Resisting Trumpism Can Revive the U.S. Labor Movement
The array of attacks on democracy and workers’ rights present an opportunity to expand labor’s power—if unions are willing to seize it.
Stephen Lerner and Joseph A. McCartin
The U.S. labor movement, like the nation at large, stands at a crossroads. The next few years might well determine whether the United States descends into an era of “electoral autocracy.” We believe this period will also set the parameters of the union movement’s power and influence for years to come, for the state of democracy and worker organization have long been deeply intertwined.
For decades the forces that have steadily eroded effective democracy and increasingly marginalized organized labor have exacerbated each other, making us vulnerable to the authoritarian danger we now face. Yet that very danger also represents an opportunity to overcome deep-seated institutional inertia, drawing elements of a cautious labor movement out of their defensive crouch, and helping them devise forms of struggle that might both revive the labor movement and renew American democracy.
President Donald Trump’s second term in office has, in a way, broken a spell. For years the pre-Trump status quo kept labor locked in a pattern of slow decline even as democracy was increasingly stifled and abridged by voter suppression, gerrymandering, filibusters, and the overweening power of organized money. But the decades-old dysfunctional status quo that gave rise to Trumpism is now crumbling under the weight of the most lawless, antidemocratic, rights-trampling administration this county has seen since the 19th century.
History suggests that fighting to defend and revive democracy in its moment of maximum peril can create a window of opportunity for labor. Past experience — both in the United States and other nations — teaches us that, when unions fight to defend democracy and win, they position themselves for periods of explosive growth and increased worker power. For its own sake and that of our democracy, it is imperative that the U.S. labor movement grasp this lesson and seize the window of opportunity that is now being opened by the urgent needs of this moment.
Moving beyond magical thinking
It’s clear that the crisis facing rights-based democracy is deepening. Over the past year, immigrants and the neighbors and coworkers who stood in solidarity with them endured a murderous paramilitary occupation in Minneapolis, Chicago and other cities across the country. The nation has been plunged into war in Iran without prior input from Congress, let alone a formal declaration of hostilities. The president has suggested that the federal government should seize control of the upcoming midterm elections.
This all comes on top of the Supreme Court’s relentless assault on workers’ union rights. And a long list of other corrupt, cruel, and coarse outrages too numerous to name crowd daily newsfeeds even as a worsening affordability crisis has undermined the stability of working-class households and caused working people to wonder whether the system is irretrievably broken.
While our democracy’s crisis deepens, the national labor movement has yet to play a leading role in the resistance against ascendant authoritarianism. By seizing the opportunity to play such a role in the year ahead, labor has the opportunity to reverse its decades-long slide toward irrelevancy by taking up an indispensable role in preserving, expanding, and deepening rights-based democracy.
By fighting to reconstruct our democracy in the face of the mortal threat it now faces, labor might transform itself from a fading force, whose structure and outlook still bear the imprint of the 19th- and 20th-century struggles that birthed it, into a rejuvenated movement ambitious enough to give workers the powerful voice they deserve in the 21st century.
Unfortunately, a specter haunts the labor movement at this crucial juncture: the magical thinking that if unions can just survive the Trump era they can help restore a kind of pre-Trump normalcy after he leaves office. The prevailing sentiment among labor’s leaders seems to be that, if they can just help their allies regain control of Congress later this year, they will be able to contain the damage Trump has wrought and coalesce behind an alternative in 2028 that can roll back Trumpism.
As important as the coming elections are, unions should firmly reject the comforting delusion that they can recover through the ballot box power they have lost in the workplace. For if such electoral victories are unaccompanied by a revived, reorganized labor movement, they will leave workers and unions in a situation no different from the one they faced prior to Trump’s rise.
If it is to have a viable future, labor must not merely survive but capitalize on Trump’s disruption of longstanding norms, assumptions, and institutions, many of which no longer operate to labor’s benefit — if they ever did — to advance a bold 21st century vision of inclusive solidarity, equality, rights, and democracy.
Turning crisis into opportunity
How labor might take advantage of Trumpism’s authoritarian excesses to advance such a vision was put on display in Minnesota this winter, where local labor organizations drew on years of experience to play a central convening role in the resistance to Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invasion. Unions of janitors, teachers, healthcare workers and others helped coalesce a resistance that included worker centers, faith communities and clergy, community organizations, immigrants’ rights groups, small businesses, and caring neighbors. Protesters turned out by the tens of thousands in subzero temperatures, religious leaders endured arrest in acts of civil disobedience, and witnesses by the thousands turned their cellphones into a 21st century arsenal of democracy.
That resistance was built on a shared common-good analysis of power and a recognition of the increasingly baneful influence of billionaires over our politics and economy. Protesters targeted not only ICE, but corporations like Target and Hilton that have either remained silent or openly abetted and profited from Trump’s authoritarian power grab.
