Labor Desperately Needs a New Strategy

What Went Wrong

Trump's re-election demonstrates the impasse of the US labor officialdom's longstanding strategy of orienting to establishment Democrats while underfunding workplace organizing. Not only did the Democratic Party fail to defeat an unpopular authoritarian, but union leaders squandered an exceptionally ripe opportunity for growth over the preceding 4 years.

The American political landscape could potentially have been transformed had unions made an all-in investment in new organizing after 2020. Instead, routinism prevailed. Despite a remarkable opening for mass unionization—driven by the pandemic, a tight labor market, Biden's pro-labor NLRB, deepening youth radicalization, and grassroots momentum from Starbucks and Amazon drives—funding for new organizing remained at historic lows, even with labor's net assets rising to a unprecedented high of well over $30 billion. Of those union leaders interested in issues beyond their narrow institutional fiefdoms, most stuck with backroom dealing with elected Democrats.

In the wake of November's electoral debacle, unions consoled themselves with the strength of their ground games and the fact that union members continued to vote disproportionately Democratic. Indeed, had union density been significantly higher in the US, Trump likely would have lost. But all this does not change the fact that the Democratic Party's popularity has bottomed out at historic lows and that a labor movement representing only 10 percent of the workforce simply cannot deliver enough votes to offset the Democrats’ overall hemorrhaging of working-class voters. After four decades of Democratic neoliberalism, the Biden administration's real-but-relatively modest steps forward on domestic policy proved to be too little too late to stem the bleeding.

Ever since 2016, anti-MAGA forces have justifiably sounded the alarm about Trump's authoritarian, xenophobic, anti-worker agenda. Yet Democratic politicians and union leaders rarely translated their urgent rhetoric into deeds. Whatever may have been said in press releases, they certainly did not act as if the fate of American democracy, the labor movement, and environmental sustainability was on the line.

With the Democratic Party delegitimized and in disarray, one might hope that labor's summits will reassess their longstanding strategy, since there's even less reason to expect salvation from above than in years prior. Unfortunately, most union leaders have failed so far to publicly offer any sober analyses of the impasse of organized labor or its Democratic “friends.” Instead, we have only seen a deeper retreat into defense mode. There's a real danger that, in the name of defending against Trump's worst excesses, union leaders will double down on the very (unambitious, legalistic, Democratic Party-oriented) strategy that helped bring us to the brink of a precipice.

If unions continue to cling to business as usual, the future is bleak for organized labor and American democracy. What then could the labor movement do to turn things around?

Where We Go from Here

Obviously, nobody has all the answers for what, if anything, can revitalize the labor movement and overcome Trumpism. Hopefully union leaders will start putting forward their own cases for what to do—labor can’t extricate itself from decline so long as unions continue to studiously refuse to openly deliberate.

In my view, labor should go all-in on an anti-billionaire, anti-MAGA fightback. Sometimes the boss is the best organizer—but only if our side rises to the challenge. Over the next 4 years, the best-case scenario would be for anti-corporate and anti-Trump sentiment to get widely channeled into workplace resistance. This would not only be the most effective path towards defeating MAGA, it would also have the far-from-secondary benefit of deepening organized labor's post-pandemic revitalization. In that spirit, here's a preliminary (and certainly incomplete) list of steps unions and rank-and-file workers could take over the coming period.

(1) Strike (even if it's illegal). Anything short of credible strike threats may be insufficient to defeat MAGA's push to decimate federal institutions, from the civil service to the post office. Within the public sector, Trump and Musk's authoritarian power grabs may inadvertently spark heightened worker militancy. But since strikes are illegal for federal workers, and since union leaders in this sector are particularly hesitant to organize or take risks, rank-and-file workers will likely have to take the lead. As we saw in the 2018 red state educator revolts, digitally enabled rank-and-file groups can in certain conditions go viral online and pave the way for mass work stoppages that can win big (despite legal prohibitions) by leaning on community support. No matter what the law says, withholding one's labor remains labor's most powerful tool.

In the private sector, big powerful strikes can force employers to cough up major concessions, while grabbing attention, centering the political conversation around inequality, and forcing politicians to show which side they’re on. With the labor market still tight, unions and rank-and-file organizers everywhere should push especially hard to get strike-ready in all industries.

(2) Launch an ambitious “America Needs a Raise” campaign. After years of inflation, workers are looking for solutions to their cost-of-living crisis. Trump can’t provide these, but labor can.

Launched through a highly publicized media and social media blitz, the campaign could initially focus on supporting and providing the tools for non-union workers to collect signatures at work and in their company in letters to management demanding immediate raises of at least 15 percent. A campaign like this would help focus the US political conversation on workers’ common material needs, rather than DEI and immigrant bashing. It would help keep up labor's momentum. And it would help expose the emptiness of Trump's populist rhetoric.

National mass online trainings, supplemented by chats between workers in the same industries, would provide workers the training tips, motivation, and moral support needed to get large numbers of their co-workers to take the public action of demanding a raise. If management refuses to grant raises, then the campaign could provide ideas for escalation, including press conferences, community support actions, national days of action, one-day walkouts, and unionization. By providing the inspiration and tools to encourage workers to self-organize, such a campaign could replicate the successes of the Fight for 15, but for a much wider group of workers. And it could set into motion more democratic and sustainable organizing dynamics, so that workers learn to build durable power by persuading unconvinced co-workers and having real ownership over their campaigns.

(3) Take workplace actions in defense of immigrants and other targets of Trumpism. While hammering the bosses and the new administration on questions of economic dignity, labor unions also need to affirm that an injury to one is an injury to all. Throwing immigrant or trans workers under the bus means doing the bosses’ bidding.

