Abstract
The U.S. labor movement finds itself in a paradoxical situation. The top-line numbers are dismal. Overall, union density dipped below 10 percent in 2024; the private-sector density numbers are even more anemic at just 5.9 percent. But if you ask many organizers in the labor movement, there is a palpable sense of possibility, supported by high levels of popular support for unions and high-profile strikes and organizing efforts.
Given the contradictory state of organized labor in the United States, skeptics might be forgiven for questioning whether this moment counts as a “resurgence” at all. And with a Trump administration hell-bent on decimating the National Labor Relations Board and attacking federal workers, complacency is not an option. Union officials and rank-and-file workers need to ramp up on all fronts: more investment in new organizing, more efforts at re-invigorating demobilized memberships, more militancy in confronting bosses, and greater creativity and tactical flexibility in those confrontations.
Dave Kamper’s Who’s Got the Power? offers a timely temperature check. This interview-laden book offers one of the most comprehensive and textured accounts of key developments in the contemporary U.S. labor movement published to date. It gives analytical and ethnographic heft to the growing sense that new organizing, union reform efforts, and a greater sense of militancy offer a new springboard for the workers’ movement in the coming decade. A veteran and astute observer of U.S. unions and the progressive policy scene, Kamper puts his considerable knowledge of labor history and his contacts in various corners of the movement to work in service of his project.
The centerpiece of the book is Kamper’s interviews with a wide range of people: veterans of the labor left, long-time union members newly engaged by rising industrial action, and young first-time activists. These conversations capture their protagonists’ strategic and tactical decision-making processes as well as the emotional rollercoaster of worker organizing. These interviews breathe new life into long-held insights: workplace dignity as a driver of worker mobilization, the importance of solidarity across differences of identity, job title, and sector, and the fundamentally uphill struggle of worker organizing in a capitalist economy.
The opening chapter of the book, arguably the most powerful, focuses on a case study that highlights each of those key insights: the 2021 strike at the massive Frito-Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas led by the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM). Kamper evocatively describes the often-hellish landscape where human beings produce Cheetos. But he lets the workers themselves tell stories of how they came to a breaking point. As one worker leader puts it, “You get companies that just don’t respect you and don’t treat you like a human being . . . and that’s when you got to stand up and say ‘Hey, enough’s enough.’” An elected union official from the plant described the difficult path navigating tensions between more militant younger workers and more cautious older workers, as well as between white and Latino workers.
After eighteen days on strike, the union won a contract with 11 percent wage increases, expanded leave, and an end to the hated “suicide shift” system of back-to-back mandatory overtime. But like almost all contract fights, many workers felt unsatisfied, and the agreement was only narrowly ratified. Kamper and the BCTGM worker-leaders describe the difficulties of returning to the daily grind after the adrenaline rush of the strikes, and the tense workplace interactions between strikers and those who crossed the picket line. This is the jarring reality of labor organizing under capitalism: even after victories, you must return to the site of your exploitation and start all over again. But after a successful strike, many workers return with a glow of victory and hard-fought strategic and tactical lessons that they can carry forward.
The Topeka strike offers a richly painted case study. But an assessment of labor’s current moment requires more than ethnography; it calls for a fundamentally critical and historical approach. How did we get here? Why is this upsurge happening now? And finally, where do we go from here? These three questions are interlinked. It is impossible to understand our moment and chart a path forward without grasping the historical forces that shape our present.
In the popular imagination, the 1940s and 1950s were the heyday of U.S. labor. Emerging from the successful unionization waves of the New Deal era, organized labor occupied an important position in the postwar order and in the Democratic Party. On the eve of the AFL-CIO merger in 1955 roughly one in three U.S. workers were union members, and wages were rising steadily alongside productivity gains in a booming manufacturing economy. Social mobility was a common feature of life, as millions of Americans who had lived through unprecedented economic depression and total mobilization for war saw a future of stable employment, homeownership, secure retirement, and educational opportunities for their children.
This story is not entirely incorrect, but a fuller picture helps us understand the disintegration of the postwar political-economic order with greater clarity. First, 35 percent unionization rates are not particularly robust compared to the post-war highs of union density in Sweden (85 percent), Austria (68 percent), or the United Kingdom (50 percent). But perhaps most glaringly, this narrative excludes the millions of Black, Latino, and women workers who did not receive their fair share of postwar prosperity. Formal and informal discrimination by some leading unions explains part of this phenomenon. Even more important was that the most marginalized sections of the working class were trapped in the least unionized sectors of the economy: agriculture, service work, and informal or semi-formal employment.
Kamper highlights another key historical moment that revealed labor’s post-war weakness, the so-called “Treaty of Detroit.” The 1950 contract signed by the United Auto Workers (UAW) and General Motors formalized the U.S. class compromise. While the five-year contract offered autoworkers a ticket to middle-class prosperity, it granted those benefits in exchange for major concessions on management’s “right to rule.” The UAW abandoned its campaign to tie worker wage increases with demands to keep car prices down for consumers and relinquished workers’ rights to engage in industrial action over shop-floor complaints.
In the words of UAW president Walter Reuther, auto manufacturing plants became “gold-plated sweatshops” where workers could bring home the bacon, but were subjected to harsh management, work speed-ups, and lack of control over the production process itself. Demands for control of the shop floor, as well as respect on the job, have formed the backbone of the workers’ movement from its inception until the present day. Long-standing demands for greater worker control resonate with the experience of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, the pandemic is a big part of the answer to the “why now?” question.
