Could Anti-Trumpism Revive Unions
By 
Stephen Lerner and Joseph McCartin, two people I respect a great deal, suggest it’s possible and note the key roles of union in South Korea and Brazil in resisting fascism. Two points first. First, despite stereotypes about unions that liberals love to track in (very much including in comments here), union members are significantly to the left of the general population. Union members are the only meaningful demographic to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 at higher rates than they voted for Joe Biden in 2020. But because of the Teamsters and their class traitor head Sean O’Brien, there’s a lie out there that unions have moved toward Trump. They have not and the evidence is overwhelming. However, the evidence is also overwhelming that unions haven’t done a goddamn thing of value in leading or organizing resistance to Trump, as I wrote in the New York Times last Labor Day. So it’s frustrating to me on multiple levels.
So sure, it’s possible, as Lerner and McCartin suggest:
While our democracy’s crisis deepens, the national labor movement has yet to play a leading role in the resistance against ascendant authoritarianism. By seizing the opportunity to play such a role in the year ahead, labor has the opportunity to reverse its decades-long slide toward irrelevancy by taking up an indispensable role in preserving, expanding, and deepening rights-based democracy.
By fighting to reconstruct our democracy in the face of the mortal threat it now faces, labor might transform itself from a fading force, whose structure and outlook still bear the imprint of the 19th– and 20th-century struggles that birthed it, into a rejuvenated movement ambitious enough to give workers the powerful voice they deserve in the 21st century.
Unfortunately, a specter haunts the labor movement at this crucial juncture: the magical thinking that if unions can just survive the Trump era they can help restore a kind of pre-Trump normalcy after he leaves office. The prevailing sentiment among labor’s leaders seems to be that, if they can just help their allies regain control of Congress later this year, they will be able to contain the damage Trump has wrought and coalesce behind an alternative in 2028 that can roll back Trumpism.
As important as the coming elections are, unions should firmly reject the comforting delusion that they can recover through the ballot box power they have lost in the workplace. For if such electoral victories are unaccompanied by a revived, reorganized labor movement, they will leave workers and unions in a situation no different from the one they faced prior to Trump’s rise.
If it is to have a viable future, labor must not merely survive but capitalize on Trump’s disruption of longstanding norms, assumptions, and institutions, many of which no longer operate to labor’s benefit — if they ever did — to advance a bold 21st century vision of inclusive solidarity, equality, rights, and democracy.
How labor might take advantage of Trumpism’s authoritarian excesses to advance such a vision was put on display in Minnesota this winter, where local labor organizations drew on years of experience to play a central convening role in the resistance to Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invasion. Unions of janitors, teachers, healthcare workers and others helped coalesce a resistance that included worker centers, faith communities and clergy, community organizations, immigrants’ rights groups, small businesses, and caring neighbors. Protesters turned out by the tens of thousands in subzero temperatures, religious leaders endured arrest in acts of civil disobedience, and witnesses by the thousands turned their cellphones into a 21st century arsenal of democracy.
That resistance was built on a shared common-good analysis of power and a recognition of the increasingly baneful influence of billionaires over our politics and economy. Protesters targeted not only ICE, but corporations like Target and Hilton that have either remained silent or openly abetted and profited from Trump’s authoritarian power grab.
Make no mistake: the formal end of “Operation Metro Surge” scarcely indicates a waning of this administration’s authoritarian ambitions. Unresolved issues regarding the limits of ICE’s legal authority, the masking of agents, and the wearing of bodycams that have led to a funding fight in Congress will continue to elicit protest and resistance in the streets. In the meantime, new fronts are likely to open in coming months as the president disregards all restraints on his power to deploy military power abroad and pushes an effort to “nationalize” the midterm elections at home.
As labor movement leaders contemplate the likely conflicts that might emerge in coming months, they should consider lessons from what happened in Minnesota as well as other cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles where local unions also played important roles in mobilizing resistance. They should also learn from the experiences of unions in other nations that successfully resisted authoritarian regimes.
The key point here is the desperate desire for normalcy among union leadership. And look, I get it. The problem is that the pre-Trump situtation for unions was already terrible. But it wasn’t per se terrible for those union leaders and the workers they represent. If you had a union contract, maybe it wasn’t too bad. But fewer and fewer workers had those contracts for all Joe Biden and his administration did to put a thumb on the scales to help unions, their actual power to do so was limited given the corporate control over the labor election process, the Republican filibuster, and the anti-worker courts. So it’s just really really hard to get union leaders to see past the political process and the belief that if they just elect a few more Democrats, things will be fine. It’s not that they shouldn’t elect a few more Democrats–obviously they should. It’s that the crisis is so much deeper than that and it is indeed “magical thinking” to believe that this is enough. The rest of the liberal-left establishment–or at least the people themselves–are finally starting to realize this. Alas, a lot of unions are way behind the everyday liberal here. And thus, I need unions to prove that they will do anything out of their normal playbook ever. Because I don’t believe they will. The leadership just isn’t visionary. It’s extremely institutional.