Fortunately, many progressive K-12 unions are doing effective Know Your Rights education to protect undocumented parents. As seen recently in Chicago, spreading this type of knowledge really does make it more difficult for ICE to detain undocumented immigrants. When necessary, educators and their unions should also be prepared to engage in civil disobedience and work stoppages to protest the terrorization of undocumented families.

All unions—including those blue-collar unions flirting with Trump—have the political and moral responsibility to join this fight. Think of how symbolically powerful it would be to see a multiracial crew of workers in their union jackets willing to get arrested by linking arms at meatpacking plants and construction sites to block ICE agents from entering. While there's no guarantee that such actions could stop every such deportation, they could counter scapegoating narratives and help recreate the scale of popular backlash against Trump's immigration policies that forced him to retreat on his family separation policy in 2018.

(4) Recruit a far larger number of salts. In our period of crisis and despair, many young people are looking for ways to effectively change the world. Labor needs to find ways to become their political home. In the same way that the AFL-CIO—with the backing of major unions—trained countless idealistic young staff organizers in its heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s, a similar “youth brigade” could be formed today to directly launch countless new drives and campaigns across the country. With deep financial support for scaling up salting projects, it would become possible every semester to make thousands of classroom presentations on this topic in high schools, community colleges, and universities across the country. And, by providing stipends to salts, it would be possible to entice broader demographics of young workers to salt beyond those with financial cushions.

Many union leaders will reply that, with Trump in office, now is not the time to try go on the offensive. But it's hard to accept that this is simply hard-nosed realism on their part when they also refused to turn to new organizing under the far more favorable Biden administration. In any case, we know that it is possible for labor to win even under hostile regimes: Hundreds of thousands more workers, for example, unionized under George W. Bush than under Barack Obama, since unions in the early 2000s did a much better job of funding new organizing.

It's true that Trump will create a significantly harder legal terrain for unionization. But unions do not live and die by politics alone. Other factors continue to create a relatively favorable environment for bold unionization campaigns, including: working people want serious economic change that Trump's billionaire administration can’t deliver; the labor market remains very tight, giving workers leverage; unions are extremely popular and still have lots of momentum; the youth radicalization that has fueled the post-pandemic unionization surge shows no signs of going away; and unions have $38 billion in net assets, which is more than to fend off the worst of Trump's attacks while simultaneously going on the offensive to demand economic dignity for all workers in this country. The recent union election win of Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia gives a glimpse of the potentialities.

Sometimes going on offense is also the best defense. Widespread unionizing efforts—both within the NLRB structures (if possible) and outside them (when necessary)—can shrink Trump's popular base by uniting workers around their common economic interests. And since Trump appears to be aiming to kneecap the NLRB, every union drive becomes a de facto confrontation with the new regime.

(6) Adopt a more scalable, more bottom-up organizing model. As I argue in my new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, unions like the NewsGuild, Starbucks Workers United, and United Electrical have developed a scalable model of union organizing that can be widely replicated in other industries, for both defensive and offensive struggles (Blanc 2024, 2025). By leaning more on rank-and-file leadership as well as new digital tools, the capacity of unions to wage big effective organizing battles is no longer constrained to the same extent by staffing limitations. This requires transforming organizing departments to train up, and rely more on, workers capable of taking on most of the responsibilities hitherto delegated to staffers.

Unions should similarly experiment with bringing back organized consumer boycotts. The alignment of massive companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla with Trump means that these are now potentially very vulnerable to consumer political backlash, especially in blue cities. Concentrated, organized boycotts of specific time durations around specific demands could play critical roles in support unionization efforts within these companies.

(8) Fight the battle of ideas. Working people are hurting and are looking for explanations for who to blame. One of the key reasons Trumpism is making inroads in the multiracial working class is that right wingers have successfully promulgated a coherent ideology over the airwaves and social media channels. Unions should ramp up internal political education—and not just during election season—while actively promoting a working-class perspective to the broader public. Charismatic union leaders should hit the podcast circuit. Labor should identify, recruit, and support labor influencers over TikTok and Instagram. Every national and local union should create a social media committee of worker volunteers charged with spreading the good work online. And every time a big union win happens, unions should push hard to get the workers leaders on the airwaves.

A word of caution, however: Effectively grabbing people's attention and persuading them that the bosses are to blame for their troubles can only happen if 1) unions take bold actions and 2) they adopt a class struggle perspective capable of making sense of the world's crises. As the UAW and Starbucks Workers United have demonstrated, grabbing attention and going viral online depends on engaging in militant struggles that capture the imagination of working people. There is no quick digital or marketing fix to organized labor's crisis.

(9) Run bold union workers and leaders for office, both inside and outside the Democratic Party. Dan Osborne's surprisingly effective independent campaign for Nebraska's senate seat shows the resonance of labor campaigns for office that speak authentically in the name of workers and that call out the capitalist class. Aiming to directly challenge a listless Democratic Party establishment, labor should draft a fighting unionist to run in the 2028 primary around an anti-billionaire platform of economic dignity for all. As Kamala Harris's pivot back to the billionaires demonstrated, backroom lobbying alone will never be able to counter the hold of big money over both parties.

Conclusion

None of these tactics on their own are guaranteed to win every battle against Trump. Nor will it be easy to reverse the continued decline of union density under the current administration. But by leveraging workers’ disruptive power, by grabbing the public's attention, and by raising the salience of economic inequality, ambitious organizing initiatives could beat back some of the worst attacks and drive a popular backlash capable of undermining MAGA's popular support and defeating it electorally in 2026, 2028, and beyond. Just as important, labor in the process would strengthen its momentum, its organizing capacity, and its fighting spirit, paving the way for the big unionization breakthrough that this country so desperately needs.