Lean Into the Punch
Labor under Trump.
One thing you learn in boxing is that your natural instincts for self preservation can get you killed. Your urge to pull away from a punch will get you clipped on the chin; instead, you need to go down and in. When a guy wants to plant his feet and throw bombs at you, you need to move towards him, into his chest, where he has less leverage. Running away from a pressure fighter will eventually exhaust you and make you easy prey; instead, you need to hurt him when he’s coming in. You can’t evade danger forever. As coaches say, “your offense is your defense.”
Sorry for being a sports metaphor guy, but: this is a lesson that organized labor needs to learn very fast, as a new Trump administration approaches. For all of their public talk about how they plan to fight, the instinct of the leadership of most big labor unions in America when faced with a hostile federal government is to do the opposite—to withdraw into their shells like turtles and try to weather the storm, to protect what they already have as best they can until the next election rolls around, when they will pour everything into the campaign of a friendlier candidate, who they presume will reset the playing field to a more welcoming state, which will then allow them to flourish.
This mentality will get us fucking smashed over the next four years.
Many stories have been written about what Project 2025 and another Trump administration will mean for labor policy and the takeaway is “bad things.” The NLRB will be hostile. All prospects for helpful labor legislation will disappear. Related policy action helpful to worker power, like aggressive antitrust enforcement, will cease. Many bad things are coming down the pipeline, but let me touch on three big ones:
The NLRB: The NLRB is in essence the referee that makes employers follow labor law, and also the place that has, for the past four years, aggressively remade labor regulations in a more worker-friendly way. Under Trump, it will all go in the other direction. Among other things, this just makes it easier for companies to break the law, and do unfair labor practices, and fire organizers, and it makes them more fearless about being ruthless when they decide to crush union organizing and union action. Think about the Amazon and Starbucks campaigns: both have been aided by significant, aggressive enforcement by the NLRB—and neither of them have a contract yet! It has taken the most pro-union NLRB of my lifetime just to allow basic union organizing to play out successfully in these places. To extend the sports metaphor, for unions, a Trump NLRB will be like a boxing match where the other guy has paid off the referee.
Government employees: Only six percent of private sector workers are unionized. But one-third of public sector workers are unionized. For better or worse, government workers are the heart of union power in America. Trump, with the help of Tweedlee and TweedleDOGE, is going to do everything he can to strip labor protections away from federal workers, purge career employees, install political loyalist hacks in positions that should really have career civil servants, and laugh as federal agencies stop working properly because there are no qualified employees there left to run them. The coming war against public unions will do two things that Republicans love: it will sap union power on a national scale, and it will make the government worse at doing its job, so that they can point and say, “See? Government is bad.” Millions of unionized public sector workers will be treated as pawns in this game.
The legal assault on the entire structure of America’s labor law regime: Parallel to what the Trump administration will be doing with policy and inside of government agencies, there is already an ongoing attempt by employers to attack the legality of the NLRB and, more broadly, the National Labor Relations Act itself. (More on that here.) Trump-appointed judges, up to and including those on the Supreme Court, may very well help corporations accomplish this in the next four years. In a nutshell, they are trying to remove the referees from the fight altogether, and make the ability of workers and unions to appeal to government to make companies follow labor law become even less effective than it is now.
With 100% certainty, all of these things are coming. Organized labor knows this is coming. How does the labor movement fight this? Yes, the big unions will fight it in the hostile courts, and yes, they will talk about how bad it is in the press, and these will be as successful as the cries of a drowning man. What should the labor movement do?
There are precisely two things to be done, beginning now, and continuing for the next four years. One thing is to organize. Unions are weak because they represent only ten percent of American workers. To gain power, we need to grow. That means that unions need to resist their impulses now to say, “Organizing is about to get harder so we shouldn’t waste our resources on it,” cut their organizing budgets, and spend their money trying to build a moat to protect their existing members. No. That is the first step to death. We all need to organize our ass off. Spend every last cent trying to bring new people in to the labor movement. In hostile times, workers need the protection of unions more than ever. It’s our responsibility to give it to them. We all get stronger when we grow, and we are all an easier target when we are small.
