A period of unusual visibility

Between November 2025 and May 2026, US organized labor produced more visible activity than in any comparable period in roughly four decades. The largest Starbucks strike in company history. The first NLRB decisions in a year. The Minneapolis general strike convergence. The largest US May Day mobilization since the 2006 immigrant-rights wave. A series of healthcare and education strikes that established new compensation patterns. The Federal workforce contraction that produced cross-cutting pressure on the labor environment.

A walking summary of the period and what it means.

The Starbucks Workers United strike

The SBWU open-ended unfair-labor-practice strike began before Thanksgiving 2025 and grew through December to roughly 3,800 workers at 180 stores in 130 cities at peak — the largest action in Starbucks history. Workers demanded a first contract addressing staffing, scheduling, and resolution of more than 700 outstanding NLRB unfair-labor-practice charges accumulated over the multi-year organizing campaign.

The strike partially de-escalated around December 23 but did not end. Workers returned to stores under “open-ended ULP” framing, retaining the legal protection associated with continuing protest of unfair labor practices while restoring some operating income. Periodic local actions continued through the spring.

The strike’s significance was structural. It was the first national-scale strike at a major US service employer in years. It demonstrated the operational capacity of a multi-year organizing effort to coordinate across hundreds of locations on a tight timeline. It produced visible disruption to a brand that had long been treated as a labor-relations success story.

NLRB regains quorum

The five-member National Labor Relations Board regained a quorum in early January 2026 after operating without one for nearly twelve months. The lapse, caused by departures and unfilled appointments, had left the Board unable to issue precedential decisions or adjudicate on the merits of cases that had accumulated through 2025.

The first post-quorum decision, Satellite Healthcare (Santa Rosa), affirmed Regional Directors’ authority to certify election results during quorum gaps. This restored procedural certainty for unions that had won elections during the year-plus quorum lapse and were operating without finalized certifications.

Subsequent Board decisions through January, February, and March began addressing the substantive backlog. Federal-employee bargaining cases, executive-order challenges, and pending union-recognition disputes all began moving through merits adjudication. The pace was substantially slower than pre-lapse Boards because of the accumulated backlog; the operational effect was nonetheless meaningful.

The Minneapolis general strike

On January 23, 2026 — sixteen days after CBP officers killed Renée Good and one day before they killed Alex Pretti — a coalition of Minneapolis-area unions called a general strike day in response to ongoing federal enforcement operations. ATU Local 1005 (transit), SEIU Local 26 (janitors), UNITE HERE Local 17 (hotel and food service), CWA Local 7250 (telecom), and the St. Paul Federation of Educators Local 28 (teachers) participated.

The action was unusual in modern US labor practice. General strikes are rare; most twentieth-century US examples were narrowly economic. The Minneapolis action was framed as labor response to civil-rights and enforcement violence, in a city where the affected union members and the affected immigrant community substantially overlapped.

The convergence proved durable. The infrastructure that produced the January 23 action would activate again on May Day, this time at national scale.

Healthcare and education strikes

The pattern of healthcare and education strikes that began in late 2025 continued through the spring.

Kaiser Permanente. The nurses’ strike that began in 2025 expanded on February 9, 2026, with approximately 3,000 UFCW members joining nurses and other Kaiser healthcare workers. The strike alleged Kaiser walked away from bargaining and produced sustained operational disruption across California facilities.

San Francisco Unified School District. Teachers staged their first strike since 1979 in mid-February 2026, citing rising healthcare premium costs and stalled contract talks. The premium pressure was directly tied to the OBBBA-driven healthcare changes that were producing parallel pressure on most public-sector employee benefits.

Los Angeles Unified School District. SEIU Local 99 reached a tentative agreement with LAUSD on April 14 hours before a planned walkout, covering 30,000 bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, and teaching aides. The 24% wage increase, expanded hours that extended healthcare to more workers and dependents, and rescinded layoff notices for roughly 200 IT staff together represented one of the largest single public-sector contract advances of the period.

The pattern across these actions: healthcare benefit pressure, OBBBA-driven implementation effects, and accumulated wage stagnation producing simultaneous strike pressure across multiple sectors.

Republic Services and the sanitation strike

The Republic Services sanitation strike, which began before Thanksgiving 2025 alongside the Starbucks strike, continued in various forms through the spring. The strike affected residential and commercial sanitation services in multiple metropolitan areas. Local resolutions varied; the broader pattern was prolonged.

