Dark Times Are Coming

The labor movement faces its worst environment in a century.

Jan 31, 2025

FDR signs the National Labor Relations Act, 1935. (Photo: Getty)

For many years my basic thesis about American society has been: the half-century-long inequality crisis is at the root of most of our issues, and increasing the power of organized labor is the best way to reverse this crisis, and therefore growing unions is absolutely central to solving America’s political and economic problems. The decline of unions enabled the crisis that got us here and the revival of unions is the most direct path to restoring our national balance of power. Though organized labor is seen as a niche topic by most people, I have long argued that it is actually of central importance, and have subjected readers like you to innumerable screeds to that effect.

Because this is a topic where the righteous side has been effectively losing for my entire lifetime, it can be tempting to descend into doomerism. But “we’re so fucked” is neither a useful nor a factual conclusion. For one thing, our own actions affect the future, so as soon as we decide all is lost, we stop trying, and create a self-fulfilling prophecy. For another thing, the pendulum always swings back in its opposite direction, given enough time, so “we’re so fucked” is a temporary condition rather than the natural state of the world. As Martin Luther King, Jr. understood, we, collectively, will get to the promised land, but you, personally, might be dead before it happens.

That said, I also believe in telling the truth. Now feels like a good time to take a blunt look at where the prospects of organized labor stand. If the pendulum is swinging, it is swinging into the very worst part of its cycle at the moment. I believe that a revival of organized labor power is vital to wresting America from the control of oligarchy—and, analytically, I have to admit that we are farther from accomplishing that than we have been since I was born. This is a result of both the forces arrayed against unions, and the weakness of unions themselves. Consider:

The Opposition

One of the clearest lessons of labor history is that working people have made their strongest gains when the government is an ally of (or at least neutral towards) the labor movement. The times when the federal government has been hostile to organized labor—frequent times!—are not meaningless, nor are the efforts of the labor movement to hold onto what it has and to build its power during hard times worthless. Indeed, the hard work during politically hostile times is what sets the stage for the rapid progress that can be made during more politically favorable times. The labor movement’s work never becomes less important, but the facts tell us that serious gains in membership numbers, in legislative victories, and in improving material conditions for workers usually require a government that is not trying to crush us.

In the 20th century, one of the keynote legislative wins of the labor movement was the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the NLRA). I say “wins,” but the NLRA was really a compromise, a peace treaty between labor and business, laying out the US government as a referee, establishing the National Labor Relations Board as a government agency that would oversee union organizing and elections and act to enforce labor law and ensure that employers didn’t illegally fire organizers or illegally retaliate against unions or refuse to bargain in good faith or commit other unfair labor practices. The NLRA created the legal and regulatory framework that unions in America have been operating under, for better and worse, for 90 years.

Republican anti-union presidential administrations have always weaponized the NLRB against organized labor by naming anti-union bastards to run it. Then Democrats put more pro-union people on it, and so it goes. Still, even anti-union NLRBs still, to some extent, are bound by the framework of labor law. They can get less enthusiastic about enforcing it, and their general counsels can undertake efforts to make regulations more anti-union, but the process has always been somewhat deliberate and characterized by this legalistic back-and-forth.

Something different is happening now. Corporate America is in the midst of a concerted legal effort to destroy the NLRA altogether and have the NLRB declared unconstitutional. Trump has, in a blatantly illegal move, fired a Democratic NLRB member, denying the board a quorum. This effectively allows employers to escape labor law enforcement indefinitely. “Employers intent on disregarding labor law can exploit the situation by prolonging cases until a Board decision is required,” explains Matt Bruenig. “In ULP cases, this means appealing any adverse ALJ decision to the Board. In representation cases, employers can refuse to bargain with a union after it is certified. When an ALJ subsequently rules that a refusal to bargain has occurred, the employer can appeal that decision to the Board, effectively stalling the representation process indefinitely.” So if you are organizing your workplace and your employer illegally fires you for that and you file an unfair labor practice charge against them, it cannot be enforced. If your coworkers all sign union cards and your employer decides they don’t want to recognize your union, nobody can force them to hold an election. And if you have a union and you’re negotiating a contract and your employer decides not to negotiate in good faith, nobody can make them.

What’s happening here writ large is that for nearly a century the labor movement bought into a legalistic process governing labor power in which the government is supposed to be the referee. Now the referee is totally and completely in the pocket of the boss. The referee has been paid off and has left the playing field to go drink champagne in the owner’s box. It is now open season. The process has been broken. Is this illegal? Yes. Do Donald Trump and Elon Musk care? No. Their plan is for this to get litigated to the Supreme Court and have the Supreme Court scrap the NLRB altogether, which will throw labor law enforcement into chaos. In the real world this means that Elon Musk and his peers (and your boss too) can, when you try to unionize your coworkers, fire you, and when you ask them to recognize your union, say “no,” and when you ask them to bargain a contract, say “fuck off,” and when you tell them they’ve violated the contract somehow, say “sue me,” and then laugh, because the case will take more or less forever.

