With its impressive strike victory last fall and now a promising drive to organize nonunion auto plants, the United Auto Workers is raising hopes for labor’s revival in the United States. Those hopes were further buoyed by the Starbucks workers’ union recently getting the company to agree to bargain a first contract. These events are bright spots against a dark background of decades of declining union density, which dipped even further in 2023.

What will it take to revive labor’s fortunes? Many have naturally looked for lessons to the heroic era of the 1930s, when American unions made their breakthrough organizing workers by the millions across industries. Yet the US economy has undergone major structural changes in the past century, fragmenting workers across a greater number of smaller workplaces and dispersing them more widely in geographic terms — and thereby posing novel challenges for labor organizers.

In an interview last month for Jacobin Radio podcast Behind the News, Doug Henwood interviewed labor scholar Eric Blanc about this structural transformation and what it means for labor strategy today. This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.