What we are in right now is the biggest boss fight ever. And we are here, in part, because our national unions AND our locals have refused to treat politics as an organizing opportunity. Most unions, at all levels, only view politics as electoral horse races or lobbying at the legislative level. Labor leaders don’t talk about politics in terms of day-to-day impact. They fall in love with a Bernie Sanders as a savior, (and I like Bernie’s passion and politics), and still fail to bring that conversation and connection to the movement.
I say all of this as professional political staff (AND a union member) for a small education local that has been working hard for almost a decade to do things differently. Because rank and file are not connecting their political identity with their union identity. And until they do, like they did in the past, things will not change.
Labor *must* include political education along with organizing and bargaining campaigns. Labor leaders *must* begin to explicitly communicate and inoculate members about how the boss (whether it’s the CEO or the AG) is using white supremacy, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia as a deliberate tactic to pit workers against each other, to distract us, so they can make bank at worker’s expense. Not every union member that voted against their interests is racist, and it is also true that many were susceptible to those racist arguments. This boss tactic is over a century old, and we are still falling for it.
Labor must also begin to talk about class - not as some ideological or intellectual argument. We need to stop saying “class war”, because people stop listening when we say that. We need to spell it out, and help folks connect the dots.
Every campaign- new organizing, corporate and contract - must have a political, non-electoral component.
And we had better start building bridges between public and private sector workers. Because us public sector folks? We know what’s coming. These mother fuckers have been coming for us for decades. We know what’s coming. And the trades have been less than willing to stick up for us (except the strike line, we all love a good strike line). After they come for us, they will come for you. And you won’t know what hit you. And if we’re gone, there won’t be folks left to help you when you are on the block.
It’s time for us to return to our militant past, where we internalized the concepts of mutual aid, defiance, solidarity and mutual aid. No more boot licking. No more silos. No more poaching. We can, and should be the home of resistance, refusal and hope. ✊
Unionize every type of worker possible. This may be a golden opportunity for the labor movement because this crowd is really out to destroy organized labor but also to suppress labor brutality and broadly. This is very obvious. This will be immediate. The midterms will be the first chance to reverse this trend or at least stop it. Nonunion workers will get blasted. Union workers will be in continuous battle with this administration. For one thing get rid of union leaders who didn’t see this coming and did not endorse Harris and for another those who actually endorsed Trump must go. Even police and fireman unions will be under attack and they need a new direction in leadership and in strategy. No worker will be better off financially or in terms of working conditions. This is a bigot opening for unionization.
Agreed. We are temporarily back in the 1880's, under an outlaw terrorist cult government. The trade union movement must be at the center of this period of struggle, but Nolan's prescriptions can be applied to the entire Left, while that Left must focus that struggle on the defense of the public sector unions. This cannot be like Reagan and the unions as in the 1980's.
While not turtling, we must also learn to discern the various provocations that will inevitably be tossed at us by the terrorist cult government, and not fall for them. WE should be making the moves on our terms, not reacting to theirs.
Hamilton Hambone! The only reason I got your sports metaphors today was because I was compelled to watch The (Dumb) Fight by my government worker spouse! Yes, organizing is the way. And every federal employee needs to become a dues-paying member now of their unions, as a buffer to all unions and to protect their jobs. The incoming administration has no respect for the rule of law and wont let legal "interpretations" stop them from acting as they wish, but having strong union representation will help support those who find themselves on the outs.
The reason unions have failed at organizing is not because the amount of money they are willing to spend. If they think they have a good chance of winning a drive they will spend greqt sums. The problem is the organizations are out dated and have been rejected repeatedly. The main argument employers use against unions is they are businesses that just want workers money. The fact that an average national union president makes more than a Supreme Court judge or a US Senator makes no sense. Unions need to fund some experimental new models or fund some independent initiatives. The Pro Act was never a strategy to reverse the decline of labor.
Hmm. Having been effectively on strike since 1976, I may have some counsel you wish to hear... but it's mostly the other kind.
