Three Crises of Labor

"Organize or Die" gets uncomfortably relevant.

Los Angeles, 2016, and still. (Photo: Getty)

America did not get to the bad place it is in today by accident. We are here as a result of the combination of a political system that serves money, and a half-century long explosion of economic inequality that has produced an oligarchy. Donald Trump is the product of these factors, but he is not the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that too much power has flown into the hands of too few people, and they have used that power to arrange the entire economic and political system in their favor. Democracy, such as it was, is an inevitable casualty of this process.

Climbing out of the hole that we are in will require more than one or two favorable election cycles. It will require shifting that underlying balance of power away from the oligarchs and their allies, and back towards the rest of us. Power that has accumulated among the rich and ultra-rich will have to be wrested back into the hands of the working class majority. This pro-democratic shift in economic and political power can only be accomplished if the organized power of the working class gets stronger—strong enough to compete with the power of the rich. In other words, organized labor must get stronger if we are to turn around America’s descent into fascism. This is why you should care about what is happening with America’s labor unions even if you have been operating under the illusion that unions don’t mean much to you personally.

Unfortunately, organized labor today is under an assault that is worse than anything we have seen since the WW2 era. At the very time that it is most vital for working people and unions to rise to the defense of democracy, they are crippled by three related crises.

The Organizing Crisis

Chart via Doug Henwood/ LBO

In the middle of the 20th century, one in three American workers was a union member. Last year, that portion fell to less than one in ten. The most fundamental thing holding back union power in this country is: There are just not enough union members.

In order to be strong, the labor movement must by necessity be a mass movement. “Working people,” as a category, represents the majority of adults. Organized labor is responsible for all of them. When only one in ten workers has a union, the entire function of organized labor is undermined. Unions cannot credibly claim to represent the entire working class. More importantly, the key political and economic purpose of unions—to counterbalance the power of organized capital—does not work. The investors class has been able to get so strong because the working class has gotten weak as a result of the decline of union density.

The theory of organized labor’s institutions has long been that increased political power would lead to an increase in organizing power and then the expansion of union density. The numbers tell us that that plan has been failing for 70 years. Joe Biden was the most pro-union president of my lifetime, and union density continued to decline during his administration. Expanding and scaling up union density even under the best of circumstances will require a vast new investment by unions. They have not made that investment. Nor have they given any signal, collectively, that they intend to make such an investment, or even that they understand that such an investment is necessary.

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The Legal Crisis

Though unions bear responsibility for their failure to maintain membership numbers, the greater reason why union membership has been declining for so long is that business interests and their political allies have successfully created a regime of labor law that makes it arduous to organize unions, and easy to union-bust. (The PRO Act is the most recent bill designed to make this system more fair and more pro-worker, but we have not been able to pass any bills like this even under Democratic trifectas, which goes back to the “electoral power will not save us” point.)

Most people who are not directly involved in unions are unaware just how unfair existing labor laws are. Rather than writing a laundry list here of every bad regulation, I will give you one recent example to illustrate what I mean. In 2023, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Kentucky tried to unionize their workplace. Amazon committed a host of legal violations in the process of their union busting campaign. As Matt Bruenig recounts, the company illegally banned employees from setting up tables to distribute pro-union materials, illegally disciplined and harassed pro-union workers, and generally created a hostile atmosphere for organizing. Now, two years later, the bureaucratic process to litigate those claims of Amazon’s wrongdoing has finally concluded. The company was found guilty by a National Labor Relations Board Judge. So what are the penalties?

“The [judge] ordered Amazon to cease and desist from the unlawful conduct, rescind all discipline issued for the November 2023 union solicitation activities, and post notices at the [Kentucky] facility.”

Yeah: the penalty for a trillion-dollar company illegally union-busting is to hang up a fucking notice in the break room!! And to stop the illegal activity, two years after the illegal activity has already achieved its goal of killing the union drive!! This is absolutely standard. The penalties for companies that violate the laws that protect workers’ right to organize are so small that companies feel free to break the laws. This is characteristic of the level of anti-worker bias embedded in all levels of laws that regulate the worker-employer relationship in America.

This stuff has existed for decades, and all of the labor movement’s political efforts have failed to rectify it. Furthermore, the legal crisis is even more acute now. There is an ongoing legal effort by a number of corporations to have the entire existence of the NLRB declared unconstitutional, and to overturn the post-New Deal legal framework that granted unions a defined set of legal rights, in exchange for restrictions on who they could organize and how they could strike. That effort received a big boost yesterday, when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, yes, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is right, the NLRB probably is unconstitutional. This issue will eventually make its way to the Supreme Court, and it is wise to assume that the Supreme Court will rule on behalf of the corporate interests. In 2025 you can save time by simply accepting that the courts will do us as much harm as possible, and then being pleasantly surprised if you’re wrong. Putting the judges in place to make these very rulings has been a decades-long project of the right wing, and they are now reaping their rewards.

Which is to say: Not only will we not be fixing the already hostile labor laws that make it extremely difficult and expensive to organize and maintain unions—we will also likely be tearing down the entire grand social bargain for labor peace that has governed America since the end of the Great Depression. That would mean reverting to the Wild West days of labor relations, when labor battles were bloody and fought in the streets, rather than in the courts. Removing the ability of workers and unions to go to the NLRB to (kind of) hold companies accountable means that the only remaining tool for unions will be strikes, strikes, and more strikes. That is what businesses are incentivizing with their legal assault.