Make no mistake: the formal end of “Operation Metro Surge” scarcely indicates a waning of this administration’s authoritarian ambitions. Unresolved issues regarding the limits of ICE’s legal authority, the masking of agents, and the wearing of bodycams that have led to a funding fight in Congress will continue to elicit protest and resistance in the streets. In the meantime, new fronts are likely to open in coming months as the president disregards all restraints on his power to deploy military power abroad and pushes an effort to “nationalize” the midterm elections at home.
As labor movement leaders contemplate the likely conflicts that might emerge in coming months, they should consider lessons from what happened in Minnesota as well as other cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles where local unions also played important roles in mobilizing resistance. They should also learn from the experiences of unions in other nations that successfully resisted authoritarian regimes.
The stories of Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea are cases in point. In these countries labor movements joined and helped lead the struggles against dictatorship, authoritarianism, and apartheid. In each case, when democracy won out, unions saw massive increases in membership. During Brazil’s transition to democracy in the mid-1980s, worker participation in strikes jumped ten-fold and Brazil’s labor federation, Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), founded during this period, surged in membership to over 15 million in 1990.
When South Korea’s dictatorship fell in 1987, a period of militant worker struggle ensued as the number of strikes jumped and union membership ballooned by a third over a two year span. In South Africa, the labor movement played a key role in the fight against apartheid, and trade union membership grew dramatically, up from 1.4 million workers and 18 percent density in 1985 to 3.8 million and 58 percent by 1998. What’s more, these growth spurts created enough worker power to erect union bulwarks that prevented backsliding into authoritarianism in subsequent years.
In Brazil, labor rallied to defeat Jair Bolsonaro at the polls in 2022, then opposed his post-defeat coup attempt and supported his successful prosecution. Similarly, South Korean unions played a vital role in defeating an attempted coup in 2024 by threatening a general strike.
As these examples suggest, and as scholars have long noted, labor movements — no matter their national context — tend to expand not in linear fashion but by quantum leaps. The British labor historian Eric J. Hobsbawm described these episodes as “discontinuous” and “explosive” bursts that occur when circumstances force “qualitative innovations in the movement.” Battling authoritarians has necessitated such innovations in many national contexts, and unions grew from such engagements. When unions aligned with democratic resistance forces and succeeded in undermining authoritarian regimes, their victories allowed workers to witness and feel their collective power. Confrontations with authoritarianism in the streets almost inevitably translated into militancy, collective action, and increased organization in the workplace.
The U.S. labor movement’s history bears out that pattern. While Americans have never witnessed a battle with authoritarianism quite like the ones that erupted in South Africa, Brazil, and South Korea, an analogous incubation of explosive growth took place during times when the U.S. labor movement aligned itself with struggles to defend democracy against what were perceived as existential threats.
A Civil War waged to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the Union in the 1860s triggered what W.E.B. Du Bois called a vast “general strike” in which the enslaved transferred their labor “from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader” even as that war fueled the expansion of the national trade unions that would later form the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
The effort to “make the world safe for democracy” during World War I likewise provided the setting for experimentation with industrial unionism that paved the way for the later formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). And the forging of an American “arsenal of democracy” against fascism during World War II led directly to the high-water mark of American union organization.
Pivoting toward action
The kind of quantum leaps in union growth and worker power that happened when the U.S. movement linked its fortunes to the future of democracy in the past can happen again. In the growing resistance to Trumpism, we are already seeing glimmers of how this could occur in our time. Unions and allied labor and community organizations in Minnesota provided the backbone of the resistance in Minnesota; employees in the largest and most influential technology labs are confronting bosses who are selling their technology to the government for domestic surveillance and global war; higher education unions are challenging attacks on free speech on university campuses.
Flashes of resistance like these are multiplying. Yet such sparks will not fuel a major breakthrough unless unions at every level, from locals to internationals, embrace the fight against Trump’s authoritarian, billionaire-serving regime — and defend democracy by challenging the corporations and Silicon Valley technofascists that are shaping and profiting from Trump’s policies.
Such opposition must go beyond an electoral strategy for 2026 and 2028. Subverting the Trump regime’s efforts to suppress the vote and defeating his allies at the polls will be a pyrrhic victory if his Silicon Valley and corporate allies maintain their size and power. Should the Democrats regain Congress and the White House, the same corporations that have aligned with Trump will be working to sabotage pro-worker policies, redoubling their AI-obsessed, job-threatening, antidemocratic agenda.
As the experience of other nations and the failure of our own post-Civil War Reconstruction remind us, elites and economic structures that benefit from authoritarian power don’t vanish when anti-democratic regimes crumble — they regroup. We cannot allow such a regrouping to occur post-Trump, for as we have seen from the last 50 years of labor decline under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, a return to the pre-Trump status quo offers no hope for workers or labor. Naming and challenging the economic actors aligned with Trump now is therefore critical if we are to weaken their post-Trump grip on power.