When is a union not a union? When it's a protection racket. De-industrialization occurred because corporatists despise having to deal with skilled workers. Why do corporatists despise skilled workers? Because no strike is effective unless at least a subset of the strikers have actual skills that cannot be replaced by random street scabs.
We all remember PATCO... right? Reagan had good reasons for going after a union with an actual skill set, and leaving the hordes of cubicle drones be. It was scary for the airports, it took a lot of determination, a lot of sweating it out. But when they broke PATCO, they broke us all. No union, not one, has effectively represented its members since. There is no labor movement, unless you count the negative movement toward gig work that everyone doing non-bs jobs has experienced. Graeber articulates this well.
The purpose of the public sector union to is to enrage the working class against institutional workers. Fat-bottomed secretaries picketing HHS for even better salaries and benefits will cause the lady waiting tables in a bar from 6 to 2 tonight to grind her teeth, and those teeth, I promise you, are already well-worn. Public sector unions are not unions at all. They are cozy footies on the minds of an entitled non-producing sub-class of corporate state tools.
Only a general, nationwide strike is going to make any lasting difference in our working lives. Here are three actions that will occur before an effective general strike can take place.
1) Illegal immigration will stop, and hiring undocumented workers will expose their employers to a real and painful criminal liability.
For the naïfs among us, both political parties want massive immigration, both want that immigration to be massively illegal, and both parties want it for the same reason: their owners and donors demand it. Cheap workers who dare not complain about wage theft or working conditions are a wet dream for the class that funds politics.
Either make the jobs dry up by putting a few employers in jail, or give all of our visiting workers working papers: no first baby step toward building an effective labor movement in this country will occur until the scab problem is fixed.
You may keep your dismissive labels behind your teeth. My Latin neighbors are the best working people I know, and people who actually work, with their hands, are the only people I personally like. There's a barn full of undocumented guys bunking in the woods across the street from my house. I will never rat them out, but they must either be documented or deported; those are Labor's choices in this matter. If we do not understand that every undocumented worker is a scab, we do not understand anything about the subject. Until we understand that millions of undocumented workers represent a class struggle we are losing, we cannot speak intelligently on the subject.
2) A large plurality of working people must come to view debt as a blood funnel jabbed in their families' necks. This is the zeitgeist we are looking for, a change of heart and mind that says no to power by refusing to feed it. Until it is socially unacceptable to drive a new lease or buy a new house or wear this year's fashion, there will be no moral basis for brotherhood, and no real resistance to the machine. The privileged direct action people who can afford to dress up and go protest may hate to hear it, but boycotting consumerism is the only action that is going to make a mouse fart's worth of difference to the corporatist owner class, while building solidarity in the process.
3) There is an enormously powerful private corporation brimful of the most depraved servants of power. It is devoted to vilifying the working class and thwarting their power. It must be destroyed. Corruptibility, malice, and sycophancy are the cardinal traits one must bring to accede to power in this organization, yet it portrays itself as being on our side. Its purpose as a tool in the hand of the parasite class is to invent new divisions between us, drive red hot wedges into those divisions, and fan the flames of intolerance and hate. We call it the Democratic Party. The difference, before you ask, is that Republicans are not pretending to represent working people. Ocasio-Cortez is pretending to be Progressive; it's an act. Find something you can vomit into first, then take a look at her voting record. Ditto Sanders, who's careful not to introduce a progressive-sounding measure unless it has no chance at getting out of committee. Ditto as many as it takes before the light breaks in. If you like the direction Labor has gone these last forty years, support the Democrats. If you hate what is happening to working people, then by god support working people, and at the very least steer clear of those calling them deplorables and garbage. The workers are watching.
I did not know that any group of workers can join together and just have a strike. It seems likely that some local union could just step in and help out in organizing everything. This power, this license to act, isn’t as well known as it should be.
Maybe the fight is against whoever is in power, every year, all the time, and the fight is the fight to get them to do their job and represent YOU and to treat them like the public servants they are. Your servants. Forget party. Forget what whoever might do. Insist on what needs to get done.
