Organized Labor’s Best Defense is a Good Offense

Don’t let Donald Trump’s cozy relationship with Teamsters President Sean O’Brien fool you. The new administration is a bunch of scabs — union busters of the highest order, cut from the same cloth as the radically anti-worker Reagans and Thatchers of the world. 

In his frenetic and destructive first few months back in office, Donald Trump has pursued  a sweeping set of anti-worker and anti-union executive actions that have our country’s oligarchs salivating. Here is a small and disturbing sampling of Trump administration actions:

• Fired hundreds of thousands of unionized federal workers across dozens of federal departments and agencies, many of them illegally
• Illegally nullified the Transportation Security Administration’s union contract and ended collective bargaining for thousands of federal workers, ominous first steps in the right-wing plot to destroy public sector unions entirely
• Started an unlawful campaign to stack the National Labor Relations Board with anti-labor zealots
• Elevated Elon Musk — an openly corrupt oligarch and notorious union-buster currently suing to rule the NLRB unconstitutional— to the very highest level of decisionmaking authority in his administration
• Began an illegal and authoritarian crackdown on the right to free speech and free assembly — indispensably important union rights protected by the Constitution
• Opened up a new privatization front targeting Social Security, the US Postal Service, and other federal agencies and programs that employ thousands of union workers and serve millions of working families

In the midst of this overwhelming onslaught of anti-union action, some in the labor movement might be tempted to retreat — to cut our losses and hope that we get a friendlier administration and more favorable political environment in four years. Like millions of union workers across this country who recognize what’s at stake here, I believe this would be a terrible mistake. Our best defense is a good offense. 

Rather than sheltering dues in rainy day funds or freezing hiring during this uncertain time, unions should pour resources into new organizing. I know from my time as a United Auto Workers (UAW) member organizing the first-ever private sector grad worker union on the West Coast that new organizing takes a real institutional commitment. It takes hiring talented and dedicated member-organizers to staff campaigns, spending money on training and leadership development programs, and funding the nuts and bolts of new organizing campaigns like legal representation and organizing materials. 

Unfortunately, as Chris Bohner has written, most labor unions have largely eschewed new organizing in recent years, even as union war chests have grown to record levels. This has to change. 

Investing in new organizing is the single most strategically sound decision unions can make in order to build power. 

First, organized labor is historically popular right now. In a time when nearly every type of institution is hitting record lows in approval ratings, unions are at their highest level of popularity since the New Deal era. At the same time, traditionally anti-union institutions like corporations as well as mainstream institutions are losing the faith of the public. Labor can and should use this in its favor. 

Additionally, some of the fastest growing sectors in terms of union density, such as the nonprofit sector, higher education, and healthcare, are among those being targeted systematically by the Trump administration and its oligarch backers. Now is the time for labor to keep its foot on the gas and redouble its efforts to organize new workers and workplaces in these sectors. 

New organizing can also catalyze people’s faith in democracy and inspire broader efforts to resist oligarchic power grabs. While the Democratic Party and the news media largely fail to meet the moment, organized labor can and must fill the void through organizing new workers and workplaces. What better way to spark democratic resistance than a series of new organizing campaigns that deliver material gains for workers and agitate workers to engage in mass action such as sick-outs, protests, and recognition strikes? 

This most basic expression of democratic willpower — harnessing “people power” to force change rather than beg for it — is the labor movement’s bread and butter, and it’s precisely what everyday people need to see modeled for them in order to not feel powerless. The Trump administration, following the terrifying blueprint of Project 2025, hopes that by causing maximum chaos and using state power to sow destruction on as many fronts as possible, the broad anti-fascist coalition that opposes its unpopular and authoritarian actions will fall into disarray and adopt a defensive posture. Instead, the effort to save our democracy must take a page out of Trump’s chaos playbook and deploy every tactic in the book to fight back. 

By organizing new workplaces, we can tie up the time and resources of anti-union entities and actors in the short term while growing our membership and financial resources to build for the medium and long term. If other lines of defense fail, a mass labor stoppage can be the only thing preventing a plunge into full-blown authoritarianism. 

Union density is still on the decline, and current density is far too low to pull off anything on the level of an effective general strike—and the bad guys know it. As union organizers know, having a credible strike threat is the foundation of any union’s ability to win its demands. We have to organize new workers, and fast.