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How the US Labor Movement Can Revive Itself and Help Save Democracy
History teaches us that, when unions fight to defend democracy and win, they position themselves for periods of explosive growth and increased worker power.
Jun 07, 2026
The US labor movement, like the nation at large, stands at a crossroads. The next few years might well determine whether the United States fully descends into an era of electoral autocracy, where democracy has withered and authoritarianism becomes the political norm. This period is also likely to set the future trajectory of the union movement’s power and influence, as the state of democracy and organized labor have long been deeply intertwined.
For decades, the right-wing forces set on steadily eroding our democracy have worked in tandem with a pro-corporate movement that has increasingly marginalized organized labor, creating a ballooning crisis for the working class. Yet this politically hazardous moment also represents an opportunity to overcome deep-seated institutional inertia, drawing elements of a cautious labor movement out of their defensive crouch, and helping unions devise forms of struggle that might both revive the labor movement and renew American democracy.
President Donald Trump’s second term has, in a way, broken a spell. For years, the pre-Trump status quo kept labor locked in a pattern of slow decline even as democracy was increasingly stifled and abridged by voter suppression, gerrymandering, filibusters, and the overweening power of organized money. But the decades-old dysfunctional status quo that gave rise to Trumpism is now crumbling under the weight of the most lawless, antidemocratic, rights-trampling administration this country has seen since the 19th century.
History suggests that fighting to defend and revive democracy in its moment of maximum peril can create a window of opportunity for labor. Past experience—in the United States and other nations—teaches us that, when unions fight to defend democracy and win, they position themselves for periods of explosive growth and increased worker power. It is imperative that the US labor movement grasp this lesson and seize the window of opportunity before it’s too late.
Moving Beyond Magical Thinking
It’s clear that the crisis facing US democracy is deepening. Over the past year, immigrants and the neighbors and coworkers who stood in solidarity with them endured murderous paramilitary occupations in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities across the country. The nation has been plunged into war in Iran without prior input from Congress. The president has even suggested the federal government should seize control of the upcoming midterm elections from the states.
This all comes on top of the Supreme Court’s relentless assault on workers’ rights and a worsening affordability crisis that has undermined the stability of working-class families, leading them to wonder whether the system is irretrievably broken.
As important as the coming elections are, unions should firmly reject the comforting delusion that they can recover through the ballot box what power they’ve lost in the workplace.
While our democracy’s crisis deepens, the national labor movement has yet to play a leading role in the resistance against ascendant authoritarianism. By seizing the opportunity to play such a role in the year ahead, labor has the opportunity to reverse its decades-long slide toward irrelevancy by taking up an indispensable role in preserving, expanding, and deepening rights-based democracy.
By fighting to reconstruct our democracy in the face of the mortal threat it now faces, labor could transform itself from a fading force—whose structure and outlook still bear the imprint of the 19th- and 20th-century struggles that birthed it—into a rejuvenated movement ambitious enough to give workers the powerful voice they deserve in the 21st century.
That transformation is only possible, though, if the labor movement moves beyond the magical thinking that if unions can just survive the Trump era then they can help restore a kind of pre-Trump normalcy afterward. The prevailing sentiment among labor’s leaders seems to be that, if they can just help their allies regain control of Congress later this year, they will be able to contain the damage Trump has wrought and coalesce behind an alternative in 2028 that can roll back Trumpism.
As important as the coming elections are, unions should firmly reject the comforting delusion that they can recover through the ballot box what power they’ve lost in the workplace. For if such electoral victories are unaccompanied by a revived, reorganized labor movement, they will leave workers and unions in a situation no different from the one they faced prior to Trump’s rise.
If the labor movement is to have a viable future, unions must not merely survive but capitalize on Trump’s disruption of longstanding norms, assumptions, and institutions, many of which no longer operate to labor’s benefit—if they ever did. That is the path to advance a bold 21st-century vision of inclusive solidarity, equality, rights, and democracy.
Turning Crisis Into Opportunity
How labor might take advantage of Trumpism’s authoritarian excesses to advance such a vision was put on display in Minnesota this winter, where local labor organizations drew on years of experience to play a central role in the resistance to Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invasion. Unions of janitors, teachers, healthcare workers, and others helped coalesce a resistance that included workers centers, faith communities and clergy, community organizations, immigrants’ rights groups, small businesses, and caring neighbors.