I belong to a services union, and work in disability support. Our union supports workers in the health service industry, where showing up for work means the difference between life and death sometimes and at the very least a risky decline in quality of life. The wider medical and health support sectors are similarly constrained. So, striking becomes nigh on impossible. However, there are many industries where the risk is taken only by the worker who withdraws their labour (and I do not see that as a small risk). Is it possible to help people make decisions in this regard by looking at the workplaces which provide greatest input to the elite status quo? Can we identify the biggest cogs into which the spanner of disruption can be thrown? Any industry involved in the military industrial complex is an obvious starting point. Then chemical industries, polluting, and carbon intensive industries not committed to change. Those actively punishing or abusing their workforce are in the moral swamp and their supposed right to profit from other's misery is indefensible. Part of the organising may involve gaining wider support from the populace who may ostensibly be inconvenienced by strikes. That animosity is always weaponised against workers. Collective action needs to extend outside the union ranks.
It should be made extraordinarily clear to the bosses and the MAGAs and whoever else that working people can and will organize in either of two ways: as unions or as mafias. Suppress one and you'll get the other, with all that entails.
What do people make of the Lori Chavez-DeRemer nomination? My two-to-six cents — it may mean the Dept of Labor is not as actively hostile to unions as it could be but instead just slows down until the NLRB administrative judges get declared unconstitutional; to the extent that it's seen as elevating Sean O'Brien, it's bad for labor's long-term political coalition; to the extent that it's divisive within Trump's political coalition, it's good. It's most likely to encourage labor to assume the defensive courch Hamilton is warning against.
And her is another thing . Why aren’t unions screaming to their members and would be members that guys like Musk put tens of millions into the Trump campaign because they want something for themselves like lower taxes , little or no regulation , etc. and guys like Musk and his DOGE partners want to fire workers and pay workers less for longer hours and less safety . Here is a chance to convince the existing me who voted for Trump that they made a mistake and HERE IS A CHANCE TO GET MORE WORKERS INTO UNIONS FOR THEIR SELF INTEREST
What we are in right now is the biggest boss fight ever. And we are here, in part, because our national unions AND our locals have refused to treat politics as an organizing opportunity. Most unions, at all levels, only view politics as electoral horse races or lobbying at the legislative level. Labor leaders don’t talk about politics in terms of day-to-day impact. They fall in love with a Bernie Sanders as a savior, (and I like Bernie’s passion and politics), and still fail to bring that conversation and connection to the movement.
I say all of this as professional political staff (AND a union member) for a small education local that has been working hard for almost a decade to do things differently. Because rank and file are not connecting their political identity with their union identity. And until they do, like they did in the past, things will not change.
Labor *must* include political education along with organizing and bargaining campaigns. Labor leaders *must* begin to explicitly communicate and inoculate members about how the boss (whether it’s the CEO or the AG) is using white supremacy, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia as a deliberate tactic to pit workers against each other, to distract us, so they can make bank at worker’s expense. Not every union member that voted against their interests is racist, and it is also true that many were susceptible to those racist arguments. This boss tactic is over a century old, and we are still falling for it.
Labor must also begin to talk about class - not as some ideological or intellectual argument. We need to stop saying “class war”, because people stop listening when we say that. We need to spell it out, and help folks connect the dots.
Every campaign- new organizing, corporate and contract - must have a political, non-electoral component.
And we had better start building bridges between public and private sector workers. Because us public sector folks? We know what’s coming. These mother fuckers have been coming for us for decades. We know what’s coming. And the trades have been less than willing to stick up for us (except the strike line, we all love a good strike line). After they come for us, they will come for you. And you won’t know what hit you. And if we’re gone, there won’t be folks left to help you when you are on the block.
It’s time for us to return to our militant past, where we internalized the concepts of mutual aid, defiance, solidarity and mutual aid. No more boot licking. No more silos. No more poaching. We can, and should be the home of resistance, refusal and hope. ✊
Indeed.
