Is It Time for Unions to Rethink Everything?

“I think it’s not so much the NLRB, but it’s the labor movement buying into this framework and buying into these restrictions,” says Joe Burns, general counsel for the Association of Flight Attendants. “I think that’s part of the problem with this fixation about which party [and] who we have at the board. You miss the bigger question, which is [that] the entire framework sucks. And that’s why only six out of a hundred [private-sector workers] are in unions. There’s no difference whatsoever in the trend line between Democrats and Republicans over the last 40 years.”

The question, then, is not whether to “Trump-proof” or how to do so, but what would it mean to build a union movement—and a broader, organized working class—resilient enough to respond to the political conditions under a given administration without being defined or restricted by them? As union recognition, labor contracts, and the right to strike are tested under flagrantly anti-union federal governance, can the union movement also fight back in ways that build its own power rather than simply buoying the power of other entities to fight on its behalf?

“I think we saw a big push to use the NLRB process to change the fate of labor unions, and if you’re an actual organizer and out there organizing, I’m sure it matters a lot having a good board agent or a sympathetic board,” says Burns, who is also author of Class Struggle Unionism (2022) and Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor’s Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today (2014). “But in the big picture, it’s not the kind of initiative that can really revive our labor movement. If this is the best initiative that we’ve seen in 40 years out of the labor board and this is the result, maybe it shows putting our eggs in that basket is not the best strategy.”

Still, having a labor-friendly NLRB during an upswing in union elections is a net positive, Thier says. Securing favorable NLRB rulings in unfair labor practice cases can grow the confidence of the entire rank and file. And yet, we’ve all seen the numbers. Despite the rise in organizing drives and union elections, overall union density has continued to decrease year over year, from 10.3 percent in 2021 to 9.9 percent in 2024. In 2024, when organized labor racked up the most recognition election wins in a decade, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an increase of 15,000 public sector union members and a decrease of 184,000 private sector union members from the previous year. Twenty nineteen, which was the year the union movement counted the fewest elections pre-Covid in the last decade, still saw 41,000 more public sector union members and 278,000 more private-sector workers than in 2024.

For many in the labor movement, the PRO Act is the legislative solution to this problem, offering reforms that would make it easier for workers to unionize. But Burns is much more skeptical. It’s just the latest flagship labor policy package messaged as “the way out of labor’s crisis,” he says, and it doesn’t address the issues most impacting the movement’s inability to build union power.

Bill Fletcher Jr., a longtime trade unionist, racial justice activist, and commentator, and a member of The Nation’s editorial board, remarks on the same, cyclical policy package process, referencing the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which President Barack Obama cosponsored as a senator and publicly supported on the campaign trail ahead of the 2008 election. Obama reaffirmed his commitment to the bill shortly after winning the presidency, but distanced himself from the policy when he took office; it was eventually abandoned in Congress.

“What [the trade union movement] keeps missing, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that the issue of labor law reform is an issue around which organizing needs to be done more than lobbying,” says Fletcher. “I heard various trade union leaders and activists expressing all kinds of frustration with Obama for not having done more about [the EFCA].… And my response was, what were you all doing? This is the [mistake] that the leaders of organized labor keep making. They keep thinking about labor law reform as a lobbying issue as opposed to a mass organizing issue.”

The shift away from mass organizing follows a multi-decade trend that dates back to the Cold War, says Fletcher. Many union leaders were willing to purge the movement’s communists and anarchists to align with a more respectable government apparatus they believed would guarantee labor’s influence. Fletcher describes the evolution as “not just a reliance on government, [but] a turning away from strategic organizing, a downplaying of member education, [and] a failure to deal with the transformation of the workforce.”

“For a while now, unions have found themselves relying a lot on legislators, on the courts, [and on] different kinds of legal routes, and they’ve put a lot less emphasis on organizing their members,” says Thier. “The focus on legislation means that, well, we’re simultaneously not really considering what it would take to win that legislation, which is just not going to happen at the legislative level on its own. And we’re also not considering [that] building a movement powerful enough to win legislation can then win things that are far and beyond our imagination right now.”

At present, the labor movement’s most visionary demands might feel like they’re floating away in the distance. Overturning the Taft-Hartley Act, banning “right-to-work” laws, and even raising the federal minimum wage seem off the table. But in reality, the strategies and tactics the labor movement will need to win those transformative victories are likely the very same tactics they’ll need to win the near-existential fight they’re currently facing.

