Optimism of the Will: How Labor Can Survive and Ultimately Thrive in the Trump Era
Amidst a sea of pessimism, some labor leaders and allies see a road forward despite the dire challenges a Trump administration will surely bring to the American labor movement.
How should American labor respond to the coming assaults under the Trump administration? A few weeks ago, I highlighted American Federation of Teachers National President Randi Weingarten’s speech calling for an abandonment of neoliberalism. In addition to her remarks, there have been several other notable responses and strategic proposals by unionists and advocates of labor that speak to the need for unions to get out in front of the predictable attacks on the horizon.
Indeed, before the Trump administration has even started, some are signaling the need to preempt likely attempts to gut unions in higher education. As the Guardian recently reported:
Student workers are bracing for the incoming Trump administration to “constrict or eliminate” their labor rights, after a surge in union organizing on college campuses.
Nearly 45,000 student employees formed unions between 2022 to 2024 between 44 bargaining units. As of earlier this year, an estimated 38% of all graduate student employees in the US were unionized.
But organizers fear this trend will stutter as Trump prepares to return to office. During his first presidency, officials tried to exclude 1.5 million private college and university student employees from exercising collective bargaining rights under the National Labor Relations Act, arguing these workers were not “employees”.
While the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the country’s top labor watchdog, withdrew this proposal months after Joe Biden took office in March 2021, Trump’s re-election sets the stage for another battle.
Thus, academic unionists at campuses across the country are organizing to secure representation and win contracts now so they are better positioned for battles in the near future.
This is precisely what labor reporter Hamilton Nolan recommends in “Lean Into the Punch: Labor Under Trump” at his Substack, How Things Work—organize and fight rather than cower and wait:
There are precisely two things to be done, beginning now, and continuing for the next four years. One thing is to organize. Unions are weak because they represent only ten percent of American workers. To gain power, we need to grow. That means that unions need to resist their impulses now to say, “Organizing is about to get harder so we shouldn’t waste our resources on it,” cut their organizing budgets, and spend their money trying to build a moat to protect their existing members. No. That is the first step to death. We all need to organize our ass off. Spend every last cent trying to bring new people in to the labor movement. In hostile times, workers need the protection of unions more than ever. It’s our responsibility to give it to them. We all get stronger when we grow, and we are all an easier target when we are small.
The other thing to do is to strike. More bluntly: to do more legal as well as illegal strikes. (Teachers in Massachusetts are showing us the way right this minute.) The legal regime that corporations are salivating to dismantle is the same one that has, for decades, laid out the ground rules for who and how and where and when strikes could expect to be sanctioned by the law. Take away those rules and the only silver lining for workers is that the shackles are off. Strikes carry their own power apart from any laws—the inherent power that goes with the fact that when workers stop working, nothing gets done. This is the core power of the labor movement. Time to lean into this. When you are in a fight and the referee leaves, you can either stand there exclaiming “My word! I say! This is highly improper!” as your opponent gouges your eyes out, or you can start fighting dirtier.
Of course, the key to his suggestions, as Nolan observes, is for labor leaders to double down on funding organizing, even if that means moving some funds away from other areas to do so. “Organize, organize, organize” has long been the mantra of the union movement; the problem is that rarely has the requisite financial muscle been put behind that rhetoric.
In “Labor’s Resurgence Can Continue Despite Trump”, Chris Bohner and Eric Blanc counsel against despair and argue that:
Conditions overall remain favorable for labor growth, despite Trump’s re-election. Political contexts matter, but so do factors like the economy, high public support for unions, labor’s deep financial pockets, the growth of union reform efforts, labor’s continued disruptive capacity, and the spread of young worker activism. Rebuilding a powerful labor movement remains our best bet to defeat Trumpism, reverse rampant inequalities, and transform American politics. Now is not the time for retreat.
To bolster their claim, they point out that organizing was more robust during the Bush era than it was under Obama:
Unions organized significantly more workers under George W. Bush’s administration than under Barack Obama. Why? The main reason is that the labor movement in the early 2000s was still in the midst of a relatively well-resourced push to organize the unorganized, whereas by the time Obama took office labor had mostly thrown in the towel on external organizing, hoping instead to be saved from above by lobbying establishment Democrats to pass national labor law reform. Labor can grow over the coming years if it starts putting serious resources towards this goal.
Therefore, the authors insist, labor can not just survive but prosper if unions take advantage of their existing resources and commit to a more robust, reformed, future-leaning movement that attracts some of the same disaffected workers who may have voted for Trump.
The United Teachers of Los Angeles’s Alex Caputo-Pearl lays out a thorough formula for “How Labor Can Fight Trump’s Authoritarianism” in Portside Labor:
In the coming years, defeating MAGA authoritarianism must be US labor’s main objective, embedded within a long-term strategy to fight for multi-racial democracy and an economy in which working-class people thrive. I propose that labor adopt an intensified “Block and Build” approach.
“Blocking” means organizing broad labor, community, and political alliances against authoritarianism, fighting tooth-and-nail against attacks on democratic rights, and vigorously defending the most vulnerable. “Building” means massively expanding a social base and movement infrastructure that will fight authoritarianism long-term and build campaigns for multi-racial democracy and an economy that radically departs from the corporate-driven, unequal model that has dominated since the 1970s.
More specifically, as Caputo-Pearl outlines, “five elements are needed in the overall program to defeat authoritarianism and build the foundations for a just society”: plow resources into organizing; campaign and negotiate for the common good with universalist demands for healthcare, childcare, and minimum wage while also defending the rights of communities under assault; strike and walk out; build independent political power by combining political and electoral work with member organizing aiming to create a new vision for society; and coordinate on as many levels as possible and build toward a nationwide general strike on May 1st 2028.
Hence, amidst the sea of defeatism, retreat, and withdrawal, it is encouraging to see that folks in labor circles are not just exercising some optimism of the will in the face of the pessimism of the intellect that is not unfounded given our present political circumstances. I am reminded of the many other times in our history when the death of the labor movement was predicted and yet unions somehow managed to persevere against all odds. Most recently, many saw doom in the wake of the Janus Supreme Court decision that greatly restricted public sector unions, and yet this was followed by a wave of activism and organizing that helped keep public sector unions afloat.
That said, the challenges labor faces in this moment with an emboldened corporate class and an ideologically hardened rightwing in power across the board at the Federal level are perhaps unprecedented in the modern era.
Also, in addition to the institutional obstacles within unions to more aggressive organizing, the labor movement faces the danger of divide and conquer tactics on the right that will pit private sector unions that have many members who may have supported Trump against public sector unions to which he represents an existential threat. This kind of split would be devastating for unionism as a whole and weaken the movement to such an extent that even those who stood with Trump would eventually be attacked by the same forces in his ranks that are aiming first for the public sector.
It is also up for debate whether the labor movement as currently constituted has what it takes to muster something like the national general strike that leaders such as UAW’s Shawn Fain and Alex Caputo-Pearl are proposing. Nonetheless, it is certainly true that dire times tend to focus the mind and summon unexpected courage.
At its best, labor can serve as a model for an inclusionary, multiracial democracy with the everyday needs of ordinary folks at its heart. If we act upon the bedrock principle that an injury to one is the concern of all, perhaps unionists can provide an alternative model to the war of all against all that MAGA embodies more than anything else.