Unionize every type of worker possible. This may be a golden opportunity for the labor movement because this crowd is really out to destroy organized labor but also to suppress labor brutality and broadly. This is very obvious. This will be immediate. The midterms will be the first chance to reverse this trend or at least stop it. Nonunion workers will get blasted. Union workers will be in continuous battle with this administration. For one thing get rid of union leaders who didn’t see this coming and did not endorse Harris and for another those who actually endorsed Trump must go. Even police and fireman unions will be under attack and they need a new direction in leadership and in strategy. No worker will be better off financially or in terms of working conditions. This is a bigot opening for unionization.
Agreed. We are temporarily back in the 1880's, under an outlaw terrorist cult government. The trade union movement must be at the center of this period of struggle, but Nolan's prescriptions can be applied to the entire Left, while that Left must focus that struggle on the defense of the public sector unions. This cannot be like Reagan and the unions as in the 1980's.
While not turtling, we must also learn to discern the various provocations that will inevitably be tossed at us by the terrorist cult government, and not fall for them. WE should be making the moves on our terms, not reacting to theirs.
wise words...
Hamilton Hambone! The only reason I got your sports metaphors today was because I was compelled to watch The (Dumb) Fight by my government worker spouse! Yes, organizing is the way. And every federal employee needs to become a dues-paying member now of their unions, as a buffer to all unions and to protect their jobs. The incoming administration has no respect for the rule of law and wont let legal "interpretations" stop them from acting as they wish, but having strong union representation will help support those who find themselves on the outs.
The reason unions have failed at organizing is not because the amount of money they are willing to spend. If they think they have a good chance of winning a drive they will spend greqt sums. The problem is the organizations are out dated and have been rejected repeatedly. The main argument employers use against unions is they are businesses that just want workers money. The fact that an average national union president makes more than a Supreme Court judge or a US Senator makes no sense. Unions need to fund some experimental new models or fund some independent initiatives. The Pro Act was never a strategy to reverse the decline of labor.
Hmm. Having been effectively on strike since 1976, I may have some counsel you wish to hear... but it's mostly the other kind.
When is a union not a union? When it's a protection racket. De-industrialization occurred because corporatists despise having to deal with skilled workers. Why do corporatists despise skilled workers? Because no strike is effective unless at least a subset of the strikers have actual skills that cannot be replaced by random street scabs.
We all remember PATCO... right? Reagan had good reasons for going after a union with an actual skill set, and leaving the hordes of cubicle drones be. It was scary for the airports, it took a lot of determination, a lot of sweating it out. But when they broke PATCO, they broke us all. No union, not one, has effectively represented its members since. There is no labor movement, unless you count the negative movement toward gig work that everyone doing non-bs jobs has experienced. Graeber articulates this well.
The purpose of the public sector union to is to enrage the working class against institutional workers. Fat-bottomed secretaries picketing HHS for even better salaries and benefits will cause the lady waiting tables in a bar from 6 to 2 tonight to grind her teeth, and those teeth, I promise you, are already well-worn. Public sector unions are not unions at all. They are cozy footies on the minds of an entitled non-producing sub-class of corporate state tools.
Only a general, nationwide strike is going to make any lasting difference in our working lives. Here are three actions that will occur before an effective general strike can take place.
1) Illegal immigration will stop, and hiring undocumented workers will expose their employers to a real and painful criminal liability.
For the naïfs among us, both political parties want massive immigration, both want that immigration to be massively illegal, and both parties want it for the same reason: their owners and donors demand it. Cheap workers who dare not complain about wage theft or working conditions are a wet dream for the class that funds politics.
Either make the jobs dry up by putting a few employers in jail, or give all of our visiting workers working papers: no first baby step toward building an effective labor movement in this country will occur until the scab problem is fixed.
You may keep your dismissive labels behind your teeth. My Latin neighbors are the best working people I know, and people who actually work, with their hands, are the only people I personally like. There's a barn full of undocumented guys bunking in the woods across the street from my house. I will never rat them out, but they must either be documented or deported; those are Labor's choices in this matter. If we do not understand that every undocumented worker is a scab, we do not understand anything about the subject. Until we understand that millions of undocumented workers represent a class struggle we are losing, we cannot speak intelligently on the subject.
