In all the coverage I’ve read the upcoming event on May 1st has been referred to as an “immigrant boycott.” Which seems weird, because usually when a large number of people who work for various industries don’t show up for work it’s called a “general strike.”
The S-word doesn’t show up in cursory searches of the nytimes website and cnn.com. Google News shows a lot of big name sources using the “boycott” terminology, and half as many tiny sources using “strike.” I don’t have Lexis Nexis so I can’t really do this properly.
I’m not sure of the reason news sources are avoiding the word, other than perhaps to downplay the significance of the event. I’d be interested to hear from journalists about why they settled on this terminology.