In September 2023, Joe Biden became the first sitting president to walk a picket line when he joined striking United Auto Workers in Wayne County, Michigan. A decade earlier, under the Obama administration, Democrats had asked the union to make concessions in bargaining to save the auto industry—and it did, accepting cuts to wages, pensions, and retiree health care along with a two-tier wage system that hired newcomers at a much lower wage. Now, Biden was paying them back, supporting their demands for a larger piece of the pie, and the UAW’s “Stand Up Strike” succeeded in reversing the givebacks of the recession. In the most pro-labor White House and Congress in eighty years, Biden and Kamala Harris pulled nearly every lever of state power to strengthen existing unions. Jennifer Abruzzo, General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Lina Khan, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and Julie Su, Acting Secretary of the Department of Labor (DOL), secured historic gains for worker power and economic justice. And the administration passed part of an ambitious industrial policy that created thousands of union jobs in energy, construction, and the auto industry, with its most visible accomplishments—new manufacturing facilities making microchips and state-of-the-art electric vehicles—forming a major part of Harris’s campaign pitch to working-class voters. But on election day, Trump garnered the majority of votes from those earning under $100,000—a class dealignment compared with Biden’s victory in 2020.
In the blame game that followed Harris’s loss, union leadership has been clear: you can’t put this on us. They are only partly right. According to both public exit polling and internal union surveys, the labor movement came through and a large majority of union members voted for Harris. While some polls had Biden tied with Trump among union members before he dropped out, early returns in some battleground states showed a commanding twenty-point margin for Harris. In every swing state, UNITE HERE and the AFL-CIO’s field program made personal contact with millions of their members. Organizers persuaded tens of thousands of voters to side with their economic interests and reward the administration that had done so much for them with another term. That spadework is what labor has traditionally been good at. It’s entirely possible that unions’ internal organizing efforts saved Senate seats in Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan along with overperforming in down-ballot legislative races in Pennsylvania.
The Biden-Harris administration saw in unions what unions would like to see in themselves: a broad and powerful organization of the working class that could reshape American society and partner with them to end the neoliberal era. The problem with that vision is that it isn’t true. When only 6 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions, unions are no longer a legitimate stand-in for the working class. Most working-class Americans have no experience with unions in their daily lives. If they did, it would make a difference in how they see the world. Unions have historically been schools of democracy for their members. What has always set them apart from volunteer organizations is that unions don’t choose their members—meaning that they need to engage disparate groups of workers in ways that build solidarity across difference. As the old saying goes, class is knowing which side of the fence you are on; class consciousness is knowing who is there with you. When unions were strong and growing, Democratic campaign efforts were buoyed by pro-union messaging and turnout operations that meant something to much of the American public. Today, far from ennobling a candidate in the minds of all working Americans, a union’s presidential endorsement can at best hope to shore up the vote from workers lucky enough to count themselves in a union’s ranks.
When President Biden spoke about growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the kitchen-table wisdom of his father, when he repeated the truism that “the middle class built America, and unions built the middle class,” he was talking to an almost insignificant segment of voters. No amount of infrastructure investment for union jobs could convince most workers that the bell was tolling for them—especially not when their wages were stagnating and their cost of living was skyrocketing. The images of Democrats in union halls simply did not project the idea of support for the larger working class the party wanted it to—they only spotlighted unions as a club that the vast majority of workers could only dream of joining. On November 5, most workers turned out for the candidate they felt would tackle inflation and cater to their immediate needs as consumers, not the one promising to protect an abstract right to organize. Of course, Trump’s promise of mass deportations, paired with his administration’s likely gutting of labor standards, will bring only misery. The fastest-growing sectors in the U.S. economy will continue to rely on low wages and workplace tyranny, only to be cheered on by a president who bragged about violating overtime the same way he bragged about violating women.
