The Roots of the Current Upsurge

What is underlying the current labor upsurge? I see it as the convergence of four factors. First, decades of stagnating wages, growing inequality, and eroding benefits and job security. Second, a global pandemic that drew these long-standing trends into sharper focus, as some groups of workers were at once hailed as “essential” but treated as disposable, and asked to put their personal safety at risk for the benefit of others, often without adequate protections. Third, a tightened labor market coming out of the pandemic that gave workers more structural bargaining power. And fourth, as strikes began to proliferate, a contagion effect, as more workers realized that “if they can do it, maybe we can do it too.”

The thread tying these factors together has been an increase in organic worker militancy not seen in decades. This has taken a variety of forms in the United States and Canada.

That militancy has been notably more organized in the United States than in Canada. In the United States, we’ve seen new organizing in places like Starbucks, Amazon, and across higher education, along with a lot of other places. Just in the private sector, US unions organized almost 100,000 workers in 2023, the most in almost a quarter century, and the fourth-most since 1990. That’s a lot, even though it still wasn’t enough to make a dent in union-density decline, as overall job growth outstripped the growth in new organizing.

But unlike much organizing in recent years, what we’ve been seeing more recently is much more of what Eric Blanc calls “worker-led” organizing. That has taken the form of independent unions like the Amazon Labor Union, which recently affiliated with the Teamsters, but also campaigns like Starbucks Workers United, which is affiliated with a major union (Workers United/SEIU), but is very lightly staffed and mainly worker-driven. The same can be said for most of the higher-ed organizing. It’s also been facilitated by organizations like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a joint project of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the United Electrical Workers (UE).

Beyond new organizing, existing union members organized militant contract campaigns, went on strike, and won important gains. The most prominent examples here were probably the Hollywood strikes, the Big Three auto contracts, and the United Parcel Service (UPS) contract. Here we need to highlight the role of rank-and-file union reform movements in revitalizing existing unions and injecting more militancy into their campaigns. With auto and UPS we can point to the central roles of Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) and Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) in leading the transformation. But even in the Hollywood unions, the strikes were preceded by months of member-driven organizing that made it clear to the leadership that the members were ready to fight and not ready to settle short.

All of this organizing, both the new organizing and the contract campaigns, was consciously built. There were key groups of people, specifically leftists of various stripes, who were embedded in these workplaces and played crucial roles in organizing the campaigns.

In Canada, this was much less the case. There was considerable worker-led organizing, but in Canada it was most visible in the form of contract rejections. From West Coast longshore workers to Toronto grocery workers, Windsor Salt workers, Ford autoworkers, and Quebec teachers and nurses, among many others, workers expressed their dissatisfaction about the contracts their union leaders had negotiated. You also saw contract rejections and close ratification margins in the United States, but not to the same degree.

These rejections largely did not happen because the contracts were concessionary. To the contrary, many were quite good compared to previous agreements. It’s just that members deemed them not good enough. Thanks to the four factors mentioned above, workers had raised expectations, and they let their leaders know.

To their credit, union leaderships tended to take the rejections and close calls in stride. When Quebec nurses rejected their recommended agreement by 61 percent, FIQ (the nurses’ union) president Julie Bouchard said she was “disappointed, but disappointed in myself, not my members. We had to make some concessions to get to an agreement, and our members said loud and clear that they wanted nothing to do with them.”

In both countries, we’re seeing an organic worker-led upsurge after decades of defeat, made possible by conditions that highlighted workers’ problems and gave them more leverage, as well as by embedded left leadership in many cases. And this upsurge is now feeding off itself, generating further energy and mobilization.

The Crisis of Political Representation

In both the United States and Canada, however, we also see what can only be described as a crisis of political representation. The labor upsurge has largely not shifted the political terrain, with some notable exceptions. In Canada, the exception is the recent vote in Parliament to enact federal antiscab legislation, banning federally regulated employers from hiring replacement labor during strikes. This was unanimous, meaning that even the Conservatives voted for it. Meanwhile, though, we’re stuck with a deeply unpopular “neoliberal with a smiling face” prime minister, Justin Trudeau, whose unpopularity seems to be paving the way for a Conservative government under the leadership of Pierre Poilievre, who has built up a Trumpian faux-populist bully brand of the kind that has become all too common across much of the world.

