Solidarity in Retreat

Tens of millions of workers want a union. The most recent national poll, from 2017, found that nearly half of all nonunion workers in the United States would join one if they could. No one knows for sure what could spur the scale of new organizing needed to meet this demand — so supporters seize on any encouraging signs of the movement’s revival. Labor journalists like to bandy about the public’s approval rating for unions, which Gallup polls in the past few years have put at around 70 percent, the highest rate in almost six decades. But in that same period, the share of unionized private-sector workers has plummeted from 30 percent in 1965 to an abysmal 6 percent today. Unions are historically popular, yet also historically weak. Absent a dramatic turnaround in labor’s favor, the fact is that employers still can run roughshod over 94 percent of workers in the private sector — public opinion be damned.

This situation is almost the mirror image of labor’s midcentury peak. As historian Toni Gilpin has noted, “When the labor movement was at its most powerful, in the 1940s and ’50s, unions were not necessarily ‘popular,’ they were feared.” From “apex capitalists” to “members of the small business and middle class,” “lots of people … saw organized labor as a threat.” Certainly unions were no less reviled by employers in 1955 than they are in 2025. The difference now is in their relative balance of power: as the labor movement has withered, bosses’ relation to unions has shifted from grudging acceptance to almost unchallenged dominance. As Bertolt Brecht once said, “it takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak.”

And to adapt an old blues lyric, the labor movement has been down so long, the recent slight rise in strikes and union drives can look like up. More than half a million workers went on strike in 2023, rejecting low wages and subpar contracts, and “more strikes were called … than in any single year since 2002,” noted a Bloomberg report. However welcome, these numbers should again be put in perspective: 5 million workers struck in the 12 months following World War II; the year 1970 saw close to 6,000 strikes involving 3 million workers. Meanwhile, the trend line of new organizing, and of funding for new campaigns, still points downward, even as workers of color and young people are leading the uptick in work stoppages and union elections. (The United Auto Workers under president Shawn Fain is an exception that proves the rule, having committed $40 million toward new campaigns.)

These organizing headwinds, however, are only part of the story. Labor’s future will also be decided by its response to a reactionary political climate and whether it can overcome two sinister and mutually reinforcing dynamics that are now at play in the movement: opportunistic collaboration with Trumpism along narrow sectoral lines, and the embrace of an “America First” nationalist agenda targeting immigrant workers. Left unchecked, these forces promise to further fracture labor by dividing native from immigrant workers, and to consolidate a tenuous affinity between working-class anger and the MAGA movement, diverting economic frustration into a far-right populist coalition. This is a time to choose sides: between deeper class unity and solidarity, or shortsighted conciliation with Trumpist power brokers.

Yet the roots of the problem reach far deeper than the present political moment. Forces of nationalism, nativism and protectionism have always been present to varying degrees in the U.S. labor movement; but the current threat of retrenchment can only be understood in the context of American unions’ long organizational decline over the last half-century, under both external and internal pressures.

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Even with nearly 11 million workers newly organized in mass production industries between 1935 and 1947, total union density in the United States has never surpassed one-third of all nonagricultural workers. In absolute numbers, membership peaked at 21 million in 1979. “It was ironic that a labor movement of such modest size — the smallest percentage of organized workers in any industrialized nation — came to be known, of all things, as ‘Big Labor,’” observed James J. Matles and James Higgins, machine shop and shipyard workers and early leaders in the United Electrical Workers, in their history of the union, “Them and Us.” Writing in 1974, Matles and Higgins saw a labor movement that was already down. A few years later, a right-wing frontal assault would leave it flat on its back.

