Ten Times This
Some perspective on how much work the labor movement has to do.
If you are a labor journalist in America then every year at Labor Day you are required to write a piece along the lines of “The State of American Labor.” Every one of these pieces goes like this: “The American labor movement is doing things. This year they unionized this company. They also unionized that company. Then again, there are challenges. Is this the beginning of a revival of the labor movement? Only time will tell. All in all, things are certainly happening.” After you write a few of these you can just reuse them and plug in different nouns. One of the benefits of being my own boss is that I do not have to write one of these this year.
Why are these pieces so worthless? Primarily because they are a form of knowledge-as-deception, meaning that they tell you a list of facts but leave you misled about the big picture of what is happening. You can read a bunch of paragraphs about ongoing union campaigns and how the president is giving pro-union speeches and get the impression that we really are in a big old revival of labor power. But if those individual facts aren’t placed in the context of a decline in union density that has been going on since the middle of the 20th century, and the need to organize at scale in order to avoid national union density plunging into the single digits in the near future, and the fact that this decline of union density is a prime driver of the explosion of economic inequality that is destabilizing our society, and the unfortunate reality that organized labor’s institutions lack both the infrastructure and the will to organize workers at the scale necessary to push union density back up, then you risk getting an overly rosy picture of things. (For more on this context, I can recommend a book.)
For my not-Labor Day story today I will forgo all of the list-making conventions of the classic State of Labor piece and instead just tell you how far the labor movement as a whole is from where we need to be. Here is what we need: Ten times this. We need to be organizing ten times as many workers into unions as we are right now. This is not an exaggeration. This is not a joke. Nor is this impossible. This is a thing that we must do if we want to achieve the fabled “revival” of organized labor that every annual look at the labor movement must tease as something that could legitimately happen in America. Can organized labor’s power in America be revived—taken back to where it was before the Reagan era truly decimated it? Yes. What will it take?
It will take ten times the organizing that we are doing now.
Chris Bohner, an excellent labor researcher, just published his own data-filled overview of the state of the labor movement. In it, he compares the perpetually peppy rhetoric from union leaders with the statistics, in historical context. In 2024, Bohner reports, about 0.1% of American private sector workers will participate in a union election at work. In the 1970s, that figure averaged 1% each year. I want to highlight this portion of his report:
But imagine if labor put on its seventies bell-bottom jeans and started organizing one percent of eligible workers as unions did in the 1970s, not the current one-tenth of one-percent rate. Instead of 107,000 workers voting for a union in 2024, the number would be more like 1.1 million workers.
Why isn’t this happening, given the upsurge in worker interest in unions? It isn’t a funding issue, as labor has over $35 billion in net assets (see below). My take is that the existing labor leadership — many of whom have never committed to a robust organizing program to begin with — continue to believe that organizing is futile unless labor law is reformed.
Bingo. This is the State of Organized Labor that really matters. The 1970s are a useful historical era to compare ourselves to, because it was the last decade when unions legitimately retained their post-WW2 power. It was before Reagan and before PATCO and before the inequality crisis took off. It’s not as though the 1970s were some utopia for workers, but it was the last time when organized labor still retained the level of influence over America’s economy and society that we need to return to, if we are going to put the era of inequality behind us.
In 1980, union density was 23%. Today it is 10%. For the sake of easy math, we can imagine a goal of doubling today’s union density, to bring worker power back to some very rough approximation of where it stood before we really started getting our asses kicked.
The union elections figure that Bohner reports is not the only way that workers join unions—union density can also grow from new hiring at already-unionized companies, or from union drives that receive voluntary recognition and therefore don’t have elections. But the number of new union elections is a good indicator of the effort that unions are putting into new organizing. That number captures the most common form of new union organizing, the one that will be necessary to broadly unionize industries with little union presence today. Want to put the nightmare of the post-Reagan ascendance of corporate power over workers to bed forever? Double union density. Want to double union density? We must focus on the private sector, where the economic action is, and where union density today is a pitiful 6%. What is a reasonable goal for new organizing in the private sector, one that did, in fact, exist in the 1970s?
Ten times what we are doing now. Ten times this.
What would it take to run ten times more union drives in the private sector than we do today? Mostly, it would take: spending money. This is difficult work but it is work that unions know how to do, and do already. As Bohner has documented, unions are not broke. The financial assets held by America’s unions have been rising substantially even as union density has been going down. Spend the fucking money on organizing. Step one.
I am suggesting something very basic here for the labor movement: Understand the urgency of our predicament. Figure out a goal—one sufficient to address the needs of workers in America. Figure out what it will take to get to that goal. Make a plan. Determine the resources necessary to enact the plan. Get the resources. Spend the money. Do the plan. Evaluate your progress or lack thereof according to the goals you have set. Basic things. Companies, football teams, nonprofits, universities, government agencies—all of these institutions carry out the process above, all the time. Organized labor’s institutions do not. Such basic planning and evaluation does not exist in the labor movement. The AFL-CIO does not have a document laying out how to achieve a goal like this. Nor do they issue annual reports on these figures that hold themselves to a measurable standard of advancement. This is a significant failure on our part, one that we can’t blame on evil corporations. It’s hard for us to crawl out of the quicksand if nobody will even begin sketching out how to build a ladder.
