People are hurting right now, badly. More are being hurt every day. The cruelties perpetrated by ICE, the dismantling of the public health system, the destruction of public education, vicious attacks on Black and brown Americans, and the demonization of transgender people are only a few examples of the injustices defining our time.
We need optimism wherever we can find it.
What gives me hope is the American labor movement, as I discuss in my new book Who’s Got the Power?: The Resurgence of American Unions. Conditions are grim, yet the unions of 2025 are in a better position to fight back than at any time in the past 40 years.
The first years of this decade saw an upsurge in labor power that was broad, deep, and sustained. Huge strikes in the auto industry and Hollywood have delivered significant gains for workers. We saw the number of graduate students represented by unions more than double in a handful of years, with students organizing unions at prominent institutions across the Ivy League and well beyond. We saw everyday heroes at Frito-Lay’s manufacturing plant in Kansas, public schools across the country, and the skies over our heads stand together and win things no one would have thought possible.
The resurgence of the early 2020s was driven by three overlapping factors that still offer hope today.
The first factor was the COVID-19 pandemic. Those of us lucky to work from home were big on calling frontline workers “heroes,” but they weren’t always treated that way. Instead, millions of workers in industries such as food production, education, and transportation were put in dangerous situations with very little support. They fought back. Pushed to the breaking point, the Frito-Lay strike in 2021 triggered a wave of strikes in the food industry across the Midwest. Educators, who were falling sick so quickly that, as one teacher put it to me, they were “running out of adults in the classroom,” struck and marched and voted to fight for the schools kids need in times of disaster. In the air, flight attendants stood up for basic human decency. They pushed significant legislation through Congress that stopped airlines from profiteering off the pandemic and also prevented mass layoffs across the aviation industry.
"covid mass screening", by Davide Costanzo, CC BY 2.0
While I sincerely hope COVID and other diseases never again reach pandemic levels, what happened in those years may signal workers’ willingness to fight during the next crisis, whatever it is. Naomi Klein explained that “disaster capitalism” involves those in power taking advantage of catastrophe to further enrich corporations and the wealthy at the public’s expense. COVID was the first major disaster in a long time when workers chose solidarity, stuck together, and won fight after fight by using their shared power. It is a model we can look to when the next crisis hits.
The second factor that drove labor’s renaissance was younger workers. In an entirely different context, in an even darker moment of our history, Churchill spoke of how the time would come when “the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” If we get out of this nightmare, it will be in large part because workers in their teens, twenties, and thirties save us with their solidarity. They are the new world stepping forth.
When I was first getting involved with the Left, in the late ‘90s, the goal of many was escape. Stop being complicit in the crimes of global capitalism, they argued. Get off the grid, disconnect from globalized commerce: basically the Unabomber without the bombs. These were their solutions. It is no surprise that people raised in the hyper-consumerism of the 1980s would think of rebellion as rejection of consumer culture.
Younger workers today are instead embracing collective action as their solution. In a society where institutions of all kinds are failing them, they are building their own. They are not just building them, but building them well. Spurred on by organizations like Labor Notes and the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, younger workers are showing they know how to organize. Look at the Starbucks workers organizing across digital space in ways that us more senior types said was impossible. They are not just spirited and energetic. They are good at what they do. Those skills matter more than ever during Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.
The third major factor spurring union collective action in the early 2020s was the ability of our nation’s largest unions to reinvent themselves to face new threats. In three of the nation’s largest collective bargaining fights - the Teamsters with UPS, SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild with the Hollywood studios, and the United Auto Workers with the Big 3 automakers - unions revitalized themselves and found new purpose and power. Their wins moved the needle for working families in real ways.
"SAG-AFTRA Picket", by Phil Roeder, CC BY 2.0
Each of those unions showed innovation and invention and the ability to change established practices in the light of new threats. For decades, two entrenched political factions within SAG-AFTRA have waged intense internal battles throughout the union’s ranks They came together to create a unity ticket ahead of the 2023 strike; it worked so well they’ve kept that unity in place with the election of Sean Astin to replace Fran Drescher as union president. The Teamsters elected new leadership with the help of their longstanding reform caucus, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and won a massive victory in their contract negotiations with UPS, including hourly wage increases and better working conditions.
Most spectacular of all, though, was the United Auto Workers. Shawn Fain led a reform movement that barely won the presidency in 2023. Then, Fain and the reformers launched the most creative and successful strike we have seen in decades, the Stand-Up Strike, which took GM, Ford, and Stellantis completely by surprise. It was a model of what the modern contract campaign should look like executed superbly by thousands of workers who won higher wages, protections against layoffs and other huge gains.
The shine has come off some of these wins of late. Seeing Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien, for example, echoing Republican talking points while standing on the White House lawn, may make us think differently about the union’s win at UPS. Such behavior is disappointing, but not surprising. Labor is never as unified as we’d like it to be. But what gives me hope is that those leaders are decidedly a minority. The American labor movement is standing strong, together, against fascism.
The coming months and years will test labor like never before. We claim to be the voice of all working people; our deeds will need to match our words. It is a heavy burden, and we may fail the test. But as I talked to amazing workers across the country for Who’s Got the Power?, I saw the passion and the fire, the commitment to fight. It was beyond inspiring. No one has any delusions that the billionaires and bullies are on our side. We know we have to struggle. The labor movement I have spent the last two years documenting is ready for that struggle.
Who’s Got the Power? The Resurgence of American Unions is available through The New Press.
