Unions Without Strikes
Today’s labor movement has been built to rely on forms of power that are all going away.
Hamilton Nolan
You can spend a lifetime studying the rich history of the labor movement. While you are doing that, new union battles and campaigns will constantly arise. Laws will change, the economy will change, industries will rise and fall. New technologies will challenge workers in previously unimagined ways. Yet the fact remains that the more you study all of the complexities of the past, present, and future, you are left with one central truth: The power of organized labor is the power of the strike. Without the strike, the labor movement’s claim to power falls apart.
This fundamental and unalterable truth — the basic insight that led workers to form unions in the first place — has been echoing in my mind as I have watched the Trump administration carry out the most naked assault on organized labor since World War II. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired about 12,000 striking air traffic controllers during the infamous PATCO Strike — an action long considered to be the worst thing the U.S. government has done to labor unions in my lifetime. For Donald Trump, that would hardly constitute a single day’s work.
Trump has illegally fired hundreds of thousands of federal government workers; tossed out the active union contract covering nearly 50,000 TSA workers; and, most staggeringly, declared that more than 700,000 unionized workers at a slew of federal agencies are just not allowed to have unions. Using the laughably flimsy pretext of “national security,” Trump’s March 27 executive order purports to tell all of those union members, working under union contracts, that they are no longer union members working under union contracts after all. It is the boldest and most grotesque example of union-busting the modern labor movement has seen from an American president.
So what will the labor movement do about it?
Rather than reciting legalistic details, let us say plainly what is happening here: Organized labor is being tested by a White House that wants to, to the furthest extent possible, wipe it off the map. The law prohibits federal employees from striking. Then again, the law also prohibits the executive branch from gutting the federal workforce and impounding Congressional appropriations and generally behaving in the unaccountable manner that it has.
When existing union contracts were disregarded during the wide-scale federal worker layoffs by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), there were no strikes. When the TSA contract was thrown in the trash, there was no strike. When the hundreds of thousands of federal union members were preposterously told they are no longer union members, there was no strike. Through every step of an increasingly aggressive series of tests of the labor movement’s power, the administration has learned that there are no real consequences. Besides filing lawsuits and issuing angry statements, unions have done little to teach Trump that he has anything to fear from attempting to destroy them.
We are now living through a gruesome demonstration of what happens when unions allow their strike muscles to atrophy. A century ago, before workers had many legal protections, everything they won was won by fighting — by the strike. After the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 formalized the relationship between unions, business, and the government, that changed. Unions evolved to wield their power in the context of NLRB elections, federally mediated contracts and political lobbying.
This is more civilized than unconstrained strikes over every dispute. But this system is now being set on fire by a dictatorial Republican Party that refuses to respect labor law, and will almost certainly get the Supreme Court to disembowel its key parts over the next few years. Like a boxer who has not been told he is now in a street fight, organized labor finds itself waiting for a referee who no longer exists, as his opponent attacks him with a brick.
When Trump’s executive order wiping away the federal unions came down, the biggest union impacted, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), filed a lawsuit. They asked people to call their representatives. They held a press conference in Washington. They got allies in Congress to file a supportive bill. They ran, in other words, the playbook of a game that the other side is no longer playing. All of these tactics will fail. Trump — with the full support of his party — has decided to simply bulldoze unions first, and allow loyalists in the courts and the regulatory agencies to clean up the legal niceties later. The union world will either wake up to this reality very soon, or be smashed while it is waiting for the return of a comforting, bureaucratic system of protection that is already gone.
What power do unions have when right wing courts are against us? When the NLRB has ceased to function? When the government disregards our contracts, fires our members, and declares our painstakingly won rights to be nonexistent? We have the power of the strike. That is the one power that no president or court or employer can ever take away. Workers do the work, and they can stop doing the work. Everything the labor movement has built flows from that truth. The power of the contracts and the laws and the agencies that are supposed to protect us are all, ultimately, contingent on the fundamental power of the strike. We are finding out the hard way that unions that cannot or will not strike are exceedingly easy to disregard.
The institutions of the American labor movement, after decades spent intertwining themselves with electoral politics, have been lulled into the belief that capital and labor have mutually agreed to civilized government mediation of our relationship. Alas. Trump has evaporated that mirage. The public sector, which makes up half of U.S. union membership, is under direct attack, and the private sector will not be far behind, as employers realize that the government is no longer interested in restraining them from committing the most vicious attacks on their own unions and organizing campaigns. The less clear-eyed unions are going to be shocked by how quickly the rules that they thought were permanent are about to disappear.
Even now, there are union leaders who will say it is foolish to start planning for illegal strikes, or wildcat strikes, or a general strike. They will say those things are irresponsible, dangerous, against the rules. Though I wish it were not the case, they will find that they themselves were the fools for clinging to old methods of power that are becoming less practical by the day. Look into the heart of your union. Is it ready to strike to keep what it has? If the answer is “no,” the most important work you can do right now is to change that. We are all about to be forced to re-learn the lesson that our movement’s ancestors knew: Without strikes, we will get nothing.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
