Culture

Some Gen-Z Kids Are Organising A Strike On TikTok, And We Love To See It

TikTok is gonna help overthrow the bourgeoisie.

by Patrick Lenton  29 August 2019
TikTok school strike

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A lot of people ask me what TikTok is for, and my answer from now on will be: teens dancing, teens doing weird memes, and teens agitating for class action.

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Over the in the US,  a TikTok video by user @gill.no.chill has gone viral, in which she calls for a strike in solidarity with underpaid teachers, and also to highlight major issues in their school district.

Other students in Nevada’s Clark County have gotten on board with the call.

“This is a video for kids who are in the Clark County school district, so if you’re not in CCSD, keep scrolling” she begins, flashing some truly excellent nails into the camera.

“So, our district is refusing to give teachers, who have spent the last three year earning enough credits — out of their own pockets, spending extra hours out of school — to earn credits to get a raise, and our district won’t give it to them.”

Do we hate her because she’s both an anarchist icon and a style queen? No, we do not.

It’s pretty excellent to see — it seems that while the youth might be feeling the same political malaise as the rest of the world, they’re not taking it lying down. Between hyper local issues like this, and huge movements like the school strike for climate rallies, it honestly does feel like this next generation might organise in such an effective manner that they could save this doomed and dying world.

And it’s really cool that they’re utilising tools like social media and TikTok in particular, which is overwhelmingly populated by their demographic (and also some dogshit 31-year-old journalists). It’s also probably the first political agitation I’ve seen on the app — it’s usually extremely weird and fun.

The video currently has 36.2k likes and 763 comments, and is labelled ‘WE STRIKE SEPT 5TH. GET THIS ON THE #foryourpage TO SPREAD AWARENESS’. The “For You page” is basically the homepage of TikTok, and helps push it into most users streams.

Other students got on board with the call too, making their own videos, or even using the app’s duet function to boost the message. As well as calling for solidarity, they highlighted other specific school district problems including a data breach that affected more than 550,000 students.


The comments section is mostly full of solidarity, including from general well wishers from outside the district, saying things like: “I’m not in ccsd but I’m gonna go riot with y’all”.

However, the call for action has led lots of other kids to bring up problems in their own districts, which @gill.no.chill addresses in a follow-up video.

“Nationally, the school system is broken,” she says, “and we can fix it by not going to school and the government realising that we all see a problem as teenagers.”

According to The Daily Dot, the teachers union and the school district have agreed to mediation as of Tuesday, and a statement from the CCSD stated it is “hopeful that an agreement can be reached in the coming days to ensure our hard working support professionals receive the compensation they deserve.”