Fragile Movements Crumble

Taking seriously the threat to organized labor.

Coal miners know. (Photo: Getty)

It can be hard to zero in on a single aspect of the ongoing assault on American civil society—like trying to maintain focus on the damage to one building during an enormous hurricane. But every so often it is worth taking the measure of the historically destructive attack on organized labor that the Trump administration is carrying out. If unions are, as I believe, the single best path towards defeating oligarchy and inequality, we must be honest in saying that that goal is currently receding farther and farther from view.

I have had the interesting experience of making a very specific argument and then, as soon as I made it, watching the exact opposite of everything that I argued for proceed to happen with great speed. Last year I published my first book, “The Hammer,” the central argument of which was basically: Inequality is the central crisis underlying America’s problems; Organized labor is the single most effective and achievable tool for fixing that crisis; We must therefore throw every possible resource at widespread union organizing at a national scale; We must laser focus on increasing union density, which will produce a host of positive outcomes in its wake.

Eighteen months after the book came out, I am prepared to say that my argument is not winning.

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In the past week—in accordance with Trump’s farcical March executive order declaring that the federal government would not recognize existing unions at a slew of federal agencies under the pretext of “national security”—the VA unilaterally terminated union contracts covering more than 400,000 workers. The EPA followed days later, ending union contracts covering at least 8,000 workers. These actions may sound big but abstract. Let me put the scale of this in context. Let’s say, for ease of math, that 400,000 existing union members are now effectively no longer union members, because the government has refused to honor their contracts going forward. As of 2024, there were a total of 14.3 million union members in America, less than ten percent of all workers. That means that, just in the past week, just as a result of these executive orders, we have lost 2.8% of all union members in the United States of America. (Even if you use the slightly higher number of 16 million workers who are represented by unions, which includes those who don’t pay dues, we still see a loss of 2.5% of the total). In other words, with nothing more than a memo and a compliant court, Trump has already eliminated more union members than the entire US labor movement typically gains or loses in an entire year. And there are still at least nine more federal agencies that have yet to complete their union purges.

This grievous loss highlights some of the critical flaws in the way that the labor movement has evolved. Clearly, there is a conflict between “We are a robust mass movement of working people” and “We are so fragile that the US president can wipe out significant portions of our strength overnight with the stroke of a pen.” It is not as if the labor movement has not lost hard battles with the government before. Eugene Debs led a national railroad strike in 1894 that ended up destroying his union after the feds intervened on behalf of the companies; the US military dropped bombs on striking mine workers during the Battle of Blair Mountain; the government systematically threw worker power into a straitjacket during WW2; and on, and on. Yet the labor movement bounced back, always. We will bounce back again. Doing so requires some meditation on where we went wrong, that led us into this particular moment of weakness. As Anton Chigurh said,

One obvious flaw in the composition of US union membership is that it is heavily skewed towards public sector workers. About one in three public sector workers is still a union member, even as union density in the private sector has fallen to an appalling 5.9%. Organizing in the private sector is hard, and requires grassroots work by organizers in workplaces, whereas union membership can be gained and maintained in the public sector via the more straightforward tools of electoral politics. The institutions of organized labor support and fund union-friendly elected officials who then, at least, do not try to actively destroy the public sector unions that they oversee, and public sector membership can grow along with the overall size of the government. I am all for public sector unions. They are important. But a basic purpose of organized labor is to maintain worker power in our economic system—to check the power of capitalists, to prevent oligarchy, to ensure that the proceeds of American business are widely shared. All of that work happens by building union power in the private sector. Instead of doing this, the labor movement has coasted on the easier public sector membership, and failed to invest and fight to maintain or grow private sector membership. This is, quite simply, an abject failure of the labor movement.

And now we see a consequence of this skewed arrangement: A hostile federal government is able to do disproportional harm to the entire base of union membership in America just by attacking union members employed by the federal government. I am not going to spend a lot of time here explaining how immoral and depraved the Trump administration’s actions are, or how vital the work of these public sector workers is, or the many fine things their unions have done—if you are reading this, I am going to assume that you understand those things. I am going to point out that we in the labor movement must be ruthlessly honest about the fact that allowing private sector membership to fall into the toilet while heavy public sector membership glossed over the losses has critically weakened us. We must strive to maintain a balance between public and private sector union density. (Preferably not by allowing them both to go into single digits.)

What does new union organizing realistically look like in the context of our current political situation? The NLRB has been gutted, the courts are almost uniformly hostile to labor rights, and big business finds it increasingly easy to just bribe the federal government to weigh in on their behalf. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the annual gold standard measurements of union density, is now being politicized, so who knows how long we can even trust the accuracy of those numbers. None of these trends are fully completed—it is still possible, and necessary, to organize a union in your workplace and enforce labor laws in your workplace and win a contract in your workplace. On the micro level, keep doing that and don’t stop for anyone. On the macro level, though, the trends are all against us. We have to figure out how to operate in the shoddy, corrupt, oligarchical era of Trump now.

Soldiers break the Pullman Strike, 1894.

