In a country that prides itself on its tradition of free speech, it should be a shock that so many Americans live in fear of joining a union or even speaking about it at work. The overall unionization rate was just 11.2 percent in 2023, a small drop from the year before. (The rate is about 6.9 percent in the private sector and 36 percent in the public sector.) Surveys show that almost half of non-union workers would like to be in a union. It’s the most economically sensible thing for workers to do. But, because forming a union takes nerve, there is a lot of cognitive dissonance. People say things like: “I want to be in a union, I’d like to be, but I’m afraid,” or “I’ve got so much going on, I just can’t get involved.”
And so they look elsewhere for another, less demanding movement to join. Among white hourly wage workers, this often plays out as a rejection of the Democratic Party and an embrace of MAGA populism. Trump’s rant against the world, and especially immigrants, becomes, for too many of these workers, a vicarious outlet for the anger they’re too afraid to express at work. In fact, one might think of this phenomenon as two rival labor movements trying to win over the working class, each out to eliminate the other. One is the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) kind—the old-fashioned kind described and blessed in papal encyclicals. The other is the Trump movement, which, thanks to the secret ballot, takes no courage at all, but would do its best to shrink the AFL-CIO if it were back in the White House. Which of these two rival labor movements will prevail is one of the things this 2024 election may decide.
A fine new book, The Hammer, by the labor journalist Hamilton Nolan, is an update on the non-Trump labor movement, a chronicle of its helplessness, and a call to action. It would be worth reading even if it weren’t so fine—because there is now so little in the press about the day-to-day wins and losses of labor. Traveling all over the country, Nolan introduces us to child-care workers in California, culinary workers in Las Vegas, and Nabisco factory workers in Portland, Oregon, among many others. I am a union-side labor lawyer and found, to my embarrassment, how little I knew, or how much I had forgotten, about labor struggles outside of my own city.
Because I have learned so much from Nolan—because he has met so many different workers and reported on them so well—it feels churlish to argue with anything in this book. And all the more so, since the claim I find myself resisting appears near the end of the book in the acknowledgments section. There, Nolan remarks, “The coolest thing about the labor movement is that it offers anyone a chance to be a hero.” Close to fifty years ago, when I first became a labor lawyer, that’s what attracted me, too. But in my cranky old age, it’s the thing I most dislike. Other rich countries are somehow able to have labor movements without anyone having to be a hero, much less a martyr, and can function day to day without a Joe Hill or Norma Rae turning themselves into a sacrificial offering.
As the subtitle suggests, Nolan wrote this book to challenge labor—the AFL-CIO in particular—to reclaim its soul and put more effort into organizing. Yes, he also wants labor unions to be smarter about their strategy, but most of all, he just wants them to try harder. In his view, many, if not most, of the sixty unions that make up the labor federation known as the AFL-CIO are either inert or could do more. Various of these member-unions have retreated into what Nolan rightly calls Fortress Unionisms. It is true that better leadership would help. Nolan singles out Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, as just the person who should be heading up the AFL-CIO, and describes her failed attempt to do so. Nolan believes that the labor movement, which offers everyone a chance to be a hero, needs a hero to head it. And those—mainly on the Left—who have already been the heroes need to double down and become even more heroic.
I am all for labor activists trying harder, but it will take a lot more than that. Under current law, it is impossible for the AFL-CIO and SEIU to get up to a unionization rate of 30 or even 20 percent. At this point, only the federal government can jolt labor out of its inertia. To see why, look at the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers (UAW). Both have become more militant because the federal government—specifically, a U.S. Attorney—forced them into consent decrees to let rank-and-file members directly elect their top officers. These federal prosecutors may not know the difference between a union and an onion, but we can thank the U.S. Department of Justice for rewriting the constitutions of the Teamsters and UAW so as to give ordinary union members control, thereby pushing both unions to the Left.
It has often been so. In the late 1930s, the federal government, by changing the rules, played a huge role in the first big push for union membership. It was partly the passage of the Norris-LaGuardia Act, the removal of injunctions against strikes, and then the Wagner Act that allowed the labor movement to flourish. Later, in the 1940s, the federal government played an even bigger role in the second push for union membership. During World War II, the U.S. government commandeered most of the economy and required companies that were now effectively under its control to sign contracts with unions.
Why has the federal government been so bad at helping labor in more recent times? The single biggest reason has been the streamlined filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate, which has been used to block at least four major attempts at labor-law reform. Most recently, two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, allowed the filibuster to kill a reform bill that would have transformed the country. It’s important to note that both Manchin and Sinema were in favor of the bill itself, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO). They just didn’t think it was worth lifting the filibuster rule—which requires sixty votes, not fifty—to adopt the PRO Act, which had easily passed in the House of Representatives. (During the Obama administration, the Democrats briefly had sixty votes in the Senate, but they lost that super-majority before a labor bill could get to the Senate floor.)
So, as dispiriting as it may sound, the federal government, or Congress, can decide to a large degree the size and kind of labor movement it wants—big or small, autocratic or democratic—but if it does nothing to help the movement grow, then the alternative “labor” movement led by Trump, or someone like him, will eventually win. This means that the fate of labor depends on electing lots of Democrats (liberal ones, woke ones, not-so-woke ones, anyone to the left of Manchin) who, however clueless or indifferent they may otherwise be about the labor movement, can be counted on to change the filibuster rule itself so that the Senate can pass a bill like PRO. The challenge will be to cut down the version of the legislation that the House already passed to prepare it for an inevitable challenge in the U.S. Supreme Court. In my view, the kind of labor bill most likely to survive such a court challenge would be one limited to creating a civil right, enforceable in courts, with remedies like damages, jury rights, and legal fees. A civil-rights act for labor would let the heroes in Nolan’s book sue for being discriminated against on the basis of union membership, or even bring class actions, with the same powerful legal remedies that are now available for discrimination on the basis of gender or race.
I understand why the young are so turned off by electoral politics. We can agree that many elected legislators are phonies. But don’t expect to build worker
power without their help. The Democratic Party would have delivered the equivalent of the PRO Act three times over if enough of the young or the Left had turned out to vote. Any young leftist who sits out the November election, or who fails to vote for the Democratic candidate, has cast a vote for union-busting.
In the meantime, I wouldn’t put much hope in a more militant AFL-CIO. If a leader like Sara Nelson were to become president of “the Fed”—a kind of front office for the member-unions—she would be like the captain of a ship held captive by its crew. It has been that way with others who took the job. Of course, there are probably some wonderful people in that front office, and they’re no doubt doing their best. For all I know, the same thing could be said for the Roman Curia, but that, too, is a poor place from which to expect big change.
If anything gives me hope for the future of labor, it’s the young, to whom Nolan’s book is addressed. The young have brought a new energy to the labor movement, and it is time for the old to get out of their way. Today, many young people with college degrees and even PhDs are in unions. Grad students at Harvard and Berkeley, now members of the UAW, helped elect Shawn Fain as president. That election, for which we have the young to thank, really did reclaim the soul of the UAW. What heartens me is that a few of these highly educated members of the labor movement may one day hold real power, in business and politics, and will remember the days when they were in the union. Or so one hopes. For now, though, it is hard to be optimistic. The rich have a hammer, and always will. It is a cause of grief, for me and many others, that, if the Republican presidential candidate should win in November, working people will be even farther off from having a hammer of their own.
The Hammer
Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor
Hamilton Nolan
Hachette Books
$30 | 272 pp.