Early blows were dealt by the deregulation of trucking, railroads, airlines and other key industries in the late 1970s under President Jimmy Carter. Another turning point, as Jane Slaughter, Kim Moody and others have written, was the 1979 government bailout of Chrysler. For decades before the bailout, the expectation on all sides had been that as productivity and profits grew, unionized workers would receive annual raises under every new contract. When, as part of a larger federal rescue of the failing carmaker, UAW leaders broke this pattern by agreeing to an unprecedented hourly wage cut, it helped set in motion the labor movement’s long retreat. The bailout concessions, Moody told me, showed that “across industries … if the strongest can be taken down, others will follow.” Just a few years later, Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire thousands of striking air traffic controllers en masse, together with the defeat of copper miners at Phelps Dodge in Arizona and Texas, would have a chilling effect on strike activity throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In Reagan’s first term, as the economy hemorrhaged jobs in mining, construction and manufacturing, union membership declined by 2.8 million, and density plunged from 23 percent to 1980 to 18.8 percent in 1984. For decades, the annual number of strikes hadn’t dipped below 20, Moody pointed out, but in 1985, the number collapsed to just 54. In the ensuing four decades, the national decline in union membership has slowed but never stopped, let alone reversed.

Today, workers confront this diminished power with every new organizing campaign, even with a historically tight labor market and, until recently, a friendly National Labor Relations Board under President Joe Biden. As Paul Blundell, an organizer at an Amazon warehouse near Philadelphia, put it to me, “the slow nature of board proceedings … and the drastic underfunding of the agency” mean that workers have “had barely any unfair labor practice charges resolved as it is.” This has happened despite the best efforts of NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has been dubbed “the memo writer” for her dozens of memos defending labor rights on topics such as anti-union captive audience meetings, employer threats and coercion, the rights of immigrant workers and worker surveillance. Abruzzo and NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox were duly fired by Trump on Jan. 27 — illegally in the case of Wilcox, whose congressionally mandated term was not set to end until August 2028. Meanwhile, the world’s two richest men, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have filed cases in the 5th Circuit Court challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB itself, which has been enshrined in federal law since 1937. Wherever workers have made organizing breakthroughs, their employers — from corporations including Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and Waffle House to liberal nonprofits such as the Audubon Society and the American Civil Liberties Union — have joined the anti-labor offensive.

Even the best-defended campaigns struggle against such onslaughts. Workers are usually on board with a union drive until the boss ramps up a campaign to crush it, through some combination of misinformation, intimidation and false promises. (This is another reason popularity polls are shaky ground on which to launch bold organizing.) As unions have gained a fragile foothold at Amazon, the country’s second-largest private employer, the company has adjusted its tactics accordingly. The example of Staten Island Amazon organizer Chris Smalls, Blundell pointed out, taught executives that “that firing the wrong leader can backfire in a big way.”¹ Rather than retaliating against employees outright, Amazon has increasingly made cynical appeals to their self-interest. Dale Wyatt, an Amazon worker in Bessemer, Alabama, told me in 2022 that one of the company’s hired union busters had pulled out an old contract that the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union had negotiated at another workplace, comparing its wages and benefits unfavorably with existing ones at Amazon, as evidence that workers were better off without a union.

Any union organizer could counter these talking points with details about contractual protections and the ability to win higher wages in subsequent bargaining cycles. But union busters have seized on a hard truth: no one wants to join a weak union that bargains subpar contracts. This trend then becomes self-reinforcing: workers who are already part of such a union won’t support new organizing campaigns if they have little effect on their own everyday power on the job.

“If existing members are not confident in the union’s power to deal with their lives, then their support for external campaigns becomes more limited,” wrote veteran union organizers Peter Olney and Rand Wilson in 2015. With union density nearing rock bottom in key sectors, unions can’t hope to meet their basic mission of taking wages out of competition: nonunion employers can undercut union shops by paying lower wages, keeping the floor low for all workers in a given sector.²

In 2023, the UAW’s Stand Up Strike, with its bold mobilizations and lucrative wage gains, pointed a way out of this downward spiral. To win these historic contracts, the union blended a sectoral strategy — targeting auto manufacturing in the largely nonunion South — with the organic momentum generated by a strike against the Big Three automakers, going public with campaigns when workplaces had already reached a critical mass of union support. If unions are ever to rebuild their capacity to take wages out of competition, it will begin with sectoral campaigns that are both smartly targeted and rooted in worker-to-worker organizing.