Although their critics have often suggested that U.S. unions have tied their fortunes too closely to politics, in truth U.S. labor has been reluctant to take up the kind of big political issues that have often moved workers into the streets (and built workers’ movements) in other democracies. At this moment we should not be surprised if many national unions hesitate to act decisively. Nor should we expect their leaders to be at the forefront, for despite critics’ endless talk of “labor bosses,” the movement has never functioned effectively as a top-down, command-and-control institution.
Rather, the national movement has tended to respond opportunistically to openings that it lacked the institutional will or unity of purpose to create. In the present crisis, local unions in cities around the country, through the common good alliances they are building to fight ICE, support beleaguered federal workers, and demand that billionaires begin paying their fair share, are beginning to create the kind of opening that could conceivably pull the larger movement into the fight.
Evidence on the ground in places like Minnesota already suggests that well-conceived actions by forward-leaning coalitions-of-the-willing can open windows of opportunity and create permission structures capable of drawing more cautious mainstream organizations into the fight. The Minnesota AFL-CIO did not initiate the remarkable “Day of Truth & Freedom,” which triggered a virtual economic shutdown of Minneapolis on January 23, as tens of thousands of residents stayed away from work, school, and shopping. Yet the organizing and alignment-building that preceded that event won the state federation’s support in the days before the action, producing a much bigger impact than its initial organizers had hoped for.
There are ways forward-leaning unions and their allies can replicate this effect in other settings by constructing campaigns that unmask the corporations that are colluding with the Trump administration’s authoritarian push. Focusing on key sectors and geographies, and engaging in calculated acts of disruption and nonviolent resistance, can not only erect defenses against the administration’s aggression but also set the stage for a post-Trump organizing surge.
We see three elements as crucial to this strategy. The first is defining our targets expansively and attacking the financial roots of their power. We need a shared analysis of who has power in our communities and nationally, including the key Silicon Valley titans who openly advocate rolling back democracy and expanding an all-seeing surveillance state.
Having identified these present-day “malefactors of great wealth,” as they were called after the Progressive Era, we need to demand that worker pension funds (state and local government workers’ pension assets alone top $6 trillion) cease investing in these corporations and their anti-worker, anti-democratic agenda. We also need to articulate a platform and visionary policy agenda that focuses on breaking up and limiting their economic and political power. We must find ways to tax their hoarded wealth, reinvesting the revenues in our struggling workers and austerity-starved communities.
A second element involves moving the labor movement into a fighting posture. The past half century has taken a debilitating toll on the movement’s willingness and capacity to engage in collective action. In 1955, the year the AFL-CIO was formed, the equivalent of 12.1 percent of union members engaged in a major work stoppage. That level of union militancy vanished long ago in the United States. During the last 25 years, the annual average of participants in major work stoppages has been equal to only 1 percent of U.S. union members. (The high point of militancy in that period came during the 2018 #Red For Ed upheaval when the equivalent of 3.3 percent of union members struck, a mere fraction of 1950s-level militancy.)
If it is difficult to imagine a revival of organized labor without a revival of worker militancy, it is even harder to envision an effective opposition to authoritarianism without it. Experts on resisting authoritarianism theorize that 3.5 percent of a population needs to actively join a resistance for it to succeed. If so, then labor will need to massively overperform if we are to reach that threshold. Labor can play this role only if it begins to rebuild its badly atrophied capacity for collective action. Unions can begin to recover that capacity by aligning contract dates and strikes, crafting common good bargaining demands that enlist public support for those struggles, and planning national no-work, no-school, no-shopping efforts like the one Minnesotans pulled off on January 23, and as the May Day Strong movement is now doing.
Finally, we need organizing committees to lead large-scale drives in crucial sectors while linking these efforts to the goal of breaking up the big companies that are increasingly dominating our economy and politics alike. As we confront the most aggressive consolidation of capital and economic power this nation has ever seen, our goal cannot be only to unionize the behemoths that are reorganizing our society — we must demand their vast monopoly power be diminished and made accountable to the public good.
There is no doubt that democracy and workers’ rights face an existential threat at this moment. Yet that very threat, and the sense of urgency it has spawned, have created an opportunity we could not have engineered on our own. It has roused growing numbers to the defense of democracy, glaringly exposed the dangers of unchecked corporate power, and catalyzed actions within pockets of the labor movement that have a potential to spread and become transformative.
In the years immediately ahead, if more unions begin to seize this moment the way Minnesotans recently did, and embrace social movement unionism they will not only play an indispensable role in defeating Trumpist authoritarianism — they might also trigger the 21st century revival of the labor movement that we so desperately need.
Stephen Lerner has spent 50 years as a labor organizer and strategist, most famously serving as architect of SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign.
Joseph A. McCartin teaches history at Georgetown University and serves as president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association.
