by Alec Ross
The pressure is now on for the United States to both innovate and draw from fellow Western democracies to right its model. If it does not, much of the world will shift toward a more authoritarian approach that continues to take power out of the hands of everyday people.
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THE WORKERS
The golden age of the American worker emerged out of a cloud of tear gas and bullets inside Fisher Body plant #2.
Thirteen days earlier, General Motors (GM) automotive laborers and their fellow employees had brought the company’s sprawling Flint, Michigan, production facilities to a standstill. The workers wanted to unionize, and GM had fought their efforts every step of the way. On Wednesday, December 30, 1936, workers learned that the company planned to move the production of its dies—the equipment used to shape the bodies of cars—from Flint to factories with less union presence elsewhere in the state. That night, the Flint workers locked themselves inside the factory and refused to leave. The dies in Flint were one of just two sets used to stamp each of GM’s 1937 cars. By taking over the plant, workers brought the company’s production to a halt. Within days, the “sit-down strike” spread to other GM facilities in the area. The strikers’ demands were straightforward: they wanted a minimum wage, improved working conditions, and bargaining rights for the newly formed United Auto Workers (UAW) union.
As the strike wore on, the workers made their home on the factory floors. Surrounded by the half-built bodies of Buick sedans, they read, gambled, sang, played table tennis, and lounged on floor mats and car seats. Supporters delivered food and supplies to the occupying workers while leading their own protests outside the plant. GM got a court order to break the strike, but it feared there would be backlash if workers were evicted by force. Instead, the company cut the heat to Fisher Body plant #2, hoping the cold Michigan winter would freeze out the men inside.
The heat shuddered off on January 11, but the strikers stayed put. That night, when the workers opened the factory gate for a food delivery, Flint police made their move. They stormed the facility, firing tear gas and buckshot at the strikers. The workers fought back by hurling car parts and spraying the police with fire hoses. The brawl, dubbed the “Battle of the Running Bulls,” left twenty-eight people injured.
After the clash, Michigan’s governor deployed 1,200 national guardsmen to the scene to protect the strikers and support negotiations between workers and management. At a time when labor disputes were often settled with violence, the decision proved critical to the workers’ cause. The strike continued for another month. After some 136,000 GM employees at forty-four plants joined the strike in solidarity, the company reached an agreement with the UAW: the union would represent workers at seventeen plants, and employees were given a wage increase.
The GM sit-down strike was called “the most significant American labor conflict in the twentieth century” by labor historian Sidney Fine. The UAW’s success in Flint galvanized union activity across the automotive industry. Within two weeks, workers in Detroit launched eighty-seven sit-down strikes, and within a year wages for auto workers increased nearly 300 percent and UAW membership shot up from thirty thousand to five hundred thousand. Workers in other industries began to unionize more aggressively as well. Between 1934 and 1943, the proportion of the US workforce that belonged to a union more than tripled, from 7.6 percent to 24.3 percent. By the early 1950s, one in three American workers was a card-carrying union member.
At the time of the GM strike, the United States was primed for an explosion in organized labor—the Flint workers simply lit the match. The Great Depression had depressed wages and decreased job opportunities for working people, leaving much of the country feeling insecure and discontent. Unions promised economic security to workers at a time when they felt they had little to lose. The political atmosphere had also turned in their favor. The federal government guaranteed workers’ right to unionize and participate in collective action in the 1935 Wagner Act, one of many pro-labor policies enacted under the New Deal. After signing the law, President Franklin D. Roosevelt summarized his administration’s attitude toward labor: “If I went to work in a factory, the first thing I’d do is join a union.”
It was at this same time and facing similar economic distress that Germany turned to Nazism and Italy to fascism. Those moments of the early 1930s are like those of the present: something dramatic is going to happen and it is not preordained what shape it will take. These are inflection points that can drive society to reshape its policies toward genocidal, nativist authoritarianism or toward liberalism.
After the crash of Wall Street and the Depression that followed, the US government and workers’ unions effectively came together to revise the social contract so that it better fit the needs of workers. It was a move away from the boom-and-bust model of the “roaring ’20s,” which bears a heck of a strong resemblance to the 2010s in the United States. Coming out of the Depression there was a new sense of who the indispensable workers were—those building the cars, planes, trains, and skyscrapers that defined industrial America. A similar awakening came during the COVID pandemic, which brought about a new appreciation for frontline workers in health care, food, and services.
General Motors and the business community were forced to the table as signatories, and worker protections and benefits were systematically enshrined into law. A social contract is a living document of sorts that needs periodic renewal and revision, and the economic growth of the subsequent decades would benefit workers and executives alike.
But over the next half century, attitudes toward organized labor incrementally soured in the United States. Unions would come to be seen less as fierce advocates for working people and more as bloated, corrupt bureaucracies intent on maintaining their own power. Today, more people are familiar with the mob-affiliated Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa than with Samuel Gompers, John L. Lewis, Sidney Hillman, or the other figures who built the modern labor movement.