But too many campaigns try to circumvent this hard, slow work by simply parachuting organizers into a strategically significant workplace, regardless of conditions on the ground. “A top-down campaign can’t conjure the militant desire for a union out of nothing,” notes Richard Yeselson, a writer and former union strategist. At the other extreme is “hot shop” organizing, in which already agitated workers invite a union to organize their workplace, and the union agrees to accept new members. This “general workers union” model can lead to amalgamations of disparate, disconnected shops, weakening a union’s sectoral power by chasing easy dues money. The Stand Up Strike offers a model for a more comprehensive organizing strategy, one that draws on the strengths of both sectoral organizing and momentum approaches while guarding against their risks.

Yeselson told me:

That’s what we’re seeing, in different ways, at the auto corporations and Starbucks. The UAW first demonstrated its power and savvy in a big contract fight, thus attracting workers at nonunion shops, which the union now buttresses and enables. In response to arrogant management foisting lousy working conditions, Starbucks workers generate rank-and-file, organic enthusiasm for unions, and SEIU then provides the logistical support of lawyers [and] communications people. It turns out “hot shops” express working-class energy and smarts, and the union can then come along and aggregate and institutionalize that solidarity.

The union busters — ever the keen observers of labor’s points of strength and weakness — have started to take notice. The management-side law firm Littler Mendelson warned in a 2022 report: “What was once a top-down approach, whereby the union would seek out a group of individuals, has flipped entirely. Now, individuals are banding together to form grassroots organizing movements where individual employees are the ones to invite the labor organization to assist them in their pursuit to be represented.”

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These forces from both outside (the neoliberal assault on labor rights and the structural upheavals of deindustrialization) and inside (organizational malaise and concessionary retreat) are often seen as the chief causes of labor’s decline and the barriers to its revival. Yet U.S. labor has also been hampered by its conflicted and sometimes hostile stance toward foreign-born workers. Nor is this problem separate from those of union democracy and rank-and-file power: if the cause of the working class does not stop at national borders, then neither can our organizing. A divided solidarity is none at all.

Overcoming these divisions requires a sober look at history. From backing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to Depression-era Mexican repatriation and anti-Filipino riots, to the massive Operation Wetback deportation of Mexican farmworkers in 1954, American unions have too often succumbed to the lure of nativism. Union leaders have at times fomented white resentment and allied with racist legislators in the name of protecting the interests of native-born workers. At the turn of the 20th century, the conservative mainstream of labor leadership saw immigrants as an outright threat. “Caucasian civilization will serve notice that its uplifting process is not to be interfered with in any way,” Samuel Gompers, founding president of the American Federation of Labor, wrote in 1905. “Caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by negroes, Chinamen, Japs or any others.” Nor are these reactions a thing of the distant past: in 1982, the AFL-CIO backed a bill in Congress that would target undocumented workers by fining their employers.

Nevertheless, key sectors of the labor movement have become more welcoming to immigrant workers. The AFL-CIO ultimately dropped its support for the bill under pressure from Latino advocates and community leaders. In 1990, SEIU organized 8,000 immigrant janitors in Los Angeles as part of the landmark Justice for Janitors campaign, which won union recognition even in the face of brutal police assaults on striking workers. In 1992, the Carpenters’ union organized over 2,000 mostly Mexican-born drywall workers across Southern California.³ In 2000, the AFL-CIO’s executive council voted to endorse a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The United Farm Workers has made amends for its ignominious “wet line” operation in 1973, when armed pickets attacked and intimidated undocumented immigrants crossing the border during a strike in Yuma, Arizona; and in 2006, the UFW supported the massive May Day marches for immigrant rights — a political strike that shut down multiple industries.⁴