Protesters turned out by the tens of thousands in subzero temperatures, religious leaders endured arrest in acts of civil disobedience, and witnesses turned their cell phones into tools to document ICE malfeasance and protect their neighbors. That resistance was built on a shared common good analysis of power and a recognition of the increasingly baneful influence of billionaires over our political system and economy. Protesters targeted not only ICE but corporations such as Target and Hilton that have either remained silent or openly abetted and profited from Trump’s authoritarian power grab.
Make no mistake: The formal end of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis scarcely indicates a waning of this administration’s authoritarian ambitions. Unresolved issues regarding the limits of ICE’s legal authority will likely continue to elicit protest and resistance in the streets. In the meantime, new fronts are already opening as the president disregards all restraints on his power to deploy military force abroad and pushes an effort to nationalize the midterm elections at home. As labor movement leaders contemplate the conflicts that might emerge, they should consider lessons from what happened in Minnesota as well as other cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, where local unions played important roles in mobilizing resistance. They should also learn from the experiences of unions in other nations that successfully resisted authoritarian regimes.
Defeating Trump and his allies at the polls will be a Pyrrhic victory if the corporations fueling the right-wing’s anti-worker agenda maintain their influence over our government.
The stories of Brazil, South Korea, and South Africa are cases in point. In these countries, labor movements joined and helped lead the struggles against dictatorship, authoritarianism, and apartheid. In each case, when democracy won out, unions saw massive increases in membership. During Brazil’s transition to democracy in the mid-1980s, work stoppages jumped tenfold, and Brazil’s labor federation, Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), founded during this period, grew to represent more than 15 million people by 1990.
When South Korea’s dictatorship fell in 1987, a period of militant worker struggle ensued as the number of strikes jumped and union membership surged. In South Africa, the labor movement played a key role in the fight against apartheid, and trade union membership grew dramatically, up from 1.4 million workers and 18% density in 1985 to 3.8 million and 51% by 1998. What’s more, these growth spurts boosted worker power and helped erect union bulwarks to help prevent backsliding into authoritarianism in subsequent years.
In Brazil, labor rallied to defeat President Jair Bolsonaro at the polls in 2022, then opposed his post-defeat coup attempt and supported his successful prosecution. Similarly, South Korean unions played a vital role in defeating an attempted coup in 2024 by threatening a general strike.
As these examples suggest, and as scholars have long noted, labor movements—no matter their national context—tend to expand not in linear fashion but by quantum leaps. The British labor historian Eric J. Hobsbawm described these episodes as “discontinuous” and “explosive” bursts that occur when circumstances force “qualitative innovations in the movement.”
Resisting authoritarians has required such innovations in countries across the globe, which have in turn helped unions to grow. When worker-led movements aligned with pro-democracy forces and succeeded in undermining authoritarian regimes, their victories allowed workers to witness and feel their collective power. Confrontations with authoritarianism in the streets translated into militancy, collective action, and increased organization in the workplace.
The US labor movement’s history also bears out that pattern. While people in the United States have never witnessed a battle with authoritarianism quite like the ones that erupted in South Africa, Brazil, and South Korea, an analogous incubation of explosive growth took place during periods when the US labor movement aligned itself with struggles to defend democracy against what were perceived as existential threats.
The Civil War, waged to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the Union in the 1860s, triggered what W.E.B. Du Bois called a vast “general strike” in which the enslaved transferred their labor “from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader” even as that war fueled the expansion of the national trade unions that would later form the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
The effort to make the world “safe for democracy,” as President Woodrow Wilson pledged during World War I, likewise provided the setting for experimentation with industrial unionism that paved the way for the later formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). And the forging of a US “arsenal of democracy” against fascism during World War II helped lead to the high-water mark of US unionism in the 1950s.
Pivoting Toward Action
The kind of quantum leaps in union growth that have occurred when the US labor movement has linked its fortunes to the future of democracy can happen again. In the growing resistance to Trumpism, we are already seeing glimmers of how this could happen in our time. Unions and allied labor and community organizations provided the backbone of the resistance in Minnesota; employees in the largest and most influential technology labs are confronting bosses who are selling their technology to the government for domestic surveillance and global war; higher education unions are challenging attacks on free speech on university campuses.
