For Labor, Caution Is Fatal

What we are witnessing is more than an administration trying to alter the direction of the country. This is the final nail in the coffin of an order that emerged from the Great Depression, the New Deal and World War II. It is vulnerable because it had ceased to protect workers and unions as finance capital reorganized the world around its priorities and inequality bloomed. As this order crumbles, workers and unions must play a leading role in ensuring that what comes next is more durable, just and democratic than what is now falling away around us.

Our goal can’t be to just limit the damage, slow the hemorrhaging and hope the Democrats get elected in 2026 so we can return to the slow and steady decline that labor has long faced under both parties. After all, labor continued to lose density under Biden with the most aggressively pro-union labor board in recent history. Returning to the status quo is both impossible and deeply undesirable. We can’t fall into the trap of defending a failed system; we need to articulate a vision of a country and world worth fighting for. Then we need to back that vision with the resources, strategies and tactics that make it possible for us to win.

We can imagine the formidable struggles we will likely face in the months and years ahead by looking back in history. We only need to look as close to home as America’s own segregated Jim Crow South, for example, to get a sense of how a racist, patriarchal, anti-union and authoritarian regime can be constructed within the confines of a nation that calls itself a democracy governed by the rule of law. 

What we will find in these parallels is both deeply disturbing and surprisingly hopeful. As challenging as the current situation is, those who went before us faced much worse: chattel slavery; laws that categorized union activity as as a criminal conspiracy; strikes deemed illegal; racial and gender discrimination upheld by the highest courts; employers who hired mercenary armies to fight unions; the violent repression of labor agitators; Gilded Age plutocrats as brazen as Elon Musk in purchasing political power. The list goes on. 

Given this dark past, it is not a coincidence that the American union movement was nearly destroyed multiple times. Economic downturns and aggressive employers combined in 1837 and 1873 to wipe out the first two efforts to build a nation union federation. The first durable federation, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), emerged in the 1880s out of the calamitous collapse of another failed effort, the Knights of Labor. And it took the near-destruction of the AFL in the 1920s and 1930s to plant the seeds of labor’s renewal in the form of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). We can draw hope from the knowledge that the union idea has proven astonishingly resilient despite all of the forces that have been arrayed against it. 

But importantly, this history suggests that unions are durable but also cautious organizations, usually averse to risk-taking except when their survival depends on it. Faced with a choice between trying to hold on to what they have amid continuously deteriorating circumstances, as the Knights of Labor attempted to do in the 1880s, or taking the risks necessary to build a new model, as the AFL decided to do in that moment, most unions have opted for caution — until the point when continuing to make that choice was obviously suicidal.

We appear to be rapidly approaching that tipping point. Almost everything that increases workers’ power is already illegal or likely will soon become so. In the public sector, increasing numbers of states will not only cut budgets but also outlaw collective bargaining, as Utah has just done. In the private sector, not only will the National Labor Relations Board be gutted, but corporations will also be emboldened by Trump’s rhetoric (like his call to fire strikers, in a live conversation with Elon Musk) to even more aggressively resist unionization and to break or domesticate existing unions. As it becomes increasingly difficult for unions to hold on to what they have, history suggests they must move aggressively to meet the present challenge or, like the Knights of Labor, be weakened to the point where they cannot even contemplate future resistance.

In the immediate future, most national unions will likely continue a cautious approach. At the outset, few elected national labor leaders will be willing to risk their positions of power and influence on behalf of a resistance that has no guarantee of success. We would be mistaken to expect them to do so, for those whose path to leadership was nurtured in the system now dying before our eyes will naturally be slow to recognize its death. Some will be afraid to ​“poke the bear,” hoping if they lay low they won’t be a focus of attacks. Others will offer only careful opposition, filing lawsuits and the like, fearing huge fines and government legal action if they launch protest strikes or encourage mass civil disobedience. But some who hesitate to lead themselves might be prepared to follow those who lead boldly, and some will be willing to take huge risks and act heroically.

When we look back in history, there are valuable lessons for us in how people organized during times of intense repression. In the pre-World War I era, unions defined themselves as fighting for industrial democracy — arguing you can’t have democracy if you don’t have a say in what happens where you work. To protest restrictions on free speech, the IWW organized mass illegal soapboxing actions that filled the jails. Industry-wide strikes in steel and other sectors, although often unsuccessful, laid the groundwork for the CIO to form industry-wide organizing committees in the 1930s. From there, a combination of strikes and plant occupations, supported by robust community organizing with tenants and others devastated by the Great Depression, led to millions of workers organizing.

How to organize and fight under oppressive circumstances is something that the Civil Rights Movement also teaches us. In 1960, when segregationists were defying Brown v. Board and no political will existed to actually break down Jim Crow segregation and McCarthyite repression, the young activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who put their bodies on the line with sit-ins jump-started movement activism and led to the breakthroughs of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Such strategies and tactics are worth reviving in this moment — alongside the innovative tactics that today’s activists can add to labor’s repertoire if they get the support they need.

Part of SNCC’s brilliance was their power structure analysis. Ella Baker, Bob Moses and other leaders knew that to build and exercise power, you needed to focus on the corporations and local power players that politicians take their marching orders from. SNCC’s research department looked at which corporations were profiting off segregation and propping up politicians. Then SNCC developed strategies and tactics to make these companies pay financial and reputational costs.