But this broadly pro-immigrant consensus, built up over decades, now threatens to unravel. To protect fragile rights in a hostile environment, parts of the labor movement are retrenching behind nativism — even if this means allying with openly anti-worker forces. No union more embodies these contradictory dynamics than the Teamsters under President Sean O’Brien. In January, Trump spoke at Teamsters’ national headquarters in an effort to secure the union’s endorsement. (In the end, the union didn’t endorse any candidate in the presidential election.) “The unions and the Teamsters, if they don’t have [the southern border] closed down, they’re not gonna exist,” Trump told reporters afterward. “They’re not gonna be able to exist.”

In the following months, the Teamsters held town halls across the country where rank-and-file members spoke about the merits of each candidate. For many, Trump’s comment about Teamsters losing their jobs resonated more than fears of national right-to-work legislation.⁵ “If I had to choose between the union and country,” said one Trump-supporting Teamster, “I’ll choose the nation, because if these illegals take our jobs, there won’t be a union.”

O’Brien at first tried to push back, invoking the rhetoric of a “nation of immigrants.” “The Teamsters union supports immigrant workers because we all come from people that came from different countries,” O’Brien said after Trump’s speech at the union’s headquarters. But since then, he has courted racist xenophobes like Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Most notoriously, O’Brien spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention. After his RNC speech, O’Brien told the far-right commentator Sohrab Ahmari that “on the stuff that we can work together on, there’s no reason why a line in the sand should ever be drawn.” O’Brien won’t be the last union leader to take such a narrow view of trade unionism — and the far right is taking note.

O’Brien has been described as a “militant business unionist” for his aggressive, top-down strategy, launching bold contract fights and new organizing fronts across the country — a throwback, in some ways, to the union’s heyday before deregulation, when officers wore pressed suits and bargained hard. If the holiday strike by Teamsters-organized Amazon workers shows the relative strengths of this business-unionist approach, O’Brien’s flirtation with an openly anti-union administration reveals its flaws. For his part, O’Brien has cast himself as a political maverick, ready to do whatever it takes to safeguard the interests of his membership. (He often appears in public wearing a T-shirt that says “teamsters vs. everybody.”)

O’Brien accordingly justifies this ongoing footsie with Republicans as a response to his members’ will. That is a convenient alibi, since that “will” is itself shaped by union democracy, the interplay between workers and their elected leaders. The will of membership is not a forgone conclusion simply transmitted from the ranks to the leadership, but a more dynamic process — posing a question, presenting the stakes, and allowing members to decide the course of action. If, as A.J. Muste once wrote, unions must be both an army and a town hall, then this is what it means to create a democratic union culture. After the presidential election, United Commercial Workers Local 3000 President Faye Guenther said the union brought together hundreds of members to debate how to get on offense and defend the local’s 9,000 immigrant members, including preparing for a potential general strike in May 2028, recently called for by the UAW.

“Members debated how both parties have failed working people and how we need to act now to reevaluate labor’s role,” Guenther said. “This kind of debate is what can save our democracy and build something new from the ashes of the billionaire donor class controlling both the Democrats and Republicans. We wrote, we brainstormed, we fought and we did something that neither candidate did enough of — we listened to the fucking workers.”

Alongside the United Electrical Workers, Local 3000 was also among the first to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, an initial demand that later became a call to end military aid to Israel, backed by unions representing 6 million members.