What can unions offer working people, if their union drives get dragged out endlessly in court and their unfair labor practice charges don’t get enforced fairly and their contracts might not get adhered to on the back end? The answer is that we offer workers access to their own power, through solidarity with one another. That is and has always been the source of labor power. The framework of rules and laws that we have built up over the past century is contingent on the will of the government to enforce them. That is now going away. The power that workers have in this environment—the power that is not contingent on anything else, the power that rests with them alone and cannot be taken away—is the power to organize, come together, act as one, and strike. Organized labor’s public sector burdened itself with the inability to strike in order to win bureaucratic protection, a choice which is right now proving to be fatal to its interests. Our organizing going forward will have to be the exact opposite: Your union might not be certified by the NLRB, and you might not be able to run to a government regulator to enforce your contract, but you will have power and you will win things because you will stick together and because you will strike. This, I think, is easy enough for working people to understand. It is the unions themselves, marinated in many years of soothing bureaucratic support, that are going to have to snap out of their dreamlike state very quickly and wake up to the real world.

Major unions and coalitions like the AFL-CIO are mostly constructed to wield power primarily through the electoral political process. We are, today, perilously close to the end of our functional democracy. That is not an exaggeration. A combination of partisan redistricting and voter suppression and perhaps outright theft may very well prove to be fatal in our next elections. One year away! What is the plan for organized labor to wield power when the courts do not offer us any help, and when the avenue of electoral politics is foreclosed? We should have one.

The labor movement’s weakness is not and has never been the working people. As a labor reporter, you could spend your entire career going around the country talking to the most inspiring people you have ever seen, engaged in the most inspiring fights for their own rights. People are willing to fight. That willingness increases in proportion to the injustice they experience. So right now, the appetite for a righteous fight among working people is high.

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No, the labor movement’s weakness has always been its ability to translate that latent appetite for power among workers into concerted national actions that build power for the entire working class. Our weakness is at the top. That translates to weakness at the bottom, because a failure of union leadership to take seriously their responsibility to organize every worker translates into a failure to invest enough in new organizing which translates into sub-6% private sector union density which translates into a pretty fucking small army when it’s time to go to war. Also, a failure of union leadership to really grasp how fucked we are right now—to understand the existential nature of today’s threat to the very concept of democratic worker power—results in the lack of urgency and street-level action that we now see.

I spent the past decade writing mostly about labor. I did so because I could see how a stronger labor movement could make everything better for everyone. What has unfolded this year has made me sad—not only the losses that unions have endured, which are to be expected, but the failure of those unions, and of the entire labor movement, to stand up and try to fight back. This failure is not the fault of any one bad person. It is the fault of all of us, who have made a series of choices over decades that seemed reasonable, but that have now been exposed as flawed. We do not have enough members, we have not continually organized the members that we have enough to make them ready to mobilize, and we have not built an effective structure to allow all of the unions and their allies to act at national scale for a common goal.

The good news is that, as ultracapitalist seer Warren Buffett always said, the tide going out has made it easy to see how naked we are. We still have millions of union members in thousands of unions. All of those members who understand the gravity of our situation can get involved in those unions and push them to embrace organizing, militancy, urgency, and national coordination. The fight is not going to stop getting worse until we are able to match the ferocity of the other side. If today’s version of the labor movement gets wiped out, that gives us the opportunity to build the next version without making the same mistakes.

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Come See Me

I am still going around talking about this stuff. I would love for any of you to come out and see me and talk about with me, if I’m in your area. A few upcoming public events:

• Monday, August 18: Detroit, Michigan. I’ll be on a panel at the Reuther Library at Wayne State University, along with the great Kim Kelly, speaking about telling workers’ stories in challenging times. There is another great union panel after ours as well. The events begin at 11 a.m. Flier here, and you can RSVP here.

• Monday, August 25: Brooklyn, NY. I’m speaking about why unions are important at a cool event put on by Brooklyn Web Workers, a new group organizing in tech. The event is at 7 pm at Easy Lover at 790 Metropolitan Ave, and you can drink booze and also watch bands when I am not talking so really you should go even if you don’t give a fuck about me or unions at all. Get tickets here! Bring a friend!

• Sunday, August 31: Manhattan, NYC. I am giving a pre-Labor Day speech about how labor power can beat fascism at the American Society for Ethical Culture. It’s at 11 a.m., and the full event link and info is here. Decrying fascism on a Sunday morning is fun. Come through.

For much more on this topic, you can read my book, which you can order through an independent bookstore or wherever books are sold. You can also order yourself a fly How Things Work t-shirt, right here. If you wear this to one of the above events I will give you a high five.

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More

• Related reading on labor in the Trump era: Dark Times Are Coming; To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members; What It Means to Be ‘A Tad Radical’; Unions Without Strikes; They Are Going to Take Everything If We Don’t Stop Them. I had a good conversation about this topic on the Liberty Hill podcast this week, which you can find at this link (scroll down for my episode).

• I would like to give a shout out to Current Affairs magazine, which just celebrated its tenth anniversary. There are only so many good left wing magazines, and Current Affairs is one of them. Subscribe to them here, for another ten years.

• Thank you for reading How Things Work. As you can tell, a theme of my writing is “we had better support one another or else.” Independent media is one part of that. This site has no paywall; it exists purely because readers like you choose to become paid subscribers in order to enable me to keep on going. I really have a lot of affection for all of you. If you would like to do your part to support this publication, take a quick second and click the link below to become a paid subscriber for just six bucks a month, or sixty bucks a year. Together we will make it. Rock on my friends.