Leftists in the labor world often salivate at this prospect: it is sure to produce an increase in radicalism in the labor movement, because literally every other avenue will have been foreclosed. Even though I am a leftist in labor, however, I find it hard to get excited about our prospects here. Unions have gotten so weak, and grown so used to operating within the existing bureaucratic framework, that is overly romantic to believe that we will be able to compete with corporate power just by hitting the streets and the picket lines—at least, not without many brutal years of struggle to whip us into shape.

The Political Crisis

Chart via EPI.

The Trumpian version of fascism can be seen as a side effect of the rising inequality and oligarchy enabled by the crushing of working class power. It’s not that the rich wanted Trump, specifically; it’s that the rich recognized that they needed to undermine democracy in order to consolidate their own power, and Trump is the noxious gas that rushed in to fill the vacuum. It remains to be seen whether the tacit agreement of corporate America to fund and support Trump’s ego and corruption in exchange for favorable treatment for themselves is stable enough to survive the significant negative global shocks that Trump’s insanity produces. What is clear is that zero resistance to fascism, or defense of democracy, will be coming from the American business community. They have made the calculation that tax cuts, deregulation, and right wing judges are worth whatever horrific long term price the Trump era will extract on all of us.

For working people, the direct damage of Trump’s second term will be immense. Immigrant workers will be abused, imprisoned, and deported; women and minorities in the workplace will find themselves marginalized and subjected to forms of institutionalized racism not allowed to flourish so freely since the civil rights era; unions will find the legal structure protecting their existence stripped away; employers will feel empowered to act even more lawlessly against their workers; the wealthy will be enriched at the expense of everyone else, who will be saddled with fewer legal protections, worse health care, and less economic security.

I am not even touching on the troops in the streets, and how far that might go.

In an ideal world, strong unions would mobilize and form the front line of the resistance to Trump’s entire political project. In the real world… weakened, shaky unions will still have to mobilize on the front lines of this resistance, because failing to do so is going to mean their own destruction. With the exception of some notable pockets of heroism, the response of the leading institutions of organized labor thus far has been dispiriting. The longer they take to wake up to the precarity of their own position, the harder the fight they will have.

Striking auto workers in Los Angeles talk to a policeman, 1941.

All three of these crises feed into one another. The lack of union organizing made the power of the working class weaker, which enabled the right wing to grow strong enough to produce the political crisis, and to arrange the legal chessboard in their favor to produce the legal crisis. None of these crises are new—what distinguishes the moment we are living through is that all of them are coming to a head at the same time. After 50 years of basking in the comfortable illusion that their decline was not terminal, labor unions are now faced with doom converging on them from three directions at once. As with all consequential illusions, you can only hope that it dissipates before it causes you to unwittingly destroy yourself.

So what do we do? Given the makeup of the Supreme Court and the Republican Party’s ongoing effort to fill the lower courts with ideologically aligned judges as fast as possible, there is no hope of solving the legal crisis without winning political power. And given those friendly courts, a compliant base of oligarchs with open checkbooks, an utterly cowed civil society, and a demonstrated willingness to use lies and voter suppression and organized violence to win elections, there is little hope of regaining power from Republican control without a vibrant, nationwide, grassroots organizing project that gets tens of millions of working class Americans into the streets and, later, into voting booths. Organizing is the only remaining path out of the looming crises.

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One thing that the labor movement knows how to do is organize. Even as opportunities to organize legally certified workplace unions under the traditional NLRB model dry up, new opportunities to organize working people everywhere at scale are opening up. Union organizing and political organizing must become indistinguishable; with political progress, you can forget about having an enforceable union contract. The need for organized labor to invest every last penny into organizing is as strong as ever. The difference is that, now, unions must see themselves as seeds of organizing that spread far beyond the walls of one employer, and out into society at large.

You don’t get paid enough because your boss takes all the money. Then he donates some of the money to Republicans, who take away your health care in order to give your boss tax cuts. When your union wins you a contract, Trump tears it up. He doesn’t give a damn about you. He even fired the head of the agency that measures union membership! He puts soldiers in the streets, sends out masked thugs to snatch hardworking people off the streets, and sits in a golden office lying his ass off while his billionaire supporters shove more of the wealth you produce into their own pockets.

Fuck that guy, fuck his judges, fuck his soldiers, fuck his cops, fuck his billionaires, fuck anybody talking about how “the Republican Party is the party of the working class now.” Fuck the Democratic Party leadership, too. You are failing. We have eyes. Everything is getting worse and nobody is coming to save us. We are the workers and the workers are the unions and the unions are for everybody. That’s how the labor movement needs to think now, from the bottom to the top. “Organize or die” has always been true. It’s just that now, the “die” part is getting closer than you would like.

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Also

• Related reading: Ten Times This; We Are Failing; Trampoline Unionism; Your Money Is On the Table; How the “Working Class Republican” Scam Works. I also wrote a book about this, called “The Hammer,” which you can order wherever books are sold.

• New York City: Labor Day is coming up and I’m going to be out here talking about how the labor movement can save us. Come out and say hey. On Monday, August 25 at 7 pm, I’ll be at Easy Lover at 790 Metropolitan Ave in Brooklyn, speaking along with some others at a cool new event for tech workers interested in organizing. Get your tickets here. And on Sunday, August 31 at 11 a.m., I’ll be speaking about Labor Against Fascism at the NY Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan. The event info is here. Love to see any of you there.

• Along with “more unions,” something that would meaningfully help America suck less is “more independent media.” This publication, How Things Work, is 100% supported and funded by readers just like you, who choose to be paid subscribers in order to help us keep going. Wonderful people. If you’ve been reading this site long enough to decide that you enjoy it, please take a quick second right now and become a paid subscriber yourself. It’s just six bucks a month, or sixty bucks a year. This is socialist media funding, and I believe it can work. Thank you all for being here.