In my personal and professional circles, few topics are more polarizing than labor unions. One camp holds them up as indispensable to achieving economic justice; another views them as inefficient, corrupt remnants of the past.
My first time working shoulder to shoulder with union members was a summer I spent working on a beer truck. Most of the truck drivers were Teamsters and those who were not were putting in the requisite years of work they needed to become eligible for membership.
The wheels of the truck rolled out of the warehouse at 6:00 a.m. That meant we had to be at the warehouse loading the truck up at 5:15 a.m. I am convinced that the men who worked in that warehouse were the strongest men on earth. I was nineteen years old and as strong as I have ever been in my life, but I could barely keep up with the fifty-five- and sixty-year-old men who worked on the beer trucks. These guys were tough. Most of them were from what we called the Hollows—the valleys that run down the edges of hills in West Virginia. Even though I had grown up and spent just about all my life living in West Virginia, some of the accents I heard in that beer warehouse were so thick I could barely understand them. It was a sing-songy accent derived from Old English that only lives on deep in the hills of Appalachia.
My job was to deliver the beer and guard the truck—a lot of these bars were in rough areas. We would show up at bars starting at 7 a.m., when many opened to serve workers coming off night shifts and chronic alcoholics who need a drink soon after they wake up. The bars would be completely full of men, each with exactly three things in front of them: a shot glass, a can of beer, and their pistol. In a lot of the really tough Hollows, we would not dare to enter a bar after noon.
These truck-driving Teamsters were successful. They made what was great money in the West Virginia of the 1990s. They bought new cars or pickups every two years. They owned boats and took vacations. They had the social cachet that accompanied their economic well-being and standing as Teamsters, and they worked hard as hell for it. It was a clear view into what happens when unionization works.
But in my first job after college, I caught a glimpse of what can go wrong when unions fail. I was hired as a public school teacher in Baltimore, and when it came time to check the box asking whether I’d join the union, I did not hesitate. My starting teaching salary was $22,459. The Baltimore Teachers Union withdrew $44 from my biweekly salary for membership fees, a noticeable amount for a guy who, after paying taxes, would end up with around $15,000 a year. If I had not joined the union, I would still have had to pay $39 every paycheck as an agency fee, meaning that although I would not have been a union member and would not have benefited from its protections, I was still mandated to pay the union for its service as the agent negotiating our salaries. Huh, I thought. This membership fee comes to almost $1,000 a year, and on top of paying student loans and the costs of starting a life on my own, it sure stings. But it’s my union and it’s here to help me and my fellow teachers.
Not so much. There was no evidence during my years in the classroom that the union did anything to increase the well-being of its members—except for protecting the teachers who probably did not belong in a classroom in the first place. We did not gain higher salaries, smaller class sizes, or access to increased resources for our students. The union’s priority was to protect jobs, which in practice meant prioritizing the lowest-performing teachers and the teachers whose personal problems had seeped into the school. You haven’t written a lesson plan in a year? No problem, we’ll defend you. You smacked a student? You’re addicted to heroin? Your students consistently demonstrate no evidence of having learned anything, year after year? These were the teachers the union went to bat for, and it fought against anything that might bring change into our school system, one of the lowest-performing districts in the United States. By the time I left, I saw it as an example of unions at their most ineffective: investing all its energy and power into maintaining the status quo, even when change would do a world of good.
The same dysfunction exists in America’s police unions. Most police unions began as benevolent organizations raising money for the widows of officers killed in the line of duty. Today they are the single biggest impediment to reforms that would crack down on police misconduct. FBI statistics for the years 2017 through 2019 show that an average of fifty law enforcement officers a year were killed on duty. During that same period, the police killed an average of 996 people a year, a 20-to-1 ratio. Most police unions will not give an inch of ground for reform efforts. They bubble wrap their officers with protections like qualified immunity and secret peer reviews for misconduct.
It is another race to the bottom. A stagnant union ends up focusing on and protecting the behavior of the worst. This is true of both the police unions and the teachers unions, and it demeans the work of the good teachers and the good police officers who make up the vast majority of the membership. The losers in this are students and citizens, and the costs to society are substantial. It does not have to be this way. It isn’t elsewhere.
When they were at their best, unions helped win workers a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, sick leave, antidiscrimination laws, child labor laws, and pensions. We can even thank them for weekends. The very basis for the European and American middle classes emerged out of the work of the labor movement. But what they delivered, they delivered in the too-distant past. Looking to the future, the United States, United Kingdom, Mediterranean Europe, and the comparatively nascent developing world labor movements need to look at models in central and northern Europe, as well as to innovative practices being developed inside some of the labor movement’s own very small start-up world.