Even the pre-election Teamster meetings, hastily organized and poorly attended, weren’t conducive to meaningful dialogue. In the end, O’Brien decided to hedge his bets and try to wrangle access no matter who won the election. But small rebellions have also bloomed. The Teamsters National Black Caucus formed a fragmented opposition, joined by Teamster Vice President At-Large John Palmer, to endorse the Democratic presidential ticket. This was followed by Teamsters Against Trump, an effort led by the longstanding rank-and-file movement Teamsters for a Democratic Union. And nationally, Teamsters joint councils and union locals representing more than 1 million members endorsed Kamala Harris. But “if Sean O’Brien thinks he can reach a rapprochement with Trump Republicans, he will find that it will be exceedingly hard to actually make a deal,” notes labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein. “No wing of capital … is willing to accommodate any actual policies that will make unions stronger or enhance the well-being of virtually any slice of the working class.”⁶

Still, the gravest damage of O’Brien’s miscalculation may be to the union’s own organizing. Rank-and-file Teamsters have been building links with Black and Latino workers nationwide as part of the effort to organize Amazon, where people of color and immigrants form a majority of the workforce. During the union’s recent nationwide strike against Amazon, workers at two of the company’s facilities in the Cincinnati area walked off the job spontaneously. Meanwhile, just 80 miles north in West Jefferson, Ohio, Haitian workers at an Amazon fulfillment center have won company praise for their back-breaking productivity, toiling 12-hour shifts stuffing boxes with goods. Wouldn’t these workers make a prime target for organizing?⁷ Instead, O’Brien became friendly with a Republican campaign that demonized the same Haitian immigrants in baldly racist terms. Most recently — on the eve of Trump’s deportation sweeps and the proposed imprisonment of 30,000 undocumented immigrants at Guantanamo Bay — O’Brien hosted Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley on his YouTube podcast. “I think the biggest problem is people are trying to protect illegal aliens that come over here and commit crimes” and “steal jobs” — ”and that’s unacceptable,” O’Brien said. “That’s right,” Hawley replied.⁸

Trump reenters the White House not only as an archetypal boss and bigot, but a known scab. He crossed a picket line of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees in 2004; during the UAW’s Stand Up Strike last fall, Trump spoke to nonunion auto-parts workers at the invitation of the company’s chief executive, part of a push by nonunion manufacturers against the transition to electric vehicles. Yet 43 percent of union households still voted for Trump despite the urgings of most union leaders. As Slaughter recently wrote in Labor Notes, “if union voters had listened to their officers, Trump’s numbers would have been in single digits.” But “unions weren’t strong enough, in numbers or in influence with their members, to make a difference in this election.”

This hasn’t stopped some union leaders from attempting a tactical triangulation with Republicans. O’Brien has used his access to Trump to lobby for former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Ore., to head the Department of Labor. Chavez-DeRemer was one of just three Republicans who co-sponsored the PRO Act, and while her record on labor is mostly one of quiescence rather than action, her support for federal education funding nevertheless places her to the left of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. As part of her own conciliatory outreach to Republicans, Weingarten not only celebrated Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination, but even flirted with the prospect of abolishing the Department of Education, a longtime priority of the libertarian Cato Institute and its ilk. “My members don’t really care about whether they have a bureaucracy of the Department of Education or not,” Weingarten told MSNBC.

Perhaps the most surprising overture came from UAW President Shawn Fain. Days before Trump’s inauguration, Fain wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post announcing that the union “needs to be at the table” when the United States-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement comes up for renegotiation in 2026. “We hope to find common ground” with Trump “on overhauling our devastating trade policies and rebuilding U.S. manufacturing,” Fain wrote, blaming both Democrats and Republicans. This was a jarring reversal from the leader who helmed the Stand Up Strike in 2023, and who in 2024 spoke at the Democratic National Convention wearing a T-shirt that read TRUMP IS A SCAB.⁹

Dennis Daggett, the executive vice president of the International Longshoremen’s Association (and heir apparent to his father, outgoing president Harold Daggett) praised Trump in December. “In over 25 years of working in Washington, I have never seen a Republican take up the mantle for working-class people. President-elect Trump proved me wrong yesterday,” Daggett wrote on Facebook. Trump reposted the note on his Truth Social network, adding that the “amount of money saved [by automation] is nowhere near the distress, hurt and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen.”

