Believe It Or Not, Unions Have Bigger Problems than the 2024 Election

This week, the National Labor Relations Board announced that the number of union petitions the agency received rose 27% in the past year, and that the figure has fully doubled since 2021. It is proof that a good government can help satisfy the public desire for unions. It is evidence that organized labor’s investment in the Biden administration has, in some concrete way, paid off.

Yet for the long-suffering labor movement, it has another, more ominous parallel to the 2024 presidential elections: The best rewards that the Democratic Party has to offer may not be enough to solve labor’s problems. The longer-term trends are more worrying than the current good news is reassuring. 

Did Joe Biden earn his self-proclaimed title as the ​“most pro-union president” of our lifetimes? Sure, probably. His genuine attentiveness to union demands certainly exceeded that of any Democratic president in the past half century. His NLRB, under the leadership of Jennifer Abbruzzo, has worked mightily to make labor law both friendlier to workers, and something that actually gets enforced – at least within the strictures of that agency’s inadequate resources. His FTC, under Lina Khan, has attacked corporate power with unprecedented fervor. Biden shook loose billions to save union pensions and stood on a picket line with striking auto workers and notably did not use his power to shut down the recent longshoremen’s strike, when he could have. (He did crush the railroad workers’ right to strike in 2022 – a conspicuous sellout of the labor movement, but one that all of his political peers would have done as well.) 

The PRO Act, which would revolutionize America’s broken labor laws in a way that might truly revive organized labor’s power, did not pass during the Biden administration, despite being the stated top legislative priority of the labor movement. Even without a crystal ball I can tell you that the PRO Act will never pass until the filibuster is abolished. It is too substantial, its reforms too meaningful. Both the Republicans and the more pro-business Democrats would be pressured to an extreme degree to do anything to stop it. Any conversation about the PRO Act must therefore also be a conversation about ending the filibuster. Until unions make it clear to their political allies that these things are a package deal, it will be easy for Democrats to promise their support without having to do anything too controversial. The AFL-CIO could save itself a great deal of empty words by changing its conversation about the PRO Act into a conversation about the filibuster – a conversation that might actually do some good. 

The greatest political value of the PRO Act at the present moment is that it is a handy yardstick for understanding which politicians are and are not aligned with labor. It is the quickest way to check whether the pretty words coming out of a politician’s mouth about their love for the working class are true or false. Failure to support the PRO Act is the closest thing that we have to a functional bullshit detector for labor issues. And the 2024 election season demands such a tool more than ever. 

A Donald Trump victory in November is a scary thing to contemplate. But Trump is old, and his term will be up in four years, and sooner or later he will be gone for good. There is an even scarier scenario that the labor movement faces in this election: The possibility that more American workers will allow their political allegiance to drift definitively away from the interests of organized labor. The myth of a ​“working class Republican Party”--a thin cover for anti-immigrant scaremongering, a scam for in which politicians who work for billionaires put on plaid shirts and ride in pickup trucks and lure voters away from the Democratic Party – is, I’m sorry to say, proving to be more persuasive than any of us would hope. Union members still vote most Democratic, but that gap is shrinking. A recent poll found that Trump is winning among union members in the swing state of Pennsylvania. This should make every union in America nauseous. And then, it should make them look in the mirror? 

Here is one thing that we can say for sure about union members who vote for Trump: The fact that they are union members is not the most important part of their own identity. If it were, they could be easily persuaded not to vote for Trump, a literal billionaire scab who we have already seen act like a typical anti-labor Republican during his term in the White House. Hell, JD Vance gave a speech opposing the PRO Act just a few days ago! The interesting question here is not whether these guys are full of shit when they ask union members for support; the interesting question is why many union members care so little about being union members that they allow themselves to be tempted into the Republican camp. Their competing identities – as macho guys, or as racists, or as anti-elites, or as Christians, or whatever – have overtaken any hold that their identity as a union member may have had on their hearts and minds. That is a problem that cannot be solved by any politicians. It can only be solved by the labor movement itself. 

This trend, which has the potential to decimate the already tenuous toehold that organized labor has in Washington, is a blaring siren alerting unions that they must drastically improve on two fronts. The first is in the political education of their members. Clearly, endorsements by almost every union president are not that convincing to a significant portion of union members. Why? Well, in many cases, the unions are not democratically run, they do not frequently meet with and solicit the political input of members, and the members feel alienated from the decisions of leadership, causing them to care little for who their union president wants them to vote for. The process of democratizing the endorsement process, though, carries with it the need for unions to act not just as workplace negotiators, but as schools–for unions to take seriously the task of saying to members, ​“We have studied these issues, we have met with politicians, we have lobbied in Washington, and here is our power analysis, and here are our friends and enemies, and here is why, and here is the path forward.” Unions need political discussion groups. Unions need book clubs. Unions need labor colleges. Unions need to embody the practice of small-d democracy, to become the natural place that their members turn to when it is time to study politics and debate politics and participate in politics. Unions need to, in essence, become their own form of civil society. Lazy, institutional, top-down unions that do not constantly work to engage members will see their members drift away and, sometimes, drift into the welcoming arms of Donald Trump. 

Second, and even more importantly, unions need to organize many, many new union members. Organized labor has wasted the presidential term of a friendly, pro-union president by allowing union density to decline during the time that Biden has been in office. You often hear unions bragging about the fact that public opinion polls say that their popularity is at a 60-year high. What you do not hear them bragging about is the fact that union density has dropped from 10.8% in 2020 to 10.0% today. What use is popularity if nine out of ten working people don’t even have a union? Nothing – nothing – is as important to the American labor movement as turning around the decline of union density. By that metric, the past four years have been squandered. And there is no reason to think that the political landscape of the next four years will be as friendly as the years that just slipped by. 

Nobody quite knows if Kamala Harris would be as solicitous to unions as Joe Biden was. But we all know that she would be infinitely better than Trump. So we had better hope that she wins. If she does, it is not a sign to celebrate. It is a sign for organized labor to work. Unions cannot say that they will start organizing widely once the PRO Act is passed; it will take widespread organizing and the turnaround of union density to build enough power to end the filibuster and pass the PRO Act. Unions cannot say they will take political education seriously if there is a political crisis; they have to ceaselessly educate members in order to avoid the political crisis in the first place. Above all, the labor movement needs to wake up to the peril of its own situation. A Harris victory is nothing but a temporary reprieve. We’ve wasted too many promising years already. We will organize, or we will die.