Organized labor in the United States peaked in 1954 when 35 percent of the workforce belonged to a union. By 2019, that number had fallen to 10.3 percent. Among employees in the private sector, only 6 percent belong to a union. Because unions derive their strength from numbers, this loss of members translates to a decline in power. Since the 1980s, many Americans have seen their wages stagnate even as corporate profits and market valuations continue to rise. Both trends are the direct result of workers losing their bargaining power (i.e., unions weakening). Even nonunion workers receive smaller paychecks when overall union membership goes down.
The demise of unions in the United States is a story of globalization, technology, shareholder capitalism, and social change. The economic and political forces that propelled organized labor to its heyday in the aftermath of World War II changed course in the last two decades of the 20th century. Industries that were historic union strongholds, like manufacturing, shrank as companies introduced automation and moved production to lower-cost labor markets overseas. The knowledge- and service-based jobs that took their place are more dispersed, mobile, and difficult to organize. Meanwhile, labor laws have been eroded around the country, which has in turn made any fledgling labor movements more fragile and easier to quash than in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s day. When you add to this stew the mismanagement of existing unions—the incompetence and misplaced priorities I saw from my classroom—you end up with a situation in which the vast majority of workers have no real power.
Even so, most union leaders in the United States still cling to the same playbook that their predecessors used a hundred years ago. They favor tradition over innovation and factory-floor organization over strategies that could unite an increasingly decentralized and temporary workforce. They place their trust in politicians who relegate labor issues to the bottom of the to-do list and rub elbows with the elites they claim to oppose. Yet while they put all their efforts into maintaining the moment, the world spins on, and laborers see their wages shrivel.
In the United States there are a few examples to the contrary. Workers in new sectors of the economy are turning to technology to bring people together to advocate for their interests. Other groups are pioneering strategies to bring benefits to a mobile labor force. There is a growing awareness among workers that, whether in a traditional union or through a homespun, grassroots initiative, they need to find a way to mobilize so that their concerns are taken seriously. And even as the United States and United Kingdom offer few positive examples, nations of northern and central Europe offer viable routes toward balancing workers’ well-being with economic competitiveness.
For workers to share in the prosperity of the 2020s and beyond, they need a seat at the table where decisions are made, responsible representatives to advocate and fight when necessary on their behalf, and the resources to mobilize when employers do not meet their needs. They also need opportunities to develop new skills, benefits that follow them from job to job, and the ability to build coalitions among people dispersed around the globe. Traditional unions can provide some of these things, but not all. It is time for a new type of labor movement.
FEWER UNIONS, MORE PROBLEMS
Organized labor dates back to long before the GM strike. Trade associations existed in some form in many premodern societies—the collegia opificium of the Roman Empire, the shreni of the Indus Valley, the za of classical Japan, and the guilds of medieval Europe. Though these groups operated with different models and rules, they served the same core function: bringing workers together to advance their interests.
Modern labor unions emerged during the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the United Kingdom and eventually spreading to the United States, France, Germany, Australia, and beyond. As workers moved from the farm to the factory, port, mill, and mine, they encountered conditions that bordered on hellish. Laborers were frequently injured and sometimes killed by the machines they operated. Overcrowded sweatshops left workers vulnerable to disease and fires. For most people, wages were low, days were long, and the work itself was dirty, dangerous, and demanding.
The writer Upton Sinclair summarized the plight of industrial workers in his novel The Jungle.
Such were the cruel terms upon which their life was possible, that they might never have nor expect a single instant’s respite from worry, a single instant in which they were not haunted by the thought of m
oney.… In addition to all their physical hardships, there was thus a constant strain upon their minds; they were harried all day and nearly all night by worry and fear. This was in truth not living; it was scarcely even existing, and they felt that it was too little for the price they paid.
Unions offered workers a way to confront the grim realities of industrial society. Alone, no one employee can compel a company to change its pay or working conditions, but by banding together, workers increase their collective clout.
This did not always sit well with the people in power. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, union members were frequently viewed as communists and radicals. Corporations used this portrayal to justify aggressive anti-union behavior. The history of the early labor movement is marked by bloody clashes between workers and various law enforcement groups. In 1921, sixty miles from where I grew up in the coal-filled hills of West Virginia, the largest armed conflict inside the United States since the Civil War took place between coal miners and mine owners. An estimated one million rounds of ammunition were fired, and it took 2,100 army troops ordered in by the president to end the conflict. During these years my great-grandmother was sent away from the coal camp where she and my great-grandfather lived so that she could give birth to my grandfather away from the violence that was taking place as strikebreakers beat or shot anybody they thought might be sympathetic to the unions.
Even as violent strikebreaking tactics fell out of favor in the late 1920s, companies went to great lengths to quash union activity. GM spent $1 million (more than $18 million in 2020 dollars) spying on workers’ union activities in the three years before the Flint sit-down strike.
