On Sunday, workers at the agricultural and construction equipment maker Deere & Co. voted by 90 percent to reject a tentative agreement backed by the United Auto Workers (UAW).

The vote was a stunning rebuke to the UAW, which tried to rush through a six-year concessions contract for 10,100 workers without giving them sufficient time to study it. At so-called informational meetings Sunday, workers angrily confronted union officials trying to sell the deal. “Deere and the UAW tried to pull a fast one, but the rank and file fought back,” a worker at the Dubuque, Iowa plant told the WSWS.

Confronting an incipient revolt, the UAW announced it was setting a strike deadline for 11:59 p.m. Wednesday night. Behind the scenes, however, the UAW executives are doing everything they can to block a strike or isolate and defeat a walkout if it is forced to call one.

The vote at Deere, the first defeat of a UAW-backed agreement at the company in 35 years, is the latest in a series of overwhelming “no” votes by workers in the US in response to union-supported contracts:

- On April 9, 1,100 Warrior Met coal miners in central Alabama voted 1,006 to 45 (96 percent) to reject the contract pushed by the United Mine Workers of America, which failed to recoup the $6 wage cut the UMWA accepted in 2016.

- In the late spring and early summer, 3,500 Volvo Trucks workers in Dublin, Virginia, voted down three consecutive UAW-backed contracts, the first two by 90 percent or more. The UAW was only able to shut down a five-week strike by forcing a revote on the third rejected deal, which it claimed passed by 17 votes.

- In August and early September, 3,500 auto parts workers at Dana Inc.—a top supplier for Deere—rejected a five-year contract proposed by the UAW and United Steelworkers by more than 90 percent, with workers at the Toledo, Ohio plant voting unanimously against the deal. More than a month after the defeat of the contract, the UAW and USW are blocking a strike that would have an immediate impact on the auto industry, keeping workers on the job and stockpiling parts with a day-by-day contract extension.

- Twelve thousand carpenters in western Washington state rejected four consecutive agreements pushed by the Northwest Pacific Carpenters Union (NWCU) by margins as high as 76 percent. The NWCU was forced to call a strike on September 16, but it kept 10,000 of the 12,000 carpenters working and ultimately pushed through a fifth contract.

- Late last week, McLaren Health nurse aides and other service workers in Flint and other mid-Michigan cities rejected by a three-to-one margin a deal reached by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to block a strike over dangerously high patient ratios and increased out-of-pocket health costs.

That massive, nearly unanimous “no” votes are now becoming the norm gives expression to enormous anger and determination to fight among workers. The union bureaucracy’s age-old methods of ramming through pro-company contracts—lies about winning “substantial gains” or “the best contract you are going to get” and the use of threats and economic pressure to browbeat workers—are running up against a wall of opposition.

This is part of the emergence of the largest strike movement in the United States in generations. The first five days of October saw the beginning of 10 new strikes in the US, including 2,500 nurses at Mercy Hospital in Buffalo, New York, and 1,400 Kellogg’s food-processing workers in Michigan and other states. In addition, 60,000 Hollywood film and television workers and 35,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers have voted to strike.