We don’t need to increase new union organizing by a thousand percent in a single year. We do need to set concrete goals to achieve that increase in a reasonable time, though. How will we get the resources necessary to do this? Well, unions need to spend more of the money they already have on new organizing. And we need to build a pipeline of private money into union organizing. And unions need to take seriously the project of getting federal money for the purpose of union organizing. All of this needs to be happening right now, even as we continue to pursue structural reforms like sectoral bargaining and passing the PRO Act that would make the work of new organizing much easier. Sitting around waiting for America’s labor laws to be reformed before we get busy on this is a recipe for accepting that labor power will continue to decline. Indeed, that is the implicit position of the AFL-CIO. Which is fucking tragic.
For all of you who support the general goals of the labor movement, it can be difficult to parse how the project of “restoring labor power in America to mitigate the power of capital” is going. Union density is a measurable and straightforward number that can give you some tangible idea about the answer. Everyone who cares about politics and economics should, I think, be talking about union density a lot more than they do now. The purpose of what I am writing here is to just try to wrest the conversation about The State of the Labor Movement out of the fuzzy realm of “Check out this cool new union drive!” and into something measurable. It’s a big country. There are more than 100 million workers to be organized. We, the labor movement, need to take seriously the responsibility to organize them. It starts with a goal, and a plan, and consistent measurement of our progress to hold ourselves to the standard we have set.
What do we need to do to revive the labor movement? Ten times what we are doing now. That’s a lot of work. I guess we better stop patting ourselves on the back, and get busy.
Related reading: We Are Failing; The Life and Death Stakes of Labor Power; “What Can I Do to Help the Labor Movement?”
More
As I have mentioned before, I wrote a book about the labor movement called “The Hammer,” which is all about the sort of issues discussed in this post today. If you give a shit about any of this in any way, I bet you would like the book. Furthermore, I have some book events coming up this month, and you should come out and talk to me in person about this! This Thursday I am in fabulous LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, with the mighty Culinary Union, who I write about in the book. Come through! Upcoming events:
Thursday, September 5: Las Vegas, Nevada. At The Writer’s Block at 7 pm. In conversation with Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union. Event link here.
Wednesday, September 25: St. Augustine, Florida. I’ll be speaking at Flagler College at the Ringhaver/ Gamache-Kroger Theatre at 7 pm.
Thursday, September 26: Gainesville, Florida. At The Lynx Books at 6 pm. In conversation with labor activist Candi Churchill. Event link here.
Sunday, September 29: Brooklyn, NY. At the Brooklyn Book Festival.
Finally, a word on this publication, How Things Work. We’ve been going more than a year and we’re getting stronger every day—thanks to you, my treasured readers. This is pure, uncut independent media. This publication can only exist because you, my treasured readers, decide that it is worth paying for. I keep this site paywall-free so that anyone can read it. Then I ask: If you can afford to pay the modest cost of being a paid subscriber, please do so. Your support enables this whole project to continue. It’s a fair system and it can work. If you like reading How Things Work and want it to survive, please take a second to become a paid subscriber right now. I believe we will win.
This reminds me of when my mom was on the church finance committee at a church that was losing members, but building a big endowment. There were finance committee members who didn't understand they were letting the church itself die because they were only concerned about the sustainability of their investment fund.
On a related note, that committee was investing in fossil fuels and defense contractors and all sorts of things that reasonable people would think went against the teachings of the bible, but they justified it as being necessary to get good growth they could reinvest in the church if needed. I assume unions with growing funds have them invested in the stock market. I wonder how many are in index funds which invest in companies like Starbucks or Amazon.
It does need a 10x effort, and has been obvious that since the 1980’s unions record on organizing expenditures, and political will has been a rollercoaster.
When SEIU was organizing 50,000 members a year in the decade beginning in 2000 it was spending 50%+ of its budget organizing and locals were expected to spend 20%.
In 2000 SEIU organized 73,339; 2001 79,821; 2002 132,759; 2003 62,121; 2004 66,993; 2005 182,466; 2006 30,951
SEIU from 2002 on was spending between $170,000,000 and $200,000,000 a year on organizing.
In addition many International unions were run by former organizing directors who became International President: UNITE, CWA, UFCW, Carpenters, SEIU, HERE to name a few.
And John Sweeney, the President of the AFL—CIO, was proselytizing and demonstrating action in spending resources and political will.
We now know that it takes political will, resources, and a strategic plan supported from top leadership to succeed. There can be lots of strategic debates about strategy and tactics, but organizing changes workers lives.
And at the moment there is far too little of it
It takes political will