Flashes of resistance like these are multiplying. Yet such sparks will not fuel a major breakthrough unless unions at every level—from locals to internationals—embrace the fight against Trump’s authoritarian, billionaire-serving regime and defend democracy by challenging the corporations and Silicon Valley technofascists that are shaping and profiting from Trump’s policies.
Such opposition must go beyond an electoral strategy for 2026 and 2028. Defeating Trump and his allies at the polls will be a Pyrrhic victory if the corporations fueling the right-wing’s anti-worker agenda maintain their influence over our government. Should Democrats regain control of Congress and the White House, the same corporations that have aligned with Trump will be working to sabotage pro-labor policies while doubling down on their AI-obsessed, job-threatening, antidemocratic campaign of economic destruction.
There is no doubt that democracy and workers’ rights are facing down an existential threat. Yet that very threat and the sense of urgency it has spawned have created an opportunity we could not have engineered on our own.
As the experience of other nations and the failure of our own post-Civil War Reconstruction remind us, elites and economic structures that benefit from authoritarian power don’t vanish when antidemocratic regimes crumble; they regroup. We cannot allow such a regrouping to occur post-Trump, for as we have seen over the past 50 years of labor decline under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, a return to the pre-Trump status quo offers no hope for workers or labor.
Naming and challenging the economic actors aligned with Trump is therefore critical if we are to weaken their post-Trump grip on power.
Although their critics have often suggested that US unions have tied their fortunes too closely to politics, in truth, US labor has been reluctant to take up the kind of big political issues that have historically helped push workers into the streets and built workers’ movements in other democracies. We should not be surprised if many national unions hesitate to act decisively. Nor should we expect their leaders to be at the forefront, for despite critics’ endless talk of labor bosses, the movement has never functioned effectively as a top-down, command-and-control institution.
Rather, the national union movement has tended to respond opportunistically to openings that it lacked the institutional will or unity of purpose to create. In the present crisis, local unions in cities around the country—through the common good alliances they’re building to fight ICE, support beleaguered federal workers, and demand billionaires begin paying their fair share—are beginning to create the kind of openings that could conceivably pull the larger movement into the fight.
Evidence on the ground in places like Minnesota already suggests that well-conceived actions by forward-leaning coalitions of the willing can open windows of opportunity and create permission structures capable of drawing more cautious mainstream organizations into the fight. The Minnesota AFL-CIO did not initiate the remarkable “Day of Truth & Freedom,” which triggered a virtual economic shutdown of Minneapolis on January 23, as tens of thousands of residents stayed away from work, school,and shopping. Yet the organizing and alignment-building that preceded that event won the state federation’s support in the days before the action, generating a much larger impact than its initial organizers had expected.
Forward-thinking unions and their allies can replicate this effect in other settings by constructing campaigns that unmask the corporations colluding with the Trump administration’s authoritarian push. Focusing on key sectors and geographies, and engaging in calculated acts of disruption and nonviolent resistance, can not only erect defenses against the administration’s aggression but set the stage for a post-Trump organizing surge.
As longtime veterans of the labor movement, we see three elements as crucial to this strategy. The first is defining our targets expansively and attacking the financial roots of their power. We need a shared analysis of who has power in our communities and nationally, including the key Big Tech titans who openly advocate rolling back democracy and expanding an all-seeing surveillance state.
Having identified these present-day “malefactors of great wealth,” as they were called in the Progressive Era, we need to demand that worker pension funds (state and local government workers’ pension assets alone top $6 trillion) cease investing in these corporations and their anti-worker, antidemocratic agenda. We also need to articulate a platform and visionary policy agenda that focuses on breaking up and limiting their economic and political power. We must find ways to tax their hoarded wealth, reinvesting the revenues in our struggling austerity-starved communities.
A second element involves moving the labor movement into a fighting posture. The past half-century has taken a debilitating toll on the movement’s willingness and capacity to engage in collective action. In 1955, the year the AFL-CIO was formed, the equivalent of 12.1% of union members engaged in a major work stoppage. That level of union militancy vanished long ago in the United States. During the past 25 years, the annual average of participants in major work stoppages has been equal to only 1% of US union members. (The high point of militancy in that period came during the 2018 #RedForEd teacher walkout upheaval, when the equivalent of 3.3% of union members went on strike, a mere fraction of 1950s-level militancy.)
