Are unions the answer to fascism? Any worker considering going to war against the bosses will tell you that the first obstacle they must get passed is their union leadership. The AFL-CIO and their affiliates around the US are the actual handmaidens of fascism. Based in Washington, DC, blocks from White House, they were silent when Trump fired 300,000 federal workers, 100,000 of them Black women. They remained silent as Trump stripped more than one million federal workers, roughly 80 percent of unionized federal workforce, of their collective bargaining rights. When asked about the possibility of the 15-million-member labor federation calling for a one-day general strike in response, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said, “We are not there.” (NYT, 1/27/26)
In NYC, with the highest union concentration in the US at around 35%, the story is the same. Few unions answered the call to stop ICE from snatching our coworkers off the streets and out of the courtrooms. And even among those that have responded the best, like more than 200 members of the CUNY Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the leadership’s outlook remains lining workers up to vote for the Democratic Party, the same racist warmakers that got us here. The NYC Central Labor Council has allegedly endorsed the May Day march in lower Manhattan, but there is no mention of it on their website, which is also true for the largest city-workers union, AFSCME. The union leaders and the Democratic Party fear seeing millions of workers in the streets, defying injunctions and violating their contracts, as much as Trump & Co. Certainly, I'm all for organuizing a union on your job, but what we're up against is much bigger, its the whole profit system. And the unions are fully invested.
There are plenty of problems with institutional unions, which I write a lot about, but if unions were the handmaidens of fascism then fascists wouldn’t be trying to destroy unions.
I suspect what Mr. Goldbetter meant wasn't that unions per se are handmaidens of fascism but that many national leaders of unions are. Whether that's true is beyond my competence to say. However, it certainly isn't impossible, just because fascists are trying to destroy unions. They're also trying to reduce brown people to second-class citizens (at best) - that's the obvious motive for the persecution of immigrants, the denunciations of "DEI", etc. - but it's possible to have a lucrative career as a brown person in the party of white supremacy - see Clarence Thomas, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, Kash Patel, etc., ad nauseam. The "I'm one of the good ones" ploy has a long albeit unvenerable history.
Moreover, the point that "what we're up against is much bigger" is valid. Unions would be important parts of any genuine solution, but it would take a hell of a lot more to cure the cancer of the American body politic. You (Nolan) yourself wrote, "There is nothing in the party except for this," which is true. It's also true that the other major party, "a party whose leadership could not wait to dump that burden in the trash", isn't hugely better. However, it's obviously the lesser evil, yet a near majority of American voters, including some union members, reliably prefer the greater evil. Eventually, Dear Leader will go away, but those people won't just go away, any more than the people who cheered for Bull Connor or jeered at Ruby Bridges just went away. There would have to be a genuine reckoning with them (which, to be clear, I don't expect).
As a former CLC president from western Pennsylvania, please rephrase the issue as: What kind of "Union" Do Workers Need Today? Almost all the basic US industries that have been downsized, outsourced or off shored were totally unionized. This did not stop their destruction since the union leadership's timid ineffective business union philosophy made it incapable and unwilling to organize a mass movement to publicly fight it. In western PA the USW watched as their "partners," the steel corporations eliminated tens of thousands of steel jobs while leaving polluted and destroyed communities in its wake. Unfortunately, the union then and now is still silent on the profit motive as the cause and capital's role in abandoning the steel industry. Instead it confuses and distorts this fundamental cause and falsely focuses on foreign imports as it props up and defends USA capitalists who have literally hollowed out the industry. Silence from the USW and all US unions despite the nation desperately needing steel and the creation of tens of thousands of steel jobs for unmet domestic needs as everything around us crumbles and falls apart before our eyes. Without unions that are based on mass struggle and independent popular politics there will not be the kind of movement needed to change the balance of power. Never talk class struggle and you will guarantee defeat.
A Union at NYU organized a strike last week by contract faculty (non-tenured) after months of negotiations had led to an impasse. After a two-day faculty strike, the administration agreed to the Union contract. Good news, for a change.
What an absolute banger of a column. Deserves to be plastered on walls everywhere and in front of millions of eyeballs. The defeatist spirit of USians needs to be violently challenged.
