, with New Orleans up next. Students and workers are rising up and fighting back, but we need more. On November 7, student groups and unions held actions against Trump’s authoritarianism on over 100 campuses around the country as part of a campaign called Students Rise Up.
Students Rise Up (SRU) is a national campaign of students and workers across the country organizing protests against Trump and authoritarianism on their campuses the first Friday of each month, leading to a national day of walkouts and strikes on Friday, May 1. The campaign, initiated by a coalition of the Sunrise Movement, youth organizations, and, critically, educator unions, points to the type of escalated action we need to fight back against Trump and ICE: a mass movement of students and workers, leveraging the power of the working class to shut down production.
As revolutionary socialists, we see Trump as a glaring symptom, but capitalism as the disease. We want more than just concessions from a far-right authoritarian; we want to overthrow the entire capitalist system that feeds off the far right to divide us and to replace it with a democratically-run socialist society. With this goal in mind, we think it’s critical to build mass working-class action, united with students, that can actually bring Trump and the capitalists’ profits to a halt. Historically, student movements can break through demoralization and fear, which can pull in workers, who have the power to shut down production. That’s why Socialist Alternative is endorsing SRU, organizing on our campuses and in our unions all across the country.
Unions building SRU will be critical to our success, but their involvement needs to go beyond signing on in name only. The real power of union involvement will come from leveraging our power as workers, including strike action on May Day 2026. While the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of Teachers have called for a general strike on May Day 2028, we can’t wait until only 5 months left in Trump’s presidency to use the labor movement’s sharpest tool.
The movement SRU is building points towards how change can really be won, but this movement also needs its own independent political organization. Neither billionaire-backed party is serious about fighting for the working class because of their ties to big business and the capitalist system. The Democrats are a dead end. Any party tied to corporations is beholden to their profits—profits built on exploiting workers’ labor. For our movement to succeed, we need to go beyond the two capitalist parties to a new party based on mass working-class struggle.
A National Movement Needs National Demands & Structures
We’re excited that Student Rise Up is a national movement. Trump has targeted the administrations of individual universities like Columbia and Brown for student protests. We can have no confidence in university administrations to protect their students or workers because they’re reliant on their wealthy donors and that’s who they make themselves accountable to. Because of the brutal crackdown on the pro-Palestine movement under Biden and Trump, especially on campuses, many students feel understandably scared of organizing. With SRU’s nationally-coordinated days of action, we can cut across the fear to “stick your neck out” by showing we stand united against Trump’s attacks. Excitingly, we saw many students at Columbia University, which faced some of the most severe repression of the encampments, participating in the first SRU day of action protesting Trump-backing billionaire Mark Rowan.
Locally, SAlt members are organizing mass action conferences on our campuses to discuss strategy and decide on bold demands, which is important for developing buy-in from students and workers. At Yale, we’re building for an organizing conference in January of progressive student groups, campus unions, high schoolers, and community members to vote on clear demands and next steps. At Haverford College, our members are doing this even earlier—for a campus-wide walkout on December 5 in collaboration with faculty. This needs to happen nationally.
We have experience leading these fights. In New Haven in May, we helped high schoolers democratically come up with and vote on clear demands for a walkout: no teacher layoffs, fair pay to address the teacher shortage, stand with immigrant and trans students and staff, and tax Yale and New Haven big businesses to fund the schools. These demands, along with clear organizing structures, galvanized 300 students from six schools to walk out and march on the Yale president’s office.
SRU’s national coordination shows we’re united against Trump, so our movement needs to take up bold, concrete national demands through mass democratic decision-making structures. Currently, the national demands are for affordability, security, and freedom, which is a start, but we should go further.
We could use the next days of action in December and February to build for a nationally-coordinated democratic conference of SRU activists in early spring, with delegates from unions and student groups. This conference would discuss debate and strategy, voting on a set of national concrete demands for May Day. We would put forward bold, political demands like abolishing ICE, ending all military funding and arms shipment to Israel, taxing the rich to provide free public college and green union jobs, and more. Some students believe that we should only focus on local demands because they’re more achievable, but Trump and ICE can’t be stopped on one campus alone. We need strong national demands and an escalating nationally-coordinated movement. This can galvanize more students to fight and give local demands more leverage.