Thier, Burns, and Fletcher all agree that defending federal workers is an urgent, critical battleground for the labor movement in this moment. And now, watching the president forcibly strip hundreds of thousands of workers of their union representation only intensifies the stakes. But to be clear, the union still exists. Those workers are still organized into a union and still maintain their labor leverage. Lacking legal protections under labor law raises retaliatory risks considerably and cannot be dismissed, but ultimately a union is defined by the rank and file and its leverage—not labor law. The question of labor militancy, it seems, is increasingly on the minds of workers, both unionized and not.

Worker militancy, from Thier’s vantage point, means “building up the confidence of every worker to take action in their own defense as a group. It’s about workers having agency and entering the stage as actual actors [instead of] these passive recipients of whatever it is the political establishment or their bosses are willing to give them.”

“It means getting beyond lobbying and litigation and legislation, getting beyond a reliance on elected officials,” says Fletcher. “Militancy begins with energizing rank-and-file members, engaging them, educating them, listening to them, and through a process of strategic targeting, increasing and escalating pressure on our opponents.”

“This is a kind of do-or-die moment for labor and we can’t wait for legislation to catch up and to protect us,” Thier says. “These people are not operating within the law. They don’t care about the law.…What we really need is to set up organizations of workers [and] of the working class very generally, to fight back to prevent the theft of our public services, our social services, our safety net, and to protect all of our individual working conditions.”

Burns, who advocates for a “militant democratic labor movement,” shortens his definition to “worker self-activity.” He emphasizes class struggle unionism and rank-and-file-directed strike activity, which he calls the movement’s “greatest hope and strength.”

The calls for one-day strikes and general strikes, and the pleas for unions to court confrontation with their employers or strike on behalf of the disorganized masses, are assuredly annoying for the 9.9 percent of US workers who are union members. (“It is obnoxious for me, someone outside of the union, to say that they should strike,” writes Hamilton Nolan.) But it also signals a broader working-class appetite for class confrontation, laws be damned—a confrontation we are massively under-prepared and under-organized for, but an appetite nonetheless. But of course, the political and legal context of these escalations does matter.

Navigating what risks to take and when, which labor protections workers should lean on and which ones aren’t worth the compromise, are all decisions guided by the rank and file. And rightly so, because the fallout can be devastating. For example, the impact of injunctions levied by the NLRB is far more determinant for most unions than the corporations they’re fighting against. An escalatory action that might result in a $10 million or $20 million fine or injunction could set a sizable union back for years.

In the case of the fired federal workers, Fletcher notes that it’s illegal for them to strike, which also means they have little to no experience with collective action, though their recent protest activity is a welcome sign.

“In order for there to be a strike, you’d have to have hundreds of thousands of federal-sector workers who recognize that if they strike, they may go to jail,” says Fletcher. “And they have to be ready for it. That’s what people have to keep in mind when they start throwing around terms [like] militancy.”

And indeed, there has been plenty of throwing around (including from myself). But opposite those workers sits a massive legal apparatus that is designed to prefer conversation and compromise over worker-led confrontation—and it’s betting that the union movement will allow them to call the shots.

“I think people really understate the role of the NLRB in the repressive apparatus against laborers and labor militancy,” says Burns. “If you look at the trajectory over time, [some of the] key features of [labor policy] is to limit actions of labor militancy, to restrict solidarity, to kind of particularize disputes. All of the items that we would need to make successful strikes—which is basically to shut down the operations of the employer—labor law is constituted to restrict that.”

Here again, the NLRB, broader labor law, and government regulations all present a series of guardrails and legal hurdles designed to mitigate or criminalize escalatory activities workers might deem necessary. But the power and threat of organized labor is rooted in the self-determined agency of its rank and file, first and foremost, not labor policy and not the courts. So if the rank and file, cognizant of their context, well aware of the risks, and having articulated their demands, deem a strike necessary, then who is labor law to stop them?

“The government [is] always going to be involved in labor relations,” Burns says. “Because their role is to protect the private accumulation of wealth and the exploitation of workers. The problem is when the labor movement starts accepting this scheme and accepts its validity. Then we start to disarm ourselves.”

“Our greatest source of power is the fact that we control the bottom line,” says Thier. “Without us there’s no service. There’s no product. If we want to influence the people in the halls of power, we have to use this leverage, this incredible source of power that we have as workers. We can revitalize this movement and people can take it into their own hands without waiting for the perfect president, perfect politician, perfect person to come and save them. It’s us, actually. No one is coming [to save] us.”