Sure, Trump could get elected or installed, and further shrink the NLRB, and impose a national right-to-work law. The Supreme Court majority could invent an interpretation of the Constitution that eliminates Social Security and Medicare, maybe even labor unions. Congress could find more ways to top load our already finance-heavy economic pyramid and push more people from the bottom out onto the streets.
But this May Day, I’m feeling this is not the time to feel discouraged. The labor movement is on the move.
It’s not just the UAW big win at The Big Three, or the follow-up victory at VW in Chattanooga, or now the contract victory at Daimler Truck. It’s the fact that all this is part of a plan to organize the auto plants across the south, along with the Amazon warehouses, schools, auto parts plants, and whatever other dominos begin to fall. And if that happens, it sucks the oxygen out of politicians from Nicki Haley to Ted Cruz and their low-wage, anti-union, job stealing, new Jim Crow, defective-airplane-building, former Confederacy, paradise. And if that happens, and the unions continue to spring back to life across the country while growing public support beyond their membership—maybe we can get back to winning permanent jobs, health care, and a decent retirement for all, pick up from where LBJ and the Democrats dropped the ball when they got tangled up in Viet Nam.
What’s different this time around, from all the other attempts in my lifetime to revive organized labor—Ed Sadlowski and the Steelworkers, Ron Carey and the Teamsters, Richard Trumka and the Miners, Jerry Tucker and the Autoworkers—is not only the broad vision of a modest genius like the UAW’s Sean Fain, but how that broad vision is shared by other unions and the wider public. Neo-liberalism and hyper-individualism spread suffering across the last forty plus years but that suffering birthed a miracle. It’s a new world where baristas, teachers, auto workers, waiters, grad students, actors, warehouse workers, public employees, and journalists all want and need smart, active, fighting unions. The upward mobility machine of a college education is grinding out graduates looking at a lifetime of debt, working without security. Much of our manufacturing infrastructure and the jobs that go with it have been shipped overseas. The magic of the marketplace has magically produced the possibility of a new solidarity across an inclusive, interracial, multicultural, multilayered, dare I say it, working class.
It took the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, the Sanders presidential campaign, and Covid to focus this anxiety and pain. Then bursts of mass frustration and indignation from BLM and Me Too pointed to the need for permanent organization and historical perspective. All of it making unions popular with the majority of the public for the first time in my memory.
So I worry that the spotlight has swung away from the economy and the unions to the free speech fights at universities. And that Gaza could be Biden’s Viet Nam. From my vantage point, Trump offers his demonic solutions because he is aware of, and working to exploit, the same real problems, global and domestic, that Sean Fain and the UAW are working to identify and fix. Mislabeled middle of the road or moderate or bipartisan politics fail to acknowledge, in fact paper over, how fragile access to the good life has become. That camouflage can confuse a public trying to feel its way through anxious times, and drive some to settle on a candidate who at least acts angry.
I was thrilled to see Biden give a shout out at his State of the Union address to Sean Fain up in the balcony, and thrilled to see Biden actually join a UAW picket line—the first time for a president—and thrilled to see his recognition and approval of the contract victory at Daimler Truck. Trump will bluster, but steers clear of picket lines and unions. Biden may yet stumble over the disaster in the Middle East and leave that opening for Trump, a new disaster.
There are union plans to get Biden re-elected in November, and I’m all in. And there are union plans that extend well beyond the election, as there must be. No matter what ends up happening in November, mark May 1, 2028 on your calendar. The UAW is working to align as many contract expirations in as many industries from as many unions as possible to expire that year on May Day, setting up a nationwide general strike.