Will the Blue Tsunami Bring a New Deal for Unions?

Union activists like me can be forgiven a certain degree of giddiness after Donald J. Trump’s agenda got walloped in the midterm election. After all, Trump has been one of the most anti-worker presidents in history. He stripped millions of federal employees of the right to bargain collectively, he gutted the National Labor Relations Board, and he sliced back regulations that gave overtime to millions of employees and that protected people from being improperly classified as independent contractors without labor rights. He cut taxes for corporations and billionaires and slashed food and medical benefits for working Americans.

Congress is now in the hands of Democrats, including many who trend younger and more progressive, and even more who proclaim themselves to be the friend of the working person (some even say “working class”). Alas, Trump remains in place. It would take some extraordinary parliamentary maneuvering to undo all—or perhaps any—of Trump’s anti-worker policies. There is no reason to shy away from uphill battles, but we cannot expect complete victory in the next two years.

Anyway, the agenda is broader than a few immediate policy initiatives. As I argue in my upcoming book, Building Power: Collective Action, the Writers’ Strike Against Hollywood, and Organizing for the Future (Cornell University Press), what American workers—and American democracy—need most is a larger, more powerful labor movement. That is the key to making sure the federal government acts in the interest of working people over the long haul. (By “working people” I mean everyone who earns a living by their own labor, whether by putting up buildings or tending to patients or teaching kids or writing software or working on the assembly line.)

If unions and their members (and potential members) want to make meaningful, sustainable advances, now is the time to commit to doing the hard work of organizing.

Here is the painful truth: Only about 10% of American workers are represented by unions. In the private sector, it’s closer to 6%. It is difficult to get corporate chieftains and elected politicians to fight for working people in the face of corporate opposition when union density is such a small fraction of the overall labor force and economy.

Things were this bad when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected. Union density was about 11% in 1934. The New Deal transformed federal labor law, FDR proclaimed that every worker should join a union, and the labor movement got to work organizing the unorganized. By 1945, density skyrocketed to nearly 35%.

Union density remained between 30-35% for decades, and tens of millions of union members won a measure of economic security. Wages and productivity increased at about the same rate, roughly doubling from 1948 to 1973 (Sven Beckert, Capital: A Global History (Penguin Press 2025) at p. 949). In other words, working people won a reasonable share of the wealth they created.

Union density nosedived after the early 1970s, and economic inequality exploded. From 1980 to 2020 income gains for the top 1% were more than triple those in the middle. The gap became even larger between the truly wealthy and the less well-off; the top 0.1% saw gains 12 times as large as those of the lowest 20% between 1979 and 2022.

A recent Economic Policy Institute study estimated the gains working people would make if union membership tripled to about 30%: $1.2 trillion a year, or about a third of the increase in economic inequality since 1979. Thus, if union density returned to where it was during the New Deal, this would put a serious dent in the economic inequality that has roiled American politics and ruined household finances. It is difficult to imagine a more powerful outcome for the Blue Tsunami than a New Deal for unions.

However (and sorry, this is a distinctly non-giddy point), one midterm election does not lock in a long-term political realignment. We need politicians to support pro-worker legislation for as long as it takes—decades, not years. The first legislative step would be to transform federal labor law to support, rather than hinder, unionization. That would make it vastly less difficult to increase union density.

None of this will happen by itself. Political candidates and consultants do not build movements. Organizers and leaders and activists and members do. Political winds shift and elections swing like pendulums. More important, politicians respond to leverage, not good vibes. They will only adopt labor law reforms if they feel sustained pressure to do so. If unions and their members (and potential members) want to make meaningful, sustainable advances, now is the time to commit to doing the hard work of organizing and bargaining, of engaging working people directly, of building their power in a sustainable way. They can use that power to exert leverage on whichever politicians seek their support. That is the surest way to capitalize on the gains that working people made in the midterm elections.