We face a terrifying future where the world’s richest man, who was born into a society (South Africa) that created its own brand of Jim Crow, revives and updates America’s apartheid. Elon Musk and the new tech oligarchy promise to create a techno-fascist future where wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of the elites at the expense of workers, women and people of color. We need to follow SNCC’s example and powermap the corporations and elites who are profiting, nationally and locally, from techno-fascism.

We then need to figure out how to make these actors pay a price. The Tesla Takedown actions across the United States and protests in Europe demonstrate that even the world’s richest man can be impacted by mass action — Tesla’s stock price is down 53% this year. 

We need to ask: How do we cut off their capital? How do we mobilize unionized workers in these companies toward strikes that demand both better conditions for themselves and for Common Good demands that benefit the broader community? And how do we organize non-union workers in them? We need to disrupt and isolate them, working to cut off pension fund investments, and state and local subsidies. And we need to be ready to use non-violent civil disobedience to maximize the impact. 

Like the CIO we need to occupy factories when we strike or develop our own innovative 21^st century ways of laying our bodies on the gears. We need to look at chokepoints in the economy and develop strategies and tactics to maximize economic impact by focusing on those chokepoints. We could shut down Silicon Valley for a day by blocking exit ramps and intersections. To do this kind of disruption at scale we need to organize and train an army of people willing to take direct action and participate in sit-ins and occupations. 

Imagine if in response to ICE raids at airports targeting immigrant workers, key airport workers stayed home for a day because it isn’t safe to work at an airport with ICE there. What if others sat in and blockaded the airport? We already have experience with this, having seen massive spontaneous demonstrations at airports to oppose Trump’s Muslim ban. The message and impact would be clear: You attack us, we will shut the airport in nonviolent protest.

Imagine if students and workers on campuses across the country ran campaigns demanding that university trustees either resign from boards or be kicked off if they are complicit in destroying the very universities they govern. Such complicity might include cozying up to Musk or Trump or Vance, donating to the Trump 2024 campaign, membership in the Heritage Foundation, or any other compromising ties to the architects and executors of dramatic cuts to much-needed research and university funding. And students and university workers could also demand that school endowments stop investing in corporations owned by Musk or anyone who is slashing university budgets.

Imagine public sector workers demanding that the $6 trillion of their pension capital be invested in housing and things that benefit workers — and no longer in corporations that are bad for workers and our communities.

Imagine logistic workers going on strike at Amazon and their allies blocking the highways around the distribution centers, making it impossible for goods to move.

Does this sound fanciful? Not only have unions and social movements done this in the past, they’ve done versions of it in recent history. You don’t need to go back as far as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to see how tying up a transit system demonstrates worker power; those of us involved in the Justice for Janitors campaign block bridges into D.C. multiple times in 1990s, effectively shutting down much of the city in a successful effort to win a citywide contract. Nor do you need to go back to Flint in 1937 to see how effective a sit-down strike could be; the UE occupied Republic Windows and Doors during the Great Recession, focusing the nation’s attention on the plight of working people at the dawn of the Obama era. Nor do you need to go back to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 to see how direct action by a broad coalition can make its presence felt; in 1999 the labor movement joined a wide array of allied groups, including environmentalists, in shutting down Seattle and a meeting of the World Trade Organization. Recreating that ​“Battle of Seattle” direct-action coalition is a real possibility in this moment, for this administration is hell-bent on not only undermining worker power but — with the encouragement of oil and gas interests — trashing environmental standards.

Who will lead this? All of us — the people and organizations that have made the choice to challenge the billionaires and tech overlords. During times of intense repression we need to look at decentralized and distributed organizing built in local communities from the ground up. Centralized command structures are too cumbersome to meet this moment and are too easily shut down during times of repression.

We know from the Minnesota model that we have the capability to create a network large enough to act together, decisively and strategically. Our task is to build one that can act in ways capable of arresting and reversing the unfolding destruction of both our democracy and our movement that too many are content to merely witness and decry. Because the full consequences of the current decimation of the federal government’s most vital services will not be felt for months or even years, those who will be adversely impacted — the vast majority of the country — have not yet been drawn into the fight. We must reach them and begin to organize them around a program of active resistance. For some that will mean civil disobedience and risking arrests; for others who aren’t in a position to take those risks it will mean capacity-building and support. It is time to make a choice: Gamble that we can somehow ride this out until Trumpism runs it course and try to rebuild from the ruins — or take courage, wisdom and resolve from our own history and not only nip authoritarianism in the bud, but together begin building the road to the promised land.

For their feedback on an earlier draft of this piece, I’m grateful to: Kate Andrias, Rob Baril, Saqib Bhatti, Vonda Brunsting, Bob Bussel, Alex Caputo-Pearl, Andrea Dehlendorf, Becky Givan, Bill Fletcher Jr., Jeff Grabelsky, Will Jones, Nelson Lichtenstein, Stephanie Luce, Nancy MacLean, Joe McCartin, Greg Nammacher, Liz Perlman, Elizabeth Parisian, Bill Ragen, Jono Shaffer, Marilyn Sneiderman, Bahar Tolou, and Jonathan Westin.