If it’s difficult to imagine a revival of organized labor without a revival of worker militancy, it’s even harder to envision an effective opposition to authoritarianism without it. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth, of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has theorized that, to succeed, a civil resistance movement requires 3.5% of a population to actively join it. If we are to reach that threshold, then labor will need to massively overperform. Labor can play this role only if it begins to rebuild its badly atrophied capacity for collective action. Unions can begin to recover that capacity by aligning contract dates and strikes; crafting common good bargaining demands that enlist public support for those struggles; and planning national “no work, no school, no shopping” efforts like the one Minnesotans pulled off January 23, and as the May Day Strong campaign recently promoted.
Finally, we need community-labor organizing committees, like those that emerged in Minnesota, to lead large-scale drives in crucial sectors while linking these efforts to the goal of breaking up the big companies that are increasingly dominating our economy and politics alike. As we confront the most aggressive consolidation of capital and economic power this nation has ever seen, our goal cannot be only to unionize the behemoths that are reorganizing our society; we must demand their vast monopoly power be diminished and made accountable to the public good.
There is no doubt that democracy and workers’ rights are facing down an existential threat. Yet that very threat and the sense of urgency it has spawned have created an opportunity we could not have engineered on our own. It has roused growing numbers to the defense of democracy, glaringly exposed the dangers of unchecked corporate power, and catalyzed actions within pockets of the labor movement that have a potential to spread and become transformative.
In the years ahead, if more unions begin to follow the example set by organizers in Minnesota to seize this moment by embracing social movement unionism, they will not only play an indispensable role in defeating Trumpist authoritarianism.
They could also help trigger a 21st-century revival of the US labor movement.
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Working People Need Power, Not Promises
If we want the Democrats, or the Republicans, or any political party to enact a political agenda that effectively addresses the real concerns of working Americans, we must build a movement that enhances and applies the power of working Americans.
Jun 03, 2026
Democrats are eager to recapture the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in this November’s elections. They are banking in part on the customary midterm pendulum swing and in part on backlash against President Donald Trump’s unhinged, cult-like governing style (despite the ineffectiveness of this strategy throughout several election cycles). They also hope to reclaim their reputation as the party of the working class.
As a lifelong labor activist, I am gratified whenever people in electoral politics say they want to uplift the American worker. But I admit some skepticism—particularly since both major parties spent a generation or more embracing the neoliberal consensus that the government should surrender to giant multinational corporations and their wealthy executives and investors. Working people are not stupid; they know most prominent Democrats and all pre-MAGA Republicans advanced an agenda that eviscerated worker interests at home and sent tens of millions of jobs abroad. (Many unions, especially those in manufacturing, opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement when George H.W. Bush negotiated it and when William J. Clinton signed it.) Public frustration and outrage have shaken politicians’ commitment to neoliberalism (rhetorically, at least), but will it be replaced by a program that advances the real interests of the people who rely on their own labor to make ends meet?
Now that he is back in office, Trump has abandoned any pretense of being pro-worker. He has stripped a million federal employees of the right to bargain collectively, gutted overtime rules and other workplace protections, crippled the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and deprived millions of working people of health and food benefits. He is proud and loud about protecting artificial intelligence from effective regulation just as employers start using it to mow down thousands—and ultimately millions—of jobs. Will the Democrats offer a real alternative for working people?
Some Democrats seem to be focused on the performative—searching for candidates who project non-elite “authenticity.” You know, candidates who know how to operate power tools and who drink beer from plastic cups. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great to run candidates who actually work for a living, but that’s not a comprehensive strategy. Working people want—and demand—actual change in how our leaders govern, not just how they look on TV (or TikTok). If the Democrats fail to articulate and deliver a legitimately pro-worker agenda, working people will continue to look elsewhere—perhaps voting for “none of the above.” (Note that, although the 2024 presidential election was proclaimed to be about the survival of our nation and its sacred values, more eligible voters stayed home than voted for either Trump or former Vice President Kamala Harris.)
Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.
Just as slick candidate packaging is not enough, the same is true of hollow “messaging.” Working people—like most voters—are tired of promises that bloom just before Election Day and wither right after. To represent workers effectively, elected officials will have to take political risks and challenge the power of the corporate elite, fighting for measures that tackle unaffordable healthcare, the housing crisis, and the vast (and growing) inequalities of wealth and income.
