First, the good news. We’ve been in a modest but real labor upsurge the last few years in the U.S. Growing strikes, union reform movements, and new union drives have been the brightest spot in a time of division for the working class.
What conditions made the recent union upswing possible? A tight labor market with low unemployment helped boost confidence. Decades of outrage at public austerity and management deprivations — forced overtime, cruel understaffing, care and quality constantly undercut for profit — were pent up among union members. Rarely tapped by timid union officials or Democratic politicos, members’ latent anger became the fuel for the most promising union upswing in decades.
Labor’s advances are still far from the scale needed, but they vindicate the hope that rank-and-file movements can transform sleepy unions into sharp tools against the billionaire class. Socialists have a responsibility — best of all by becoming union members in pivotal places — to build the fighting wing of labor, learn from within it, and build a socialist movement from deep roots in the working class.
For union momentum to quicken pace through the hostile terrain of a second Trump era, we first have to take honest stock of our modest recent gains. We have to double down on building a broader cast of shop floor leaders in collective action. And most difficult of all, we have to organize our unions to become practical engines of working class solidarity and ambition, in a political scene that badly needs both.
Revival From Within
Major strides in union reform began with caucus breakthroughs into leadership in many local teachers’ unions and in the Auto Workers, which helped grow the Labor Notes network. Teamsters for a Democratic Union, after helping elect a challenger union president and driving key parts of the union’s UPS contract fight, grew with new speed. Inspiration has spread into promising new reform movements of grocery workers, stagehands, federal engineers, and construction workers, among others.
We see in these reform stories how democracy and militancy on the job work to grow new organizers, but it won’t be quick work. At the top of the Auto Workers, knocking out the boss-friendly Administration Caucus looked like it took just a few years, but even that built on decades of prior fights. Actually transforming the union bottom to top by building fighting stewards, local officers, and a culture of member action at factories across the country will be a much longer project.
Expanding and deepening union reform depends on having committed militants well spread out on shop floors around the country. Socialists played key roles in many recent reform fights. A few militants can play a big role when they focus on building their coworkers’ leadership in fighting the boss.
Union officers with little member support are vulnerable to reform fights, but reform caucuses themselves can also be vulnerable to sectarianism, to minoritarian takeovers seeking a shortcut to political influence. Socialists can’t imagine ourselves as the enlightened vanguard that wins leadership at all costs; our work in unions has to keep oriented towards developing new members as the leaders of their own fights. That careful focus doesn’t prevent socialists from advocating our ideas with our coworkers — it makes those ideas more credible.
The point of union reform can’t be only to improve the lot of current union members, but to help build a working class fighting consciously for itself, and ultimately for an economy and society workers run democratically: socialism. Better than socialists preaching that gospel in the abstract, fighting the boss together shows us how our strength depends on solidarity from inside and outside our ranks.
New Unions, Far From Enough
After decades of shrinking union membership, facing a cast of billionaire villains pledging to bust unions at all costs, organizing the unorganized has come to make more sense to many union members as a matter of survival.
New organizing has grown, along with surprising public support. From 2021 to 2023, union membership grew by over 400,000. At workplaces with over 500 members, the union election win rate shot up to 86%, up from last decade’s 63%. Inspiration from strikes and resources from reforming unions helped spark many of these new drives.
The biggest new wins have been in healthcare and campus unions. New organizing is far rarer and sorely needed in manufacturing, logistics, and especially construction, sectors with especially direct kinds of leverage over capital. Despite much ballyhoo about Biden’s pro-union nudges in billions given to private chip and battery factory construction, building trades unions grew by just a few thousand members overall in 2023, and shrank as a percentage of their sector.
But the sharpest caveat of new organizing progress is that union density is still falling, down to a bare 10%. New unions simply haven’t outpaced the growth of the workforce.
Union finances have been largely untapped for the task. Unions now hold $33 billion in net assets, double a decade before. That most officers have piled up such reserves instead of organizing or striking is a sobering sign of how much reform yet remains to be done.
Even more important, labor’s biggest power — existing union members — is rarely brought to bear on new organizing campaigns. Experimenting with how to bring current union members into helping their neighbors and friends get organized is a key task if labor is to grow.
Two Paths Through Danger
All this modest labor upsurge faces new headwinds. Trump is back, with a growing brigade of sycophant CEOs. His win will likely bring some kinds of crackdown on labor, likely targeted on immigrant workers and public sector workers, and potentially a broad gutting of labor law.
On this dangerous terrain, unions could move in two opposite directions.
One path is sectional collaboration with Trump. Union officers could seek deals to protect their members in the short term; may the rest of us be screwed. This sad parade kicked off with the International Longshoremen’s Association president fawning over Trump.
The Teamsters’ head has also made ominous signs of cozying up for concessions, but December’s risky strike at Amazon was a strong show of a more confrontational strategy. We should be sober that selfishly defensive union moves can make sense to many members. It will take grounded organizing to change their mind.