Labor Notes characterized the period as having more workers participating in strikes than 2024, which had itself been the most active year in recent memory.

The federal workforce contraction

Through 2025 and into 2026, the federal civil service contracted by approximately 9% — the largest peacetime reduction in modern US history. The contraction was driven by Schedule F-related reclassifications, DOGE-related directives, RIF expansions, and the late-March 2026 OPM proposed rule rewriting reduction-in-force procedures.

The Treasury Department’s announcement on March 2 that it was substantially abolishing the Office of Financial Research — created after 2008 to monitor systemic financial risks — was emblematic of the pattern. The cumulative effect was a substantial reduction in federal-government capacity across regulatory, oversight, and service-delivery functions.

The federal-employee unions — AFGE, NTEU, and others — challenged numerous aspects of the contraction in federal court. Several injunctions were issued; most ultimately dissolved on appeal or were narrowed substantially. The contraction continued.

May Day Strong

Roughly 500 organizations staged more than 750 May Day actions on May 1, 2026, under “No Work, No School, No Shopping” and “Workers Over Billionaires” framings. The National Education Association, AFT, AAUP, Starbucks Workers United, the United Electrical Workers, SEIU locals, and UNITE HERE were among major union participants. The Sunrise Movement coordinated student walkouts, reporting more than 100,000 students participating.

The platform was explicitly political: shift the tax burden from working class to wealthy, eliminate ICE, end US involvement in foreign wars, limit corporate election spending. Coverage of the actions explicitly cited the elevated Minnesota strike turnout — a direct line back to the Minneapolis general strike of January 23 and the killings that catalyzed it.

The action was the largest US May Day mobilization since the 2006 immigrant-rights wave. The organizing capacity it demonstrated — coordinating across labor, immigrant-rights, climate, and student-led organizing networks — was substantially larger than any equivalent moment in recent decades.

The PRO Act and federal labor legislation

Throughout the period, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act remained reintroduced and stalled in the Senate. The same was true of the Veterans Education Empowerment Act, the Heat Injury and Illness Prevention rule (which OSHA continued advancing toward finalization at slow pace), and the broader package of federal labor reforms that would have addressed the conditions producing many of the strike actions.

The structural pattern: the political conditions for Senate movement on labor legislation did not visibly improve, even as the labor environment producing pressure for that movement intensified.

What the period produced

Three observations.

First, the convergence of labor and civil-rights organizing is structural. The Minneapolis-to-May-Day arc demonstrated that the affected workers and the affected immigrant community substantially overlap, and that the institutional separation between “labor unions” and “immigrant rights organizations” can be dissolved when conditions warrant. Whether the convergence sustains into the summer and fall, and whether it produces durable coalition infrastructure, is the open question.

Second, the federal-court framework remains the operative venue for individual accountability. The DOJ Civil Rights Division has not announced pattern-and-practice investigations of CBP after the Minneapolis killings. Federal use-of-force standards conditioned on grant funding have not advanced. Federal accountability has come, where it has come, through individual federal-court litigation under Section 1983 and similar civil rights frameworks — exactly the litigation framework that qualified immunity is designed to constrain.

Third, the state-level lever has produced more substantive policy change than the federal lever during this period. Maryland’s elimination of 287(g) cooperation in February. State-level minimum-wage increases and just-cause eviction protections in multiple states. State shield laws for immigrant-receiving healthcare and education systems. The legal architecture is being built around federal enforcement, even as the federal enforcement itself continues.

What’s next

The reconciliation bill — Reconciliation 2.0 — is the immediate federal venue. Committees were instructed to deliver text by May 15, 2026 funding ICE and CBP through reconciliation, bypassing the 60-vote Senate threshold. Whether the funding includes structural reform, oversight, or accountability provisions depends on Senate Democratic leverage in conference.

The labor environment will continue elevated. Periodic strike actions, federal-court constraint litigation, and state-level reform fights will continue through the rest of 2026. The May Day mobilization infrastructure will likely activate again in the fall around midterm-aligned issues.

The structural question — whether the affected workers and communities can sustain coalition organizing across the labor and immigrant-rights divide — is the harder one. The Minneapolis-to-May-Day arc suggests it’s possible. The institutional history suggests it’s difficult. The political environment of the rest of 2026 will test which is more durable.