I'll be damned if I know how to wake people up, but I'll keep trying. Sharing on my FB page with 120K followers. Although I can definitely predict the responses from various ideological clusters. We need reading groups led by people soundly situated in theory very badly.
Hamilton, I absolutely respect your thoughts here, but I really do think that labor power in the USA is a dead letter. Very few people are willing to put their jobs, reputation, and physical safety on the line in service of a union, and that's not going to change any time soon. Not only that, union leadership everywhere is full of folks who don't want to actually *do* anything, and would prefer to squabble over union dues than actually act. It would take YEARS to get labor power to where it was 50 years ago, much less strong enough to actually change society.
With that being the case, how else can we push back? Are we just doomed to take our lumps from the government for the next few years?
Having worked in local government, I can confirm that between union contract language and management policy that said the same thing, it was the contract language that actually got reliable results.
Now that Adolf the cheating golfer has killed the National Endowment for the Arts, I am so hoping that my unions can fight this along with the Courts--except, of course, The "Supreme Court", which is now just another branch of a huge golden check made out to the majority of the berobed frauds who call themselves "Justices".
I wish I shared your optimism, but we have seen that, these days, contracts are only as strong as the paper they are written on. What's to be done when they are simply torn up?
The union contracts that were "torn up" recently were those of federal government workers. That was very bad but it is a specific thing, and it's not the case that private sector union contracts are being torn up or ignored. Millions of workers are working under enforceable union contracts right now. (The answer to your question is strike.)
My fear is that private sector union contracts will be torn up or ignored in the future, and while, theoretically, there are courts and strikes to stop that from happening, the cynic in me is skeptical that theory will translate to practice.
Strong unions make a stronger middle class. When unions are strong, the required minimum wage is higher, the workplaces are safer, jobs are more secure, and non-union businesses must compete with unions to offer better benefits.
Are unions the answer to fascism? Any worker considering going to war against the bosses will tell you that the first obstacle they must get passed is their union leadership. The AFL-CIO and their affiliates around the US are the actual handmaidens of fascism. Based in Washington, DC, blocks from White House, they were silent when Trump fired 300,000 federal workers, 100,000 of them Black women. They remained silent as Trump stripped more than one million federal workers, roughly 80 percent of unionized federal workforce, of their collective bargaining rights. When asked about the possibility of the 15-million-member labor federation calling for a one-day general strike in response, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said, “We are not there.” (NYT, 1/27/26)
In NYC, with the highest union concentration in the US at around 35%, the story is the same. Few unions answered the call to stop ICE from snatching our coworkers off the streets and out of the courtrooms. And even among those that have responded the best, like more than 200 members of the CUNY Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the leadership’s outlook remains lining workers up to vote for the Democratic Party, the same racist warmakers that got us here. The NYC Central Labor Council has allegedly endorsed the May Day march in lower Manhattan, but there is no mention of it on their website, which is also true for the largest city-workers union, AFSCME. The union leaders and the Democratic Party fear seeing millions of workers in the streets, defying injunctions and violating their contracts, as much as Trump & Co. Certainly, I'm all for organuizing a union on your job, but what we're up against is much bigger, its the whole profit system. And the unions are fully invested.
There are plenty of problems with institutional unions, which I write a lot about, but if unions were the handmaidens of fascism then fascists wouldn’t be trying to destroy unions.
I suspect what Mr. Goldbetter meant wasn't that unions per se are handmaidens of fascism but that many national leaders of unions are. Whether that's true is beyond my competence to say. However, it certainly isn't impossible, just because fascists are trying to destroy unions. They're also trying to reduce brown people to second-class citizens (at best) - that's the obvious motive for the persecution of immigrants, the denunciations of "DEI", etc. - but it's possible to have a lucrative career as a brown person in the party of white supremacy - see Clarence Thomas, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, Kash Patel, etc., ad nauseam. The "I'm one of the good ones" ploy has a long albeit unvenerable history.