The traditional party of Canadian workers — the New Democratic Party (NDP), led by Jagmeet Singh — has been propping up the minority Liberal government through a “confidence and supply” agreement. It has used this position to extract certain concessions, like the antiscab legislation and expanding public health insurance to include certain prescription drugs. But the NDP is languishing in the polls and is not articulating any kind of broad political vision for building working-class power. Like many social democratic parties around the world, it has largely shed its working-class identity in favor of an urbane progressivism.

South of the border, we have with Joe Biden what many have referred to as “the most pro-labor administration in history.” While this is probably true, the problem is that this is an incredibly low bar. It did not prevent Biden from intervening to halt a national rail strike to win something as basic as paid sick days. And as with every Democratic president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it has not led to meaningful reform of broken US labor law — although it has led to more aggressive interpretation and enforcement of existing laws, particularly thanks to National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo.

US workers remain trapped in a two-party system that fails to represent their interests, and they famously lack a labor party, even a bourgeois sellout one like the UK Labour Party. They are also trapped in a labor regime, as I have described previously, that blocks the translation of class conflict into political reforms. Instead, class issues get refracted and diffused, appearing as individual problems or partisan “special interests.”

So at one level, at least in the US case, the failure of labor resurgence to shift the political terrain is a long-standing problem. However, it has been exacerbated in recent years through a process of what some have called “dealignment,” in which traditional party-class alliances have gotten scrambled. In the United States this has taken the bizarre form of the Republican Party trying to position itself as the party of the working class, while the Democrats more and more become the party of suburban professionals.

While another Donald Trump presidency seems a bit less inevitable now that Biden has dropped out of the presidential race, the fact remains that the race is extremely close, and Trump does enjoy significant working-class support, no matter how you define class. Importantly, union members are still less likely to be Trump supporters, but many are. This is similar to union member support for Poilievre’s Conservatives in Canada.

Why is this? As organized labor weakened, parties that traditionally incorporated workers into their coalitions as workers left behind those coalitions and began forging new ones. This left workers open to political appeals along different cleavage lines that didn’t correspond to class distinctions. With the current right populism, those new cleavage lines are race and migration status, combined with a conspiratorial wariness of “elites” (often defined in terms of cultural markers like education). While sexism, racism, and white nationalism are integral parts of this political project, it is a coalition that has begun to incorporate more women and people of color as well.

While the realm of electoral politics remains pretty grim on both sides of the border, there are some reasons for optimism about the broader left, despite recent setbacks, though more for the United States than for Canada. In the United States, the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America in the context of Bernie Sanders’s improbable presidential run and Donald Trump’s even more improbable victory in 2016 has expanded the left political terrain in ways that are critical to keep in mind. It’s true that DSA has many problems, might put too much stock in electoral politics, has a large paper membership, and has been losing members for the past few years. That being said, it remains the largest left organization in the United States since Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s and the largest explicitly socialist organization since the Communist Party of the 1940s.

That’s not nothing. The political terrain remains far more favorable to left ideas than at any point in my life. Indeed, this shifted political terrain is a key reason for the more favorable situation for labor, as DSA members have played key roles in many of the organizing struggles I described earlier. So we could say that the labor upsurge has not reshaped politics as much as we might expect or hope, but politics has helped shape the labor upsurge.

Perhaps ironically, the situation isn’t quite as hopeful in Canada. There isn’t a vibrant left to the left of the NDP, and various NDP reform efforts have floundered. There is Québec solidaire in Quebec, which is a solidly left party. But it has weak ties to labor, and has moved toward a strategy overly focused on elections in recent years.

That being said, the mainstream labor movement remains in much better shape in Canada, and particularly in Quebec. The fact that you have 30 to 40 percent union density does affect the political terrain, even without a party amplifying that voice.

Finally, the global movement that has arisen in response to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has reshaped politics. In the United States, it contributed to the nonviability of Biden’s reelection campaign, and while we can hardly expect a Kamala Harris–Tim Walz administration to take meaningful steps to bring Israel to heel, their stance is already a marked shift from Biden’s. In Canada, we have seen moves like revoking the tax-exempt status of a major Zionist charity that was funding settlements in the occupied territories. We remain far from putting a stop to the genocide, but the degree of global solidarity with the Palestinian cause is not something I have seen in my life.

The blockages between labor and politics today are real. But so too are the opportunities for building a new class politics created by historic worker mobilization, the rise of working-class tribunes like Shawn Fain, and an inspiring movement for international solidarity with Palestine.