After Election Day

Join the labor movement.

The past. (Photo: Getty)

Happy, or perhaps sad, election day. Something consequential will happen today. We don’t know what it will be yet. Rather than sit around and drown in anxiety and idle speculation, let me say a brief word about the future.

If this election goes the wrong way, many people will be bereft. They will feel panicked and outraged, fearful and angry, all at once. It is not so different from the sensation you would feel right after being punched in the face. We saw this process play out in 2016. Those who are not completely subsumed by despair begin searching for something, anything, that feels like a productive way of fighting back against what has occurred. These emotions often get poured into donations to various charities—Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Sierra Club, whatever—and also into attendance at protests and marches. These actions are worthwhile, always, but in this case are better understood as frantic emotional coping mechanisms than as some well-thought-out strategy.

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Today, right now, is a good time to turn your gaze to the horizon beyond this presidential election. If The Bad Man comes in, what is to be done? We can say definitively that—after a small grace period—weeping and moping will not do much good. Channeling your anger into internet arguments, while certainly a response that I can understand, will not accomplish much either. Getting drunk, talking about violent retribution fantasies, yelling at the television, or deciding to tune it all out and move to Portugal are, likewise, things that will not help the situation. Even the donate-and-wave a sign in a big march reaction, though far more civically minded than any of the other things I named, does not constitute a meaningful plan to “resist” what might be coming down the road.

Allow me to suggest to you one concrete thing that you can do, in the event of a political catastrophe, that will actually matter: Join a union. If you, like most people, work a job that is not unionized, you should make it your project to organize and unionize that workplace. This is something that I say so frequently that it risks fading into the background, just another mantra repeated by some person with their own pet idea. But I am saying it today, in this context, because it is, in fact, the precise sort of solution that millions of people will be grasping for if things go poorly. And it will not occur to most of those people, so they will do all the other things. Do not fall into that trap. Fix in your mind, right now, the fact that “resisting” the sort of changes that might come about during four more years of The Bad Man requires not just rage and donations and protests—it requires the construction of competing power centers that can stand up to a weaponized version of the government. Organized labor should be that power center. It is what The Resistance is looking for. You can help make it a reality.

Organize your job and form a union. Now you are part of the labor movement. Now you can participate democratically in an existing union that has resources and organizational capacity and, vitally, power. Labor power, which all working people have, rests in the ability to act collectively, and to make demands, and to strike in order to win those demands if necessary. The only way to tap into this enormous source of latent power is to unionize. Unions are inherently progressive. Not because they endorse a particular political party, but because the nature of the work they do is about empowering the working class and increasing equality and enabling regular people to stand up effectively to the power of capital, of the rich, of corporations, of unrestrained capitalism. When you win a union and sign a union contract it is not just an act of improving your own life and the lives of your coworkers; it is a battle won in the class war. And the political war that you are stressed about right now is, at its heart, a class war. We must build permanent institutions to fight that class war or it will be lost. The only permanent institution suited to this task is the labor movement. This is the whole ballgame, long term. Not the election. Rather, the question of whether the system that produced the conditions that propelled The Bad Man to the precipice of the highest office in America will be allowed to strengthen, or whether they can be rolled back in the direction of humanity.

I know that people want to join this fight. There is no question that the will exists among millions and millions of you. What I am saying is that the labor movement is the army to join. It is a weakened but still potent army that you can help to revive. And it has a power—labor power—that no other group does. Begin your resistance plotting with this in mind. The labor movement is waiting for you.

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Outside the New York Times headquarters today, there is a picket line. Hundreds of the company’s tech workers are on strike. They formed a union more than three years ago, and management has yet to give them a first contract. This in and of itself is a mark of disrespect and would, under a more enlightened regime of labor law, be illegal. The liberal New York Times is a capitalist corporation, and it acts like one.

These workers, like all workers who are forced by their employers to fight for their basic rights, face a whole buffet of minor and major hardships. Idiots gripe at them. “My job sucks, why do they deserve more?” Right wingers insult them. Even the most odious of their own colleagues, pickled in the myth of Timesian prestige, sell them out publicly. “Guild leadership could have chosen any other day—364 of them, in fact—to make the entirely reasonable point that workers deserve a fair contract,” Jeremy Peters, a NYT reporter (and member of the paper’s newsroom union, separate from the tech union) said to the Wall Street Journal. A selfish little man airing his annoyance that a strike of his colleagues might demand some sort of material sacrifice from him is something familiar to many workers who have been on strike. Times publisher AG Sulzberger emailed the newsroom to say that the strike by the tech workers to whom he has failed to give a contract for three years puts all of the paper’s journalism about the election “at risk.” Sulzberger was paid four million dollars last year to do his job, which he inherited from his dad.

I bring this up simply as an example of the larger point. The New York Times Company would have you believe that these workers, by striking on election day, are selfishly putting at risk something more important (reading NYT stories about the election) for something less important (a union contract). In fact, the opposite is true. The union that is now on the picket line is one of the very few large, active unions of tech workers in the United States of America. Unionized the tech industry—the richest industry in America, and one almost completely free of the influence of organized labor—will do more to determine the future path of the class war in this country than ten thousand New York Times stories will. This union winning this contract and laying the groundwork to push unionization further into the most powerful industry in the country is the important thing here. The same thing will be true when you unionize your workplace and your boss yells at you for disrupting the important operations of the business with your various union demands. Building the union and securing a contract and improving the future of everyone who works there and strengthening the working class and strengthening the labor movement and extending the wall against unchecked corporate power, power that The Bad Man will allow to flourish, at the expense of all of us—these, in the long run, are the important tasks. The workers on the picket line at the New York Times are doing something on this election day that is more significant than helping to publish the 567th iteration of a story about polls. They are building the wall of humanity. That is what is going to matter, if things go the wrong way today.

Join the labor movement. That’s where the real battle will be taking place. And if all of this fearmongering proves unnecessary, and The Bad Man loses? In that case: join the labor movement.

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Related reading, for election day: How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself; Class War USA; Speaking Plainly About Who Is Robbing You.

You can make a donation to support the striking NYT Tech Guild right here.

I wrote a book this year called “The Hammer,” about how the labor movement can save America, and why it hasn’t yet. I’ve been on the road talking about for most of the year, and have gotten to meet a lot of great people. I’d like to meet you too. I still have a few more events coming up before the end of the year. If I’m in your city, come out and let’s talk about how to fix things.

• Tuesday, November 12: Boston, MA. 12:15 pm at the Harvard Center for Labor & a Just Economy, in conversation with Michelle Miller. Event info and (free) registration is here.

• Thursday, December 5: Baltimore, MD. 7 pm at Red Emma’s, in conversation with Max Alvarez. Event info here.

• Saturday, December 28: Gainesville, FL. At The Lynx Books.