It’s clear that Trump and his allies are intent on reversing hard-fought worker protections.
It’s equally clear that we need a robust labor movement ready to not just defend against the attacks of anti-union politicians and their corporate funders, but to proactively build a diverse and dynamic base that can hold onto the gains we’ve made and keep winning in hostile times.
Since its inception, the U.S. labor movement has fought with the odds stacked against it.
At a time when Chinese and Chinese American workers were denied jobs in unionized factories, Sue Ko Lee organized garment workers in San Francisco’s Chinatown, forming the Chinese Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in 1938. Dorothy Bolden, a Black woman raised in the Jim Crow South founded the National Domestic Workers Union in 1968, bringing together struggles for feminism, racial justice, and labor rights — years before the Wages for Housework movement began. As we face the return of an anti-worker administration, it’s wise to study the unlikely victories of yesterday’s labor movement and the ability of its leaders to recruit workers who were sidelined from labor politics.
Figures like Sue Ko Lee and Dorothy Bolden offer the modern labor movement key characters in a shared origin narrative, precedents that indelibly, if imperceptibly, shaped the disruptive and defiant organizing efforts of the last five years. The very notion of labor’s resurgence implies our inheritance of the sacrifices, the acts of solidarity of thousands of workers, the celebrated and the unnamed alike.
The recent growth of the labor movement also owes much to well-known contemporary leaders, like Shawn Fain and Sara Nelson and Chris Smalls, people who carry on the legacy and stretch the tradition of worker struggle. But in order to keep growing — and keep building worker power — we need to raise the profile of and support the next generation of labor organizers who will help push the movement to be as diverse, as energized, and as creative as ever.
It’s why In These Times, with support from Omidyar Network, decided to launch the Labor Organizer of the Year award, designed to celebrate and support emerging labor leaders — and inspire workers to rise up together.
Alex Han is Executive Director of In These Times. He has organized with unions, in the community, and in progressive politics for two decades. In addition to serving as Midwest Political Director for Bernie 2020, he’s worked to amplify the power of community and labor organizations at Bargaining for the Common Good, served as a Vice President of SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana for over a decade, and helped to found United Working Families, an independent political organization in Illinois that has elected dozens of working-class leaders to city, state and federal office. Most recently he was executive editor of Convergence Magazine.