Trump had hit the right talking points, and in October, the ILA’s three-day strike won a promised hourly wage bump of $24 over six years and a return to the bargaining table on automation questions. The ILA has since reached a tentative deal for a six-year contract, for which, Daggett said, “President Trump gets full credit.”

Labor has been down this road before, notes Greg Nammacher, president of SEIU Local 26 in Minnesota, whose membership base is 80 percent immigrant workers. “Whether it’s the air traffic controllers union with Reagan in the 1980s or some of the trades with Scott Walker in Wisconsin in the early 2000s,” he said, “over and over again, we have seen that corporate-backed politicians will flirt with worker organizations in order to try and split us. But in the long run, they’ll absolutely take every opportunity to undercut those organizations.” The stakes go beyond short-term political gains or losses. “If we become a narrow trade union movement that is only trying to advocate for wages at work while the rest of our communities are dismantled,” Nammacher continued, “we will lose support with our own membership and will also become isolated as organizations and even more vulnerable to attack in the next round.”

On the rare occasions when labor representatives have held senior roles under Republican presidents, their time in office has been short, often ending in recriminations and denunciations of bad faith. In 1953, Chicago building trades official Martin Durkin served as labor secretary under President Dwight Eisenhower, part of the latter’s cabinet of “8 millionaires and a plumber.” Durkin tried to undo parts of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, including anticommunist loyalty oaths and bans on closed shops. But when an initially sympathetic Eisenhower came out against those reforms, Durkin resigned in disgust after less than nine months in office. A generation later came New York Building and Construction Trades Council president Peter Brennan. After the much-publicized “hard hat riot” against antiwar protesters in 1970, Republicans sought to court conservative sections of the building trades, led by Brennan, who threw his support behind Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential campaign and was duly rewarded with the labor secretary position in 1973. For a time, this unlikely alliance seemed to pay off. In the months before Nixon’s Watergate downfall, Brennan helped win Republican backing for a bill to allow unions to picket entire construction sites, which had also been banned under Taft-Hartley. Brennan’s successor, John Dunlop, a labor-friendly economist of what was then called “industrial relations,” thought he could consummate the deal, but was stymied when President Gerald Ford refused to sign the bill into law. Like Durkin before them, Brennan and Dunlop each lasted less than a year in office.

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As labor’s strength has waxed and waned over the decades, all union leaders seeking common cause with ruling-class politicians have come up against a simple fact: the United States is a class-divided society, and to win, the labor movement must fight along class lines. But today, only one class is on a war footing. The world’s richest people have already made out like bandits since Trump’s 2024 election; Elon Musk alone is now worth nearly half a trillion dollars, more than the GDP of most countries. Stock values have soared for companies such as the online payday-loan lender MoneyLion; private prisons, on expectations of mass jailing of immigrant workers; and cryptocurrency companies, which bet big on the election.

In the coming four years, the federal state will once again swing from sometime guardian to open enemy of workers’ rights. The symbolic choice of Chavez-DeRemer aside, Trump will appoint a majority of the five-member NLRB, further eroding its power to enforce labor protections. From the workplace to the boardroom to the White House, bosses at all levels have every interest in diverting workers’ anger from bosses themselves and toward their immigrant co-workers and neighbors, fracturing class solidarity and fomenting a racist nationalism.

“I doubt Trump has the interest or focus to make a serious effort to split labor — and provide the carrots to do it — the way Eisenhower or Nixon did,” Yeselson said. All the less reason for labor leaders to do the splitting for him.

Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations drew an analogy with the aftermath of 9/11 and the passage of the Patriot Act, which instilled fear in unions that they would be considered unpatriotic. “Instead of fighting back, [labor leaders] did what the AFL did in the ’20s — tried to prove to the government, ‘We’re not the troublemakers’,” Bronfenbrenner said. “And I think we’re going to see labor divide between those who challenge the government and those who kind of try to make themselves more palatable, thinking that that’ll save them.” On Jan. 8, the 2 million-strong SEIU announced it would rejoin the AFL-CIO, mending a 20-year split and growing the labor federation’s dues-paying membership to more than 10 million. The affiliation comes as part of efforts to defend immigrant workers against workplace raids and mass deportation. “Immigrant rights are worker rights, and this is a top priority for the labor movement,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told Bloomberg News. These are welcome steps, but as an organizing force, AFL-CIO remains little more than bureaucratic deadweight, so its actual role remains to be seen.