Despite significant individual wins in key industries, a sober assessment indicates that the near-term prospects for winning industrial democracy are dim, especially in comparison to the late 1940s. But labor leaders from the shop floor to international executive boards must always be looking for opportunities to chip away at management’s right to rule. Small but meaningful pushbacks against this pillar of the postwar class compromise have appeared in a diverse set of workplaces across the economy.
The Bargaining for the Common Good (BFTCG) framework, taken up particularly by teachers’ unions but also in healthcare and other sectors, offers a practical example. Organized labor can and should be the most effective vehicle for winning major gains for the entire working class and society, not just union members themselves. The working conditions of teachers, nurses, librarians, and social workers are the conditions of care, learning, and thriving for the millions of students, patients, clients, and community members they encounter every day. The Chicago and Los Angeles teachers’ unions, as well as nurses’ unions and others across the country, have explicitly adopted the BFTCG framework and applied it to their contract processes, gaining real wins. The labor movement has a lot to learn from these pioneering unions. And in terms of labor realpolitik, these “caring” professions represent the growth sectors in the post-industrial U.S. economy over the past forty years.
The “Meds and Eds” economy reflects labor’s contradictory situation more broadly. These sectors contain some of the most highly organized workplaces alongside some of the most exploitative non-union employers. Public school teachers have some of the highest unionization rates in the nation, about 70 percent of whom have union representation. Nurses and other healthcare workers, in both the private and public sectors, often have built robust and often militant unions. Even so, there is great fragmentation and unevenness. For example, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UMPC) employs over 100,000 people, more than U.S. Steel employed in the city at its height. But the vast majority of UPMC employees do not have union representation. Despite these challenges, SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania has succeeded in winning unions at some smaller UPMC-affiliated hospitals and healthcare provision centers. Massive investment in organizing and empowering worker-leaders will be necessary to break the non-union hold of major hospital employers like UPMC across the country.
The most successful and surprising union breakthroughs of the past several years are unions for graduate student workers, which comprise an entire chapter of Kamper’s book. Over 150,000 graduate student workers were union members as of January 2024. This represents roughly 40 percent union density across the sector, a near-doubling of union membership among these workers over the past five years. The result of overwhelming wins at elite private institutions and state schools alike; this wave of growth has occurred alongside massive strikes in the University of California (UC) system. Like Kamper, my first experience in the labor movement was as a member of my graduate student workers’ union at UC, which went on strike twice and became the first union in the United States to endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Graduate student unions are crucial in providing a voice and economic protection for the underpaid workers who provide much of the teaching and research that make universities possible. Because of the daunting academic labor market, many of the leaders and members who make up these unions will not stay in academia. They will fan out across the educational and non-profit sectors, boosting the militancy, experience, and know-how that is essential for a strong and member-led labor movement.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for U.S. labor unions today is the other key pillar of the post-industrial U.S. economy, the service sector. Roughly 25 percent of workers are in hospitality, food service, retail, or delivery. With a few exceptions, these tend to be among the least-organized and lowest-paid workers in the country. Very few unions have managed to organize these jobs outside of certain warehousing and delivery contexts. But veteran labor observers were stunned when a Workers United campaign to organize Starbucks workers store-by-store began to take off in late 2021. The campaign employed a worker-to-worker organizing model, which jettisoned traditional staff-heavy approaches in favor of empowering workers to lead organizing on the shop floor. It spread like wildfire, leading to successful union elections at over 650 stores in forty-five states as of this writing. The union’s inability to win a first contract, however, has revealed key difficulties in collective bargaining under current labor law. While some progress has been made, negotiations are deadlocked, spurring an unprecedented nationwide strike that is currently impacting almost two hundred stores and four thousand workers. The impact of this strike and the accompanying consumer boycott remains to be seen. While the Starbucks campaign certainly does not provide any silver bullets, it has highlighted the need for a new organizing model that combines insights from past waves of organizing with the new economic, social, and cultural landscape of U.S. workers.
One key organization supporting this new wave of worker-to-worker organizing is the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC). Founded in the depths of the pandemic as a joint project of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), EWOC is an organization that leverages volunteers to train and support workers in any industry, anywhere in the country to help them organize at work. Its emphasis on worker leadership, peer mentoring, flexibility, scalability, and use of distributed organizing methods has positioned it to be a key hub of worker organizing in this new upsurge. Labor needs to invest in this type of organizing to meet burgeoning worker demand. As Eric Blanc points out in his book, We Are the Union, 60 percent of American workers say they want a union but less than 10 percent have one. Labor needs to figure out ways to scale its organizing, and fast.
As someone who entered college in 2008 and was deeply radicalized by financial crisis, one chapter of Who’s Got the Power in particular stood out to me: “The Children of 2008.” In this chapter, Kamper offers a short but solid account of the psychological and political impacts of the financial crisis and the Occupy movement that followed. I was slightly disappointed, however, to see that Kamper neglected to highlight several major political developments that structured the rise of the post-2008 U.S. left and labor resurgence: disappointment with Barack Obama’s presidency and the Democratic Party establishment, the energizing impacts of the Black Lives Matter movement, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns of 2016 and 2020, and the rise of groups like DSA. The movements of the Millennial Left (for lack of a better term) have been key to many labor organizing projects. They have also carried forward the cultural values and political vocabulary of working-class solidarity that has helped lay the groundwork for new gains in labor organizing over the past decade.
The fortunes of progressive politics depend, in fundamental ways, on the strength, resilience, and orientation of organized labor. But labor’s fortunes are deeply intertwined with the advancement of progressive and democratic socialist politics on the terrain of electoral politics and government administration. Both unions and progressive political institutions can benefit from what Who’s Got the Power highlights: the dignity of ordinary people, an ironclad sense of solidarity across lines of difference, and a clear eye on the possibilities and limitations of our current political-economic context.
