It's the Brian Lairn Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. I'm Bridget Bergen, senior reporter in the WNYC

in Gothamist Newsroom sitting in for Brian today. Did you hear about the National General Strike

taking place today? Hundreds of organizations across the country have pledged that their members

will skip work, school, and keep their wallets shut today in response to ISIS takeover of Minnesota

and other American cities and states, as well as the shootings of American citizens, most prominently

Alex Pretti and Renee Good. This comes after Minnesotans held their own general strike last week,

in which over 700 businesses closed and estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people marched in the streets

despite freezing temps. But even if you're hearing the

cars honking and your local coffee shop is an opening, what's happening today likely won't

look like previous general strikes that have shut down cities in the past. So what is happening?

Why does it fall short? And could actions like this one build towards something bigger in the near future?

With me now to give us a General Strike 101 is Eric Blanc, Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University,

author of several books, including We Are the Union, how worker-to-worker organizing is revitalizing labor and winning big,

and writer of the Substact newsletter, Labor Politics. Hey, Eric, welcome back to WNYC. Thanks so much for having me on.

And organizers have said that this is under the umbrella national shutdown. They've called

for a general strike today. What is a general strike? What are

they trying to accomplish today? A general strike is basically when a majority of workers in a

given geographic area, so a city or a state or a country, go out on strike. So the intuition behind it is that this whole system politically, economically depends on workers going to work.

And when workers withdraw their labor, the system can't function.

So you can press demands very powerfully through a general strike.

And I think that's why there's been so many calls for general strikes recently because

people are trying to figure out actually, how do we stop Trump? How do we stop ICE? So what about the

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