This seems so obvious it raises the question of why elected officials have ignored working voters’ real interests for so long. Here’s the key: Politicians will only stand up to corporate interests and press for meaningful pro-worker change if working people have enough leverage to force them to do so. For the past several decades our elected leaders chose a neoliberal path because the giant multinational companies and the ultra wealthy had the power to demand it—and working people did not have the countervailing power to resist it and to advance their own interests. It is no coincidence that the pro-corporate political consensus arose at precisely the same time that union membership plummeted in the United States. Although public approval of unions is as high as it has been in decades, the percentage of working people who are actually represented by unions is near an all-time low: about 10% of all workers and less than 6% in the private sector.
As the great United Auto Workers union leader Walter Reuther said, no one gives you anything you’re not strong enough to take for yourself. Working people need to build, or rebuild, the power to insist that politicians act in their interests, not just those of the corporate elite. Here’s a concrete example at the heart of building worker power: One of the reasons unions are so small now is that federal labor law has failed to protect workers’ right to organize and to engage in collective bargaining. There are plenty of great ideas for reforming US labor law. The Employee Free Choice Act, first introduced in 2006, would have streamlined the way the NLRB governs union organizing efforts. Opposition from pro-business senators (including some Democrats), together with the threat of a GOP filibuster, doomed it—even when Barack Obama was in the White House and the Democrats controlled both chambers. The Protect the Right to Organize Act, or “PRO Act,” would have addressed a whole range of structural and substantive problems with US labor law. It did not make it to full floor votes even when the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate in 2021.
Why did Congress fail to adopt either of these essential bills, even when Democrats were in power? Because elected leaders—including Democrats—did not feel political pressure or fear political fallout. It’s like a Zen koan: Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.
Bottom line: If we want the Democrats, or the Republicans, or any political party to enact a political agenda that effectively addresses the real concerns of working Americans, we must build a movement that enhances and applies the power of working Americans. Unless and until we create a larger, stronger labor movement, politicians will not feel enough pressure to do the right thing for working people. Leverage is how politics work, and we should act accordingly. We should roll up our sleeves and get busy organizing in the workplace so we can assert real influence in the halls of government.
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'Hands Off Our Pensions': Belgian Workers Take to the Streets in General Strike Against Austerity Measures
It's the latest of several national strikes over the past year and a half against policies that one union leader said will heighten "inequality" and "poverty."
May 13, 2026
Much of Belgium ground to a halt on Tuesday as tens of thousands of workers flooded the streets of Brussels as part of a general strike against government austerity measures.
Schools closed, public transit operated with reduced service, and flights out of major airports were grounded as workers walked off the job. Instead, they marched through the capital clad in red and green, the colors of Belgium's major labor unions, with some carrying signs that read, "Hands off our pensions" and "We will not pay the price of their wars."
According to Morning Star, as many as 100,000 people took part in the strike, which was called by the nation's three biggest trade unions in protest of measures by Prime Minister Bart De Wever's government that the unions say slash pensions, reduce wages, and attack collective bargaining.
The marchers called on the government to roll back plans to raise Belgium's retirement age to 67 and have called for an end to what the unions have dubbed a “pension penalty” that would cut benefits for those who retire early.
Amid rising costs caused by the US-Israeli war against Iran, the unions are also outraged by a proposed temporary cap on wage indexation, which requires wages to rise in tandem with inflation.
It's part of a broader trend of the government loosening labor rules for employers, which unions say has led to longer, more irregular hours and diminished employees' work-life balance.
"People will have less money left over and will still have to work more flexibly and longer," said Ann Vermorgen, the chair of the Confederation of Christian Trade Unions. "Even the Planning Bureau says that the reform will promote inequality and that poverty will emerge.”
Tuesday's general strike was just the latest over the past year and a half, as the unions have refused to let up on their push to reverse De Wever's agenda.
Gert Truyens, the chair of the General Confederation of Liberal Trade Unions of Belgium (ACLVB), said that with the pension penalty and the other labor proposals, the government was displaying “total disregard” for social dialogue by “unilaterally imposing things without discussing them with the trade unions and employers.”
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