As tens of thousands of New Yorkers streamed down Seventh Ave from Times Square toward their dispersal point at Fourteenth Street for the city’s “No Kings” protest on Saturday, October 18, a separate march of perhaps five thousand waited uncertainly a long avenue block away. At its front, march leaders led a chant of “Whose streets? Our streets!” — apparently oblivious to the irony that the New York Police Department (NYPD) was at that moment refusing to allow it to march uptown and west to join the far larger protest. Behind them, protesters stood, now mostly silent and uncertain: What was the plan? Why were we waiting? Finally the word filtered back: disperse and walk east on the sidewalk to Union Square, where marchers were told, incorrectly, that they would meet up with the main march.

Saturday’s labor march provided almost the perfect metaphor for the health of the New York City labor “movement”: unable or unwilling to mobilize its 750,000 members in substantive numbers, irresolute and unclear in its plans, keeping its own members in the dark, and afraid or unwilling to challenge the NYPD’s dictates. And rather than strive to provide organization and leadership to hundreds of thousands of ordinary New Yorkers protesting Trump, organized labor signaled that it stood purposefully apart.

Although the march was called by the NYC Central Labor Council (CLC), large segments of NYC labor were missing in action at the assembly point. Virtually all of the construction trades — perhaps supportive of Trump’s policies, or simply afraid of their own members, even as Trump is shutting down huge government-funded construction projects for transit, wind, and solar; the uniformed services — not just police and correction officers but sanitation and fire too; every Teamsters local, including 237, the second-largest municipal workers’ union; transit workers; the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council; all of the major cultural worker unions, undoubtedly deciding (correctly) that their members would be more invigorated joining the main march rather than isolating themselves with their union brethren.