Labor’s Crisis Is Not a PR Problem
Union approval is at historic highs, yet density keeps falling. The problem isn’t messaging but the lack of strategy that can turn popularity into power.
SEIU workers walk off the job at Los Angeles General Medical Center. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
On both the Left and Right, there is a prominent tendency to frame organized labor’s problems as most fundamentally about its perception (or non-perception) in public consciousness. For the new pro-worker right, figures like Sohrab Ahmari, “the mainstream of the labor movement must detach itself from goofy progressive gender politics and open borders. Now. Today.” In their view, labor is suffering from its attachment to an ideology that is anathema to the majority of working people in the United States.
For the Left, meanwhile, labor is time and again “forgotten” by the Democrats, dropped from public consciousness when its cause should in fact be a rallying cry, as that of the January 6ers was for the MAGA base. What these views share is the idea that if only labor could be represented to the public in a good light, it would throw off its shackles and start to make some real gains.
It’s important to note first that there is truth in both of these positions. Many union leaders are often out of line with working-class attitudes on political issues, partly because they share an associational world with activist nonprofit leaders who have no social base and garner their opinions from other urban professionals. And the Democrats should indeed be making an issue of, for instance, Amazon’s union-busting as a way of winning back working-class voters.
But both positions gloss over the simple fact that unions are more popular than they have been for some time. Ahmari’s idea that “goofy gender politics” lies at the root of labor’s woes is absurd on its face given that a supermajority of Americans approve of labor unions. Whoever the goofiness is alienating, it’s a small minority. But the Left’s idea that the union cause has been forgotten because it has not been made an issue by the party with an absurdly low favorability rating also doesn’t make sense of this fact either. People are well aware that Amazon is a union buster and that the JFK8 workers got screwed; they just don’t know what to do about it.
Mistaking Symptom for Cause
More substantively, however, both positions confuse symptom for cause. In a situation where no one has a strategy for a realistic reversal of the union density trend, i.e., when union leaders don’t have a clear-cut incentive to be in touch with the interests and values of the people they hope to organize, it makes sense that there would be a noticeable gap between leadership and (potential) rank and file. Similarly, it would make sense that labor is constantly appealing to a Democratic Party that hasn’t had time for it for, arguably, fifty years.
This substitute for strategy widens the political gap, since it draws labor leadership further into the world of moving goalposts and rhetorical mirages that the professional political class thrives on. These developments have produced a particular kind of “insanity” in the labor movement — in Einstein’s oft-quoted sense of doing the same thing again and again while expecting different results: the hope the Democratic Party will finally deliver reforms it has failed to provide for half a century now.
The core problem underlying these symptoms is the simple fact that labor can’t make new organizing gains, that it can’t translate its immense popularity into membership increases that even keep up with labor market growth. This is not a cultural or PR problem; it’s a strategic one.
Everyone recognizes that labor law in this country is broken. Much rarer, however, is some analysis of what this brokenness means for organized labor’s situation. Simply recognizing it could, as has traditionally been the case, simply be a reason for giving the Democrats more money.
To our minds, the key lesson that has yet to be fully internalized is that running more and better National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections is not the path out of this mess. Especially now, but even before Trump II, the NLRB election process has been so skewed toward employers that it no longer represents a viable path of worker empowerment for the broad majority of workers.
It’s no surprise that unions have been very reticent to confront this fact. Insofar as they spend money on new organizing at all, it is largely devoted to the process of winning NLRB elections and then getting contracts. The organizing process has been structured into well-worn grooves ninety years into the Wagner Act era. Even challenges from the Left to union intransigence largely concern tactics about how to better win elections not whether or not the process is worth an investment in the first place.
No Quorum, No Quarter
Consider our current situation: the NLRB lacks quorum, which means that it can process elections but can’t make any decisions. In this situation, union recognition basically depends on employer participation, so any rectification of the playing field that the National Labor Relations Act once provided no longer exists. Workers and employers are once again facing off without state mediation (or better, with the state on the side of employers), as they were before the Wagner Act. Any gains that workers hope to make either requires the beneficence of employers or enough disruption of their operations that they’re willing to trade recognition for peace.
That is the task before organized labor: not to win some PR war, not to continue pouring money into elections for mainstream Democratic Party candidates, not even simply to invest in new organizing by the standard methods, but to once again test the bounds of strategic disruption to see if those muscles still work. Needless to say, this requires some strategic overhaul in many organizing departments and experimentation with tactics, some new and some that haven’t been used since before Taft-Hartley. It also requires making risky, big bets on these tactics with treasuries of institutional labor.
Those who return us time and again to the issue of labor’s perception in public consciousness — whether the new right’s gripes over cultural politics or the Left’s compulsion to claim every issue as a “workers’ issue” — are not only missing the moment. They’re also distracting from a more difficult discussion, and one that bears true, material risks.