But that doesn’t mean the end of labor. In fact, rebuilding the labor movement and a political party dedicated to fighting for the entire working class may well be the only strategy for defeating Trumpism and delivering a more just society. Where do we start? Throwing everything we’ve got at organizing the unorganized and revitalizing the political education of existing members, re-polarizing American politics around social class instead of insisting on a tent big enough for Bernie Sanders and Mark Cuban to fit at either end. We need a party that welcomes the hatred of the economic royalists—not just the Elon Musks of the world but the faceless pharma CEOs who are profiting off of the desperation of the sick and elderly and the hedge fund executives who continue to ship jobs overseas, privatize public services, and drive up the cost of housing. The current version of the party might have successfully defeated Donald Trump once, but it will never change the material conditions that made his rise possible.
True, the odds are stacked against us. Given the Republican trifecta in Washington, we will certainly not be able to pass labor law reform that removes formidable barriers to organizing anytime soon, and the leadership of the NLRB, DOL, and FTC will no longer be our comrades in arms. On the contrary, as Trump did in 2016, we can expect appointees who will make millions no longer eligible for overtime, remove protections from excessive heat exposure, and weaken liability for wage theft. Employers, emboldened by an administration firmly on their side, will still fight organizing drives tooth and nail, with consequences for union-busting coming too little and too late. Workers in care, hospitality, retail, gig work, and even manufacturing remain spread out across many small workplaces. The proliferation of temp agencies, the misclassification of workers as independent contractors rather than employees, and layers of subcontracting between corporations and their workforce will continue to bedevil organizing.
But this is not the whole story. The call is also coming from inside the house. Most unions simply aren’t investing significantly in organizing of any kind. Even when presented with workers who want to join—by worker centers or by the nascent Emergency Worker Organizing Committee project—many unions flatly decline to take them in, citing old arguments against “hot shop organizing,” the idea that unions should accept workplaces regardless of whether they represent a significant number of workers in the sector. Unions reason that without density, they won’t be able to deliver significant gains, and individual workplaces will cost too much to represent. But in a world where unionization rates in many industries are already below 5 percent, caution is no longer tenable. We can’t afford to turn down any of the 52 percent of non-union workers who say that, given the opportunity, they would vote to join a union today. Part of this effort will require unions to radically rethink their organizing strategy, investing in distributed models focused on supporting organizers within a given workplace rather than relying on paid staff.
For decades, many unions have insisted that the hundreds of worker centers and other “alt labor” groups that have organized the likes of taxi drivers and domestic, carwash, construction, nail salon, warehouse, food manufacturing, farm, and nursery workers would be flimsy and fleeting. But many are still thriving, intensively organizing specific industries and interested in partnering with unions. And since so many of these groups’ members are undocumented workers, it is they who will be on the frontlines of fighting Trump’s deportation machine. In anticipation of those mass deportations, worker centers like Arriba Las Vegas, Arise Chicago, and Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores in New Bedford are helping workers who are organizing and bringing workplace violation cases to file for deferred enforcement of immigration cases. They, too, are the labor movement.
Organizing at scale and pioneering new models is difficult and risky—and will certainly be expensive. But it is critical. Sectoral bargaining alone, without workers organizing, won’t build a fighting working class: fighting builds a fighting working class. When the worker-to-worker organizing at Starbucks first began, most union strategists said that it was a fool’s errand; they would never get to a first contract. 521 shops and 11,947 workers later, Starbucks is bargaining. The Union of Southern Service Workers is energetically organizing Dollar General and Waffle House workers. Winning takes a willingness to try several times, as the UAW demonstrated when it succeeded at unionizing a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga this past April after failed votes in 2014 and 2019.
We don’t have another four years of pro-union policy. What we do have are existing unions with substantial treasuries—some $35 billion in total, according to research by Chris Bohner—and a workforce with significant grievances. We need to bring them together. Unions need to invest in worker-to-worker organizing and convince millions more workers that voting for Trump won’t fix their economic problems—voting to form a union will.
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