This process is still unfolding but this is what is coming and there is no point in wondering how it will play out. It is going to play out in the way that Elon Musk and Donald Trump want it to. There are two basic takeaways from what is happening here, for the labor movement, and for workers in general. The first is that the social bargain that has governed labor relations for a century is gone. I mean, we can wait and see if the Supreme Court will save it, but that’s a bad bet, and in the meantime the smart move is to assume that things will turn out poorly. The sooner that unions wrap their minds around the reality of operating in an environment in which the NLRB will not enforce labor law on their behalf, the better.

The second takeaway is also the answer to the question, “Well how do we make employers do anything, then?” And that is: more strikes. Strikes are the one fundamental labor power that the government and Elon Musk and the Supreme Court put together cannot take away. You do the work and you can choose to not do the work, and that is your power as a worker. The goal of the NLRA and the NLRB was largely to achieve labor peace and avoid the need to strike over every last thing and allow business to proceed in a smoother and more predictable fashion. That obviously makes sense for all parties. But now the agreement is being torn up, right in front of our eyes. Striking will once again become the default and only option to exercising organized labor power.

The Labor Movement’s Own Weakness

All of these political and legal realities raise the related question: Are unions ready for this? The answer is “no.” An unfortunate but probably inevitable truth is that big unions that have operated in the framework of the NLRA and the NLRB for 90 years are built from top to bottom to work in that framework. There is no reason to believe that the majority of unions will nimbly adapt to a world in which they cannot file ULPs and they cannot get the NLRB to schedule union elections and they cannot get their contracts enforced in a timely manner. Most unions today simply are not built for these harsh realities. They are like astronauts who have been in space for 90 years and are now about to be subjected to earth’s gravity once again. You can bet that they will be crawling on their knees for a while.

Consider, for example, public sector unions. Government workers. In one sense, the public sector is the heart of American union power, since about a third of public sector workers are union members and less than 6% of private sector workers are. But are these public sector unions prepared for what is coming? I would love to say “yes,” but I see little evidence of that. These unions are legalistic, bureaucratic, political entities. (Some much more than others; teachers, for example, have a much stronger track record of street fighting than, say, unionized employees of federal government agencies. I am not trying to smear anyone here, but rather to just lay out the general reality of the landscape in broad strokes.) They primarily exercise power by aligning themselves with friendly politicians, pushing legislation, filing lawsuits, and bargaining and enforcing contracts. You will notice that none of those tactics are going to be very effective in the current moment—the friendly politicians are out of power, the regulatory agencies are being dismantled, and the courts are captured by the right wing. You are about to watch the unions that represent federal government employees be steamrolled because they have built themselves to center their power in the law, rather than in the power to strike. When the law disappears, and you have allowed your strike muscles to atrophy, you have no real weapons left.

It is illegal for many public sector workers to strike. This part of the law, which hobbles labor power, will continue to be strenuously enforced, at the same time that the parts of the law that enable labor power will be dismantled. The only question is whether unions and workers continue to follow the law that does nothing but hold them back, or not.

Besides being legalistic machines in a newly lawless environment, the other problem is that unions have failed to maintain their membership. They have not taken the need to organize new workers seriously enough. After WW2 one in three American workers was a union member, and today fewer than one in ten workers is a union member. This is the result of concerted oppression by business and government, but it is also the result of major unions that have not invested in turning those numbers around, because they imagined that they would be okay tending to their shrinking walled gardens. Now, that bill is coming due. Unions have gotten small enough to fit under the oligarchy’s thumb. That’s what happens when you don’t get all the people. Your army is too small. This was a problem decades in the making. We are moving towards the bitter consequences.

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Just days ago we found out that union density in America has fallen into the single digits. This is a situation that has never existed in the lifetime of anyone reading this. It is a profoundly ominous milestone for anyone who cares about inequality or the state of the American class war. And, as far as I could tell, it passed completely unremarked upon by labor unions. When the union density statistics are released every year, unions prefer to either highlight the raw number gains and ignore the declines in overall union density, or to decry the fact that labor laws are bad, like delusional wretches in a dungeon asking to file formal complaints against their torturers. What they need to do is spend every last cent trying to organize enough new workers to give themselves a proper army. The best time for them to have done that would have been 50 years ago, but the second best time is today.

Everything I have said here is familiar to the leaders of organized labor’s institutions. None of it is meant to disparage the thousands—millions!—of brave workers and activists who continue to work hard and take great risks to build the labor movement every day. But to the extent that any of you are concerned about the way that this country’s long-running class war is flowering into full, grotesque oligarchy before our eyes, it is important to understand that the conditions for labor for the foreseeable future are very, very grim. We need to understand and accept this as a first step to remaking our unions into fighting machines that can operate in an environment that will, I’m confident to say, soon be more hostile to our rights than it has been in at least a century.

So? Let’s not waste time deluding ourselves. The courts are unlikely to be our saviors now. What can’t be won in the courts will have to be won in the streets. The pendulum is swinging deep down into the pit. What can you do? You can organize your workplace. And you can learn to love strikes. We’ll get back to the mountaintop, but it’s going to be a long climb up.

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