The other thing to do is to strike. More bluntly: to do more legal as well as illegal strikes. (Teachers in Massachusetts are showing us the way right this minute.) The legal regime that corporations are salivating to dismantle is the same one that has, for decades, laid out the ground rules for who and how and where and when strikes could expect to be sanctioned by the law. Take away those rules and the only silver lining for workers is that the shackles are off. Strikes carry their own power apart from any laws—the inherent power that goes with the fact that when workers stop working, nothing gets done. This is the core power of the labor movement. Time to lean into this. When you are in a fight and the referee leaves, you can either stand there exclaiming “My word! I say! This is highly improper!” as your opponent gouges your eyes out, or you can start fighting dirtier.
Set aside, for a moment, the laws. Organizing workers just means talking to workers and getting them together and getting them to act collectively. No law can stop this elemental process. Just because the governments points to a group of organized workers and says “you are not a proper and legally protected labor union” does not mean that they are not a group of organized workers who can take action together. Likewise, striking just means workers collectively not working. The right of workers to organize and to strike is as basic as their right to breathe. Declaring these things illegal obviously makes them more difficult, and it makes the consequences of doing them more unpleasant. But no law can stop workers from organizing and striking unless they decide to stop organizing and striking. The power to do so is theirs alone.
Now, let me admit that when I put on my “real world journalistic analyst” hat, I get somewhat pessimistic. There are many great unions and great labor activists and great labor leaders all across the nation. But, as institutions, the big unions and the AFL-CIO are things that have been built under the law and operate under the law and are constructed to work within the law and asking them to even consider expanding their consciousness beyond the bounds of the law is kind of like asking a cat to think like a dog. I am not Pollyanna and I do not expect, you know, the American Federation of Government Employees to morph into the Zapatistas. (Unfortunately for all of us, big public sector unions—with the exception of the teachers and some municipal employee unions—are some of the most bureaucratic and worst at internal organizing and keeping their membership truly engaged, and we better pray that begins to change as the threat to them increases.) I am asking for something much more modest from organized labor’s institutions: The honest recognition about what is coming, and an honest strategic assessment of where our power lies and how we must use it to avoid getting weaker. The protectionist instinct—retreat within, give up on expanding our ranks, concentrate on electoral politics and friendly politicians to be our shield against Trump, or try to make compromises with the Trump administration to soften the blows—is a loser. It will not work. It is a recipe for unions to emerge four years from now as a battered shell, with union density in the single digits. Even the stuffiest, laziest, boxy suit-wearing middle aged white guy bureaucrat union president must not give into this impulse. It is bad for America.
New organizing budgets must go up. Outreach to workers everywhere must go into overdrive. The labor movement is what people need now, and we have to be there to give it to them, in whatever form we can, even if the laws get worse. And if working people can’t rely on the law to protect them, they have to use the one tool that the law cannot take away—the strike. The courts won’t help us and the boss will feel free to be cruel and working people will be scared and unions need to be there to say: We know what to do. We can help you organize. We can help you unite. We can help you create power that you didn’t know you had. We can help you strike. You’re not going to spend the next four years cowering in the corner. You’re going to spend the next four years fighting. And there’s a mighty labor movement to help you.
Get your minds right. Pulling back will only make the beating worse.
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Related reading: What You Need to Know About the Legal Quest to Destroy America’s Labor Protections; What Republicans Plan to Do to Labor If They Win; To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members; Getting Comfortable With Illegal Strikes; Ten Times This. I also wrote a piece for In These Times this week about the overwhelming power of Trump’s dumbness.
You should organize your workplace right now. Yes you. Yes now. Contact EWOC or the AFL-CIO for help.
I wrote a book about the labor movement called “The Hammer.” It talks about all of this in a longer and more interesting way. I am biased, but I think that right now is a very opportune time to read it. I have two book events next month, and if I’m in your city, you should come out and meet me and we’ll talk about all of this. The first is on Thursday, December 5 in Baltimore, MD—7 pm at Red Emma’s, in conversation with Max Alvarez. The second is Saturday, December 28 in Gainesville, FL—6 PM at The Lynx Books, in conversation with Sara Nelson. Come through!
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.