The next four years demand that the labor movement shift from this defensive crouch to militant offense. “It’s the job of the labor movement to encourage heightened worker militancy rather than try to hide out of sight,” United Electrical Workers President Carl Rosen said.

What does this look like? How can workers join militant struggle and political education, workplace organizing and independent political action? No one can dictate a class-struggle program; this can only arise from the pitched battles ahead, as workers wage them. There are no formulas and no guarantees. But here are a few things unions can do to rebuild working-class capacity to fight back. Hold strike schools across the country where workers can learn about open bargaining, building contract action teams and organizing marches on the boss. In the face of workplace raids targeting immigrant workers, organize defense pickets at work sites and in communities. Sponsor political education programs for union members on why the interests of the working class are opposed to those of the bosses and their billionaire pals. Build cross-border solidarity, because the workers’ movement is global in aspiration and membership.

Finally, labor can look to the inspiring history of immigrant workers’ own organizing. Despite the nativism of major unions, the period of forced Mexican repatriations in the 1930s was not just an episode of victimized immigrant workers. In these same years, historian Dana Frank notes, Mexican farm workers launched strikes alongside Japanese, Puerto Rican and Filipino workers, and “in 1933, their efforts [led to] a massive strike wave throughout California agriculture,” as “a total of 140,000 workers walked out in 140 different strikes, from berry pickers in El Monte to pea pickers in Santa Clara County.” This culminated “in a cotton strike in the San Joaquin Valley in which 12,000 workers — around three quarters of them Mexican and one-quarter white, joined by African Americans and Filipinos — all quit. The strikers succeeded in raising cotton wages by 25 percent,” Frank wrote, “at the very lowest point, economically, of the entire Depression.”

More recently, in 1994, California Gov. Pete Wilson tried to enlist teachers and healthcare workers to back Proposition 187, which would deny state social services to undocumented immigrants. But together with immigrant communities, these workers put up a fierce resistance: in March of that year, 10,000 union members and over 100,000 Latino protesters filled the streets of Los Angeles in a mass march against 187. “The battle against 187 was a moment that tested the fortitude of labor leaders,” wrote labor organizer Peter Olney, because “it was politically perilous to march against 187 with Mexicans and their flags and sombreros and mariachis.” While the measure ultimately passed, it was found unconstitutional a few years later. And above all, by taking a stand and embracing the risk of real solidarity, union leaders and members broadened their base and deepened their strength. Failure to do the same now will mean losing the next generation of union members.

People don’t take such risks for one another unless they feel implicated in a broader vision of social belonging and the common good. This in turn requires a militant class politics demonstrating — not just declaring — that our fates are tied through collective struggle. In past periods of anti-union backlash, labor has tended to retreat further into sectionalism and self-protection. Deepening and expanding class-struggle unionism isn’t a utopian dream, then, but a practical necessity. Wherever corporate power flees in search of cheap labor to exploit, it must be met with worker power, whatever its color or country.

As the late Mike Davis reminded us in “Old Gods, New Enigmas,” “the New Dark Ages require us to dream old dreams anew. There is a legend about a certain species of caterpillar that can only cross the threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly.”