2) A large plurality of working people must come to view debt as a blood funnel jabbed in their families' necks. This is the zeitgeist we are looking for, a change of heart and mind that says no to power by refusing to feed it. Until it is socially unacceptable to drive a new lease or buy a new house or wear this year's fashion, there will be no moral basis for brotherhood, and no real resistance to the machine. The privileged direct action people who can afford to dress up and go protest may hate to hear it, but boycotting consumerism is the only action that is going to make a mouse fart's worth of difference to the corporatist owner class, while building solidarity in the process.
3) There is an enormously powerful private corporation brimful of the most depraved servants of power. It is devoted to vilifying the working class and thwarting their power. It must be destroyed. Corruptibility, malice, and sycophancy are the cardinal traits one must bring to accede to power in this organization, yet it portrays itself as being on our side. Its purpose as a tool in the hand of the parasite class is to invent new divisions between us, drive red hot wedges into those divisions, and fan the flames of intolerance and hate. We call it the Democratic Party. The difference, before you ask, is that Republicans are not pretending to represent working people. Ocasio-Cortez is pretending to be Progressive; it's an act. Find something you can vomit into first, then take a look at her voting record. Ditto Sanders, who's careful not to introduce a progressive-sounding measure unless it has no chance at getting out of committee. Ditto as many as it takes before the light breaks in. If you like the direction Labor has gone these last forty years, support the Democrats. If you hate what is happening to working people, then by god support working people, and at the very least steer clear of those calling them deplorables and garbage. The workers are watching.
I did not know that any group of workers can join together and just have a strike. It seems likely that some local union could just step in and help out in organizing everything. This power, this license to act, isn’t as well known as it should be.
Maybe the fight is against whoever is in power, every year, all the time, and the fight is the fight to get them to do their job and represent YOU and to treat them like the public servants they are. Your servants. Forget party. Forget what whoever might do. Insist on what needs to get done.
I belong to a services union, and work in disability support. Our union supports workers in the health service industry, where showing up for work means the difference between life and death sometimes and at the very least a risky decline in quality of life. The wider medical and health support sectors are similarly constrained. So, striking becomes nigh on impossible. However, there are many industries where the risk is taken only by the worker who withdraws their labour (and I do not see that as a small risk). Is it possible to help people make decisions in this regard by looking at the workplaces which provide greatest input to the elite status quo? Can we identify the biggest cogs into which the spanner of disruption can be thrown? Any industry involved in the military industrial complex is an obvious starting point. Then chemical industries, polluting, and carbon intensive industries not committed to change. Those actively punishing or abusing their workforce are in the moral swamp and their supposed right to profit from other's misery is indefensible. Part of the organising may involve gaining wider support from the populace who may ostensibly be inconvenienced by strikes. That animosity is always weaponised against workers. Collective action needs to extend outside the union ranks.
It should be made extraordinarily clear to the bosses and the MAGAs and whoever else that working people can and will organize in either of two ways: as unions or as mafias. Suppress one and you'll get the other, with all that entails.
Let them choose wisely, while they can.
What do people make of the Lori Chavez-DeRemer nomination? My two-to-six cents — it may mean the Dept of Labor is not as actively hostile to unions as it could be but instead just slows down until the NLRB administrative judges get declared unconstitutional; to the extent that it's seen as elevating Sean O'Brien, it's bad for labor's long-term political coalition; to the extent that it's divisive within Trump's political coalition, it's good. It's most likely to encourage labor to assume the defensive courch Hamilton is warning against.
And her is another thing . Why aren’t unions screaming to their members and would be members that guys like Musk put tens of millions into the Trump campaign because they want something for themselves like lower taxes , little or no regulation , etc. and guys like Musk and his DOGE partners want to fire workers and pay workers less for longer hours and less safety . Here is a chance to convince the existing me who voted for Trump that they made a mistake and HERE IS A CHANCE TO GET MORE WORKERS INTO UNIONS FOR THEIR SELF INTEREST
Great article!
Absogoddamlutely—and the point generalizes past labor to everyone.