But we should have no illusions: unions cutting friendly deals with Trump and the bosses he emboldens will only divide and demoralize working people. When you beg for scraps, every bit can be quickly taken away. When you win by fighting, you’ve grown muscle to win more.
The other possible path for unions is working class independence and solidarity. Challenging CEOs with strikes and shop floor confrontation can build up the activity of union members like little else. That’s how labor won long before the law even recognized unions.
In a disorganized society, unions can be a rare bedrock of solidarity. Pushing our unions to fight persecution of immigrant workers is more than a profound moral cause; it’s an essential strategy to build union power, beat fear and division in our ranks, and fight with the leverage of all our siblings. Where other movements struggle for leverage, bargaining and striking for the common good can win and spread some needed hope.
Politics Is Not Optional
For unions to rally around working class solidarity and stick to it, charting an independent path in electoral politics is key. Political battles outside the workplace profoundly shape and divide workers’ politics inside. To overcome rightwing ideas rising among workers, unions need a democratic culture of member discussion and action, and a sense of being part of a class-wide fight for better, freer lives.
Unions already have one big step towards independence in practice. They’re working-class organizations that routinely pour millions into elections, and sometimes even develop their own ballot measures and candidates to run. But union political choices are nearly always made just by top officer decisions, keen on clout with politicians. When union officers routinely go hard for whatever shifty candidates the Democrats hand down, they alienate and divide union members rightly disgusted with a political system largely run for the megarich.
Unions would better inspire members to act — and develop their collective politics — by backing fewer and far better electoral runs. That means focusing on running union members, confrontational working class fighters, and ambitious ballot measures to tax the rich, boost worker power, or grow public goods.
Cross-union efforts that bring members together to decide and wage their electoral strategy could take this work even further, helping grow a class-wide vision. The run-up to May Day 2028 could build that kind of multi-union, member-led political discussion, even for unions who don’t align their contracts in time. Coalitions of willing locals, likely often independent of stodgy regional AFL-CIO councils, could use member votes to set minimum demands for endorsing candidates, or develop new candidates and ballot measures to organize our class and soak the rich.
Independent political action for unions is especially needed because reforming the Democratic Party from within increasingly looks a dead-end. The Democratic primary base is rapidly losing workers and narrowing to the well-off. The money cannons of that richer base, AIPAC, and Wall Street are increasingly shameless and effective in shooting down DSA-backed Democratic insurgents like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. That context makes left primary runs far tougher, although they can still be worthwhile as agitational fights in high-profile races with a feasible path to win, like Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral run.
None of those worsening factors can be checked by internal party delegates and platform squabbles that hold no material power over who gets elected. Megadonors bankroll the campaigns they want. Top Democratic politicos are only getting stronger at raising corporate billions, no matter 2024’s electoral collapse.
In short, as Democratic primaries get tougher and the party’s brand craters with the working class, experimenting with independent, non-partisan, and third-party runs is increasingly vital for unions and the Left. The official ballot line for union-backed political runs isn’t as important as the practical organizing and agitating they require. But there are real costs to identifying with a party over which we have no feasible control, as the Democrats increasingly alienate workers.
An encouraging proof of an independent union-backed campaign came with Dan Osborn’s near-win run for Senate in Nebraska, although Osborn was not good on immigrant solidarity. On a municipal level, the Richmond Progressive Alliance remains a hugely successful model of a working-class local party that has won municipal majorities and taxed corporations, based on heavy financing from a handful of unions, year-round activism, and democratic member organization.
The 2024 electoral disaster for corporate Democrats is an opening for better union politics. Anecdotal as it is, from Oregon to Virginia, I’ve talked to rank-and-filers who say some of their local officers and siblings have gone from being all in for Kamala to now saying unions should consider running independents. We shouldn’t exaggerate this swing, but there is a window to rally more supporters of working class political independence.
Doubling Down For Our Class
We’re in a perilous moment for history. The global right wing is strengthening working class division and disorganization, just as climate meltdown and growing war make our solidarity fiercely urgent.
Our only way out is building a working class fighting for itself, not against itself. Deepening and expanding the fighting union upsurge is our clearest hope to do that, especially because it’s already begun. Our mission is to build the fighting wing of labor as the core of a class-wide force.
For the rank and file strategy to go further than the past few years, activists will need to take harder leaps in our organizing: to commit to rank and file jobs where we’re most needed, often even moving towns, pitching in major money, and trying out trades past our comfort zone. We will need to persuade and support others to take those risks.
On the shop floor, our task is to build up thousands more of our union siblings to lead collective action and fight the boss with courage. That’s the foundation of changing our unions with reform caucuses, daring new organizing, and political independence, so the labor movement can build working class power at scale.
We can’t build the rank and file strategy in solitude or silence. We have to agitate for it, sharing sparks and lessons from our unions in articles (perhaps consider Labor Notes), videos, your local potluck. If we want independent union politics, jobsite militancy, and member-led new organizing, it’s our task to advocate them plainly. These ideas need champions. That means the organizer reading this — and those we help step up. Now comes the time for harder risks, not retreat.