1. This doesn’t mean the company has stopped retaliating altogether. In January, Amazon announced it would shutter seven warehouses across Quebec after workers there unionized. Rather than continue to employ workers directly, Amazon plans to revert to an earlier model of subcontracting out its distribution operations in the area. This drastic move was, perversely, a response to the strength of Canadian labor law: unlike in the U.S., Amazon would have been forced to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with its workers, or else enter arbitration. ↩︎
2. There are further nuances here. Moody notes that “most labor markets are regional in nature. That’s how the SEIU organized the L.A. janitors. Density is important but it can be overplayed. Low national density is more a sign of weakness than a cause. After all, most of the big upsurges in union growth have started when density was very low: 1886, 1901, 1933-1937. Furthermore, there are key dimensions to density, by industry and geography, that can be more important than national density.” ↩︎
3. When building trades workers raise concerns about unorganized immigrant workers, they shouldn’t simply be upbraided for playing into a nativist trap: cheaper nonunion labor, immigrant or otherwise, does undercut their bargaining power. But the answer is to organize would-be scabs on construction sites, not to exclude them. ↩︎
4. Today, as raids target farmworkers in California, the UFW is standing by undocumented workers, decrying attempts to sow fear. “It’s had a very chilling effect on the whole community,” said Antonio De Loera-Brust, a spokesman for the UFW. “There’s a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety for everyone with an undocumented loved one, which is a significant portion of the Latino community in Kern County.” Ahead of the 2018 midterms, six unions representing 3.5 million workers, including the Teamsters, came together to form Working Families United, a coalition to defend holders of Temporary Protected Status. ↩︎
5. The real extent of rank-and-file support for Trump is hard to gauge. In an informal online poll conducted by the union, almost 60 percent of Teamster voters opted for Trump, while just 34 percent chose Democrat Kamala Harris. Trump’s camp “pointed to the result as an effective endorsement from the union rank-and-file,” writer and Teamster Jason Flynn notes in Long-Haul magazine, but “in reality, neither side was able to generate significant enthusiasm or activity among members.” “Only 2.5 percent of our membership” took part in the poll, and “likely less than 3 percent of Teamsters’ roughly 1.3 million members participated … in any way” in the endorsement procedure. ↩︎
6. In this respect, O’Brien is not an outlier in the union’s recent history. “Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush all received the union’s endorsement for president,” Lichtenstein noted. Still, this loyalty has not been absolute. “In 2014, when Pennsylvania Republicans unsuccessfully tried to pass a bill depriving public-employee unions of the dues check-off,” Lichtenstein wrote, “the official Teamster Nation blog countered with a blast headlined, ‘We’re Teamsters, we’re Republican and we vote — but not for anti-worker politicians.’” ↩︎
7. That doesn’t mean ethnicity alone can defend against division, let alone nativism, as seen in the sharp shift toward Trump across demographic groupings in last year’s election. Immigrants such as Gompers himself or Latinos such as Cesar Chavez weren’t immune. Whatever the consolations of presumed ethnic and racial solidarities, the melanin content of people of color doesn’t make us less permeable to reaction. Solidarity can’t be assumed; it’s created in lived struggle. ↩︎
8. Teamsters for a Democratic Union has yet to address O’Brien’s remarks, but has issued a statement underlining the union’s commitment to defend members “regardless of their immigration status.” ↩︎
9. Even setting aside the political viability of this unholy alliance, a focus on trade agreements as culprits for offshoring misses the bigger picture. “The Big Three left the country for Mexico many decades ago, long before NAFTA and the USMCA trade agreements,” notes Jeffery Hermanson, former organizing director at the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center in Mexico. “It’s corporate greed that drives jobs offshore,” Hermanson said, “and I learned a long time ago that the best way to fight corporate greed and poverty wages is to organize the workers wherever they are.” The UAW has committed to aiding independent organizing of autoworkers in Mexico, where the mainstream labor movement is in the stranglehold of corporatist unions, and labor law reforms have been largely toothless. Yet a retreat behind nationalist walls, physical or economic, directly undermines these goals. “Without a complementary support of cross-border working-class solidarity,” Hermanson said, protectionist policy devolves into “a ‘patriotic’ defense of ‘our’ capitalists,” rather than an internationalist defense of workers.  ↩︎