Students & Workers Can Shut It Down! Move Up The 2028 General Strike
While student actions are powerful, workers can take them to the next level by withholding their labor and creating a real crisis for the capitalist class and its profits. We saw a glimmer of what this could look like, in a limited way, when UAW 4811, representing graduate student workers at several UC campuses, went on strike in solidarity with the pro-Palestine encampments. Unions endorsing Students Rise Up is a major step forward in bringing together workers and students, and unions can be truly decisive in struggle if they go beyond endorsement and play an active role, collaborating with students and taking initiative.
The graduate student union at the University of Illinois Chicago, GEO Local 6297, is pointing the way forward by passing a motion to mobilize its members to SRU actions on campus and connect it to the demands in its contract campaign. One of the article’s authors, a co-president of the union, worked with its outreach team and stewards to unite a coalition of unions and student organizations under the SRU banner. To emphasize the shared goals of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff, they are building their campaign as UIC Rise Up. If you are a union member who is interested in SRU, you can make a motion like this one to encourage your union to mobilize your coworkers.
Members of unions signed on to SRU (including AFT, UAW, UNITE HERE, and SEIU) should organize escalating workplace actions alongside student protests. Each action should be used as a springboard to build for May Day. These could begin as coordinated mobilizations and sickouts, but ultimately, it will be important to threaten their institutions’ operations, not just their reputations. This means strike action.
UAW President Shawn Fain has called for a general strike in 2028, for universal healthcare, pensions, and better wages. AFT is in support of that call, and both unions are signed onto SRU. While union leadership has largely abdicated responsibility in fighting Trump thus far, SRU is an opportunity to turn this call for a strike into a real campaign. Where union leaders don’t take up SRU, it’ll be on rank-and-file members to pressure them to!
Striking is the working class’ strongest tool, and we cannot wait until 2028 to use it. To strengthen the SRU movement, union members in UAW and AFT should pass resolutions in their locals to call for a general strike before 2028. UIC Rise Up aims to unite students and workers to make a campus-wide strike on UIC a reality by stopping business as usual, and to urge other student-labor coalitions to take up the fight together. We need to leverage our power as workers to fight for immigrant, trans, and all union members.
Our Movement Needs A New Party With A Socialist Program!
In order to successfully capture this energy and win concrete demands, we need a new party that can be a political home for the movement. Sunrise and other groups argue that by putting pressure on the establishment, we can push the Democratic Party in a more positive direction and “win it back” for working people. Experiences like the George Floyd rebellion and the movement against the overturn of Roe v. Wade show that the opposite is true: Democrats will derail and co-opt our movements to funnel the energy into electing them. But when they get into office, they pose no meaningful threat to Republicans, precisely because they are not rooted in, and in fact generally oppose, working-class movements.
If Sunrise Movement stands behind the Democrats and funnels all of our anger and fighting spirit into the 2026 midterms, this will cut our movement off at the knees. Many unions, including those signed on to SRU, embrace this strategy of reforming the Democrats as well, pouring millions of members’ dues money into a party that crushes strikes. Unions should stop putting this money towards the Democrats and put it towards building movements like SRU and a new party for working people.
Workers’ parties are not abstract or unattainable. A new socialist party, called Your Party, is being launched in Britain. The rise of Your Party is fueled by the failure of the establishment Labour Party to be able to combat the right-wing Reform UK party. This is what we need to fight for here! If we want to build this kind of party in the United States—one that is not beholden to billionaires and truly fights for the working class—we need to get organized. This party needs to take on a socialist program to completely transform society to one that runs by and for workers and students.
Our members will be building Students Rise Up. If you want to build the fight against Trump, which is intrinsically connected to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, you should join Socialist Alternative!