Moreover, the point that "what we're up against is much bigger" is valid. Unions would be important parts of any genuine solution, but it would take a hell of a lot more to cure the cancer of the American body politic. You (Nolan) yourself wrote, "There is nothing in the party except for this," which is true. It's also true that the other major party, "a party whose leadership could not wait to dump that burden in the trash", isn't hugely better. However, it's obviously the lesser evil, yet a near majority of American voters, including some union members, reliably prefer the greater evil. Eventually, Dear Leader will go away, but those people won't just go away, any more than the people who cheered for Bull Connor or jeered at Ruby Bridges just went away. There would have to be a genuine reckoning with them (which, to be clear, I don't expect).
As a former CLC president from western Pennsylvania, please rephrase the issue as: What kind of "Union" Do Workers Need Today? Almost all the basic US industries that have been downsized, outsourced or off shored were totally unionized. This did not stop their destruction since the union leadership's timid ineffective business union philosophy made it incapable and unwilling to organize a mass movement to publicly fight it. In western PA the USW watched as their "partners," the steel corporations eliminated tens of thousands of steel jobs while leaving polluted and destroyed communities in its wake. Unfortunately, the union then and now is still silent on the profit motive as the cause and capital's role in abandoning the steel industry. Instead it confuses and distorts this fundamental cause and falsely focuses on foreign imports as it props up and defends USA capitalists who have literally hollowed out the industry. Silence from the USW and all US unions despite the nation desperately needing steel and the creation of tens of thousands of steel jobs for unmet domestic needs as everything around us crumbles and falls apart before our eyes. Without unions that are based on mass struggle and independent popular politics there will not be the kind of movement needed to change the balance of power. Never talk class struggle and you will guarantee defeat.
A Union at NYU organized a strike last week by contract faculty (non-tenured) after months of negotiations had led to an impasse. After a two-day faculty strike, the administration agreed to the Union contract. Good news, for a change.
I love that picture of her. It captures the exact moment Trump sucked her soul from her body
What an absolute banger of a column. Deserves to be plastered on walls everywhere and in front of millions of eyeballs. The defeatist spirit of USians needs to be violently challenged.
I'll be damned if I know how to wake people up, but I'll keep trying. Sharing on my FB page with 120K followers. Although I can definitely predict the responses from various ideological clusters. We need reading groups led by people soundly situated in theory very badly.
Hamilton, I absolutely respect your thoughts here, but I really do think that labor power in the USA is a dead letter. Very few people are willing to put their jobs, reputation, and physical safety on the line in service of a union, and that's not going to change any time soon. Not only that, union leadership everywhere is full of folks who don't want to actually *do* anything, and would prefer to squabble over union dues than actually act. It would take YEARS to get labor power to where it was 50 years ago, much less strong enough to actually change society.
With that being the case, how else can we push back? Are we just doomed to take our lumps from the government for the next few years?
Having worked in local government, I can confirm that between union contract language and management policy that said the same thing, it was the contract language that actually got reliable results.
Now that Adolf the cheating golfer has killed the National Endowment for the Arts, I am so hoping that my unions can fight this along with the Courts--except, of course, The "Supreme Court", which is now just another branch of a huge golden check made out to the majority of the berobed frauds who call themselves "Justices".
I wish I shared your optimism, but we have seen that, these days, contracts are only as strong as the paper they are written on. What's to be done when they are simply torn up?
The union contracts that were "torn up" recently were those of federal government workers. That was very bad but it is a specific thing, and it's not the case that private sector union contracts are being torn up or ignored. Millions of workers are working under enforceable union contracts right now. (The answer to your question is strike.)
My fear is that private sector union contracts will be torn up or ignored in the future, and while, theoretically, there are courts and strikes to stop that from happening, the cynic in me is skeptical that theory will translate to practice.
The answer is still to strike. Which means *always* organizing, investing in members' and stewards' leadership, and maintaining strike readiness.
TBH, that's how you can win and enforce workplace demands whether or not you've won an NLRB election or have a legal contract.
Strong unions make a stronger middle class. When unions are strong, the required minimum wage is higher, the workplaces are safer, jobs are more secure, and non-union businesses must compete with unions to offer better benefits.
solidarity forever - there are few places in the USA where diverse people gather with common intent than a union meeting!
What? Unions can be coopted by unscrupulous characters? Like the US government?
Sir!! Hell yes.