To Stop Trump, Unions Need Joint Campaigns and a Shared Vision

[This article is part of a Labor Notes roundtable series: How Can Unions Defend Worker Power Against Trump 2.0? We will be publishing more contributions here and in our magazine in the months ahead. Click here to read the rest of the series.—Editors]

History shows us that when authoritarianism rears its head, whether it takes root depends on the labor movement’s response. That’s why unions must be at the center of the burgeoning anti-authoritarian movement that’s on display in efforts to build a broader pro-democracy coalition under banners like "No Kings" and "Workers Over Billionaires."

But we have to be clear-eyed: our labor movement isn’t in fighting shape. Most of our unions do not have recent muscle memory of striking or taking confrontational collective action. We must build up to strike readiness through greater organizing and collaboration by large locals and labor councils, and through escalating direct actions involving members and non-members alike.

As Trump’s authoritarianism escalates, we have to broaden our tent to include labor-community coalitions. We have to draw on a range of tactics, like consumer boycotts, sickouts, and slow-downs. We need to reenergize union structures at the national, state, and local levels and line up political and contract demands.

And as Trump tries to snuff out an already-shrinking labor movement, unions have to pay attention not only to their role in defending society, but also to defending the rights of union and non-unionized workers under assault.

THE ANTI-LABOR TURN

The stakes for unions and society could hardly be higher. The Trump administration has eliminated union rights for a million federal workers with the stroke of a pen. That's 100 times the anti-union tsunami that Ronald Reagan unleashed when he locked out 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, often cited as a key moment in labor’s decline.

The union movement in the United States is fragmented and divided. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, in fact, gave the Trump campaign a big boost by appearing at the Republican National Convention in the midst of a contentious race, and has continued to tout alliances with politicians from the MAGA right.

Furthermore, despite some bright spots of organizing, our movement as a whole has not developed methods to reverse the staggering loss of union density over the last 40-plus years. Unions represented one in four U.S. workers in 1980, but today we represent just one in nine.

Nonetheless, a broad pro-democracy front will require significant labor participation. Unions remain one of the most durable, democratic, and internally diverse institutions we have. Members reflect a microcosm of society, with different races, religions, countries of origin, genders, and political views. Organized labor still represents 14 million members—and our pro-democracy forces have a better chance of winning their participation than our opponents do.

HOPEFUL EXAMPLES

Without shared campaigns and aligned goals, much of labor’s potential power goes underutilized. Currently, central labor councils at the local and state levels—and the AFL-CIO at the national level—are the joint bodies that bring together most unions. But they are almost always unable to mobilize the base of union members in the same way that large local affiliates of individual unions can.

Building power starts at this local union level, with a shift in orientation towards members and in service of collective interests. This is what the Chicago Teachers Union did from 2010 to the present, as we organized to win multiple strikes in our public and private sector divisions. United Teachers Los Angeles, the Oakland Education Association, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, the St. Paul Federation of Educators, and other teacher unions have followed suit.

From that foundation of revitalized locals, these unions have built more thorough, methodical organizing over years. California educator locals, for example, formed the California Alliance for Community Schools and launched the We Can’t Wait campaign earlier this year, with 32 locals aligning contract expiration dates across the state to push for more staffing, smaller class sizes, and better wages and benefits. The Twin Cities locals, meanwhile, have worked with SEIU Local 26, the workers’ center CTUL, and other allies to coordinate strikes and weeks of action.

When we’re at our best, local campaigns and national union organizing objectives fuel one another. During the high-water mark of unionization in the 1930s, the spade work of local and city-based campaigns was sparked and supported by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and when successful, buoyed international unions’ prospects for new organizing.

This approach is on display in the local and national efforts led by the May Day Strong coalition and the United Auto Workers (UAW) call to align contract expirations around May 1, 2028.

May Day Strong parlayed the momentum from this year’s May Day mobilizations into collaboration with the AFL-CIO to make Labor Day more than a barbecue. These “Workers Over Billionaires” demonstrations became a stronger challenge to the right-wing oligarchs’ takeover of government than we’ve seen on Labor Day in a long time.

RESUSCITATE OUR UNION STRUCTURES

Many of our union structures at national, state, and local levels can be repurposed and resuscitated. Our idea is to accelerate that process, because the stakes require it.

If we could bring together large locals within and across unions to align political and contract demands, that would make it possible to shift the balance of power in the country and significantly weaken the consolidation of the authoritarian right-wing bloc represented by the MAGA regime.

Dozens of local unions across different sectors have led over the last 10 years by investing in three critical approaches:

• Supermajority organizing, based on talking with and listening to every worker we represent, including non-members
• Bargaining for the common good, meaning fighting for demands in the public interest, like affordable housing, climate resilience policies, and racial justice
• Applying supermajority organizing methods to electoral work, including getting big numbers of members involved in canvassing, identifying neighborhood leaders, and building ongoing relationships between union members and other people in the communities where they work

Historically, strikes in important industries have been key to strengthening large sections of the working class and raising workers’ expectations. These strategic industries have included railroads, mining, steel, textiles, auto, ports, and schools, depending on the era.

Labor actions could have a multiplier effect if taken together in key sections of today’s economy with some union density—like hospitals, airports, and the logistics, transportation, and ports sectors central to Amazon and the warehouse delivery system. Ripple effects could strengthen our bargaining power vis-a-vis the Trump administration, especially if these actions are connected to and inspire broader social forces.

Additionally, socially reproductive parts of the economy—meaning the sectors that are necessary to keep all the other workers working and train future generations of workers—have huge leverage and importance for most Americans when disrupted. Think K-12 schools, community colleges and trade schools, universities, hospitals, and public transit.

Joint campaigns around a shared vision could inspire further collective actions like electoral work, boycotts, protests, strikes, and contract fights, all of which have an impact on the public.

RECOVERY AND RECONSTRUCTION

Which international unions are best positioned to build an even broader front, because they are opposed to the anti-union authoritarianism of the government, have enough social and economic power to disrupt the economy, and represent the multiracial working class?

Five of the 10 biggest internationals in the country can already be considered part of the progressive front, based on majority member support for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election combined with their development of political programs that reject the authoritarian turn. These include the three largest public sector unions—the National Education Association (NEA), AFSCME, and the American Federation of Teachers/American Association of University Professors (AFT/AAUP)—and two unions with a range of public and private sector units, the Service Employees (SEIU) and the UAW.

SUPPORT LABOR NOTES

BECOME A MONTHLY DONOR

Give $10 a month or more and get our "Fight the Boss, Build the Union" T-shirt.

A majority of the other 50-plus international unions affiliated to the AFL-CIO have top leaders who have taken on the regime or expressed solidarity with the broader movement for immigrant and civil rights. For instance, leaders of several building trades unions have issued statements denouncing Trump’s job-killing attacks on green energy projects.

These unions represent workers in sectors with the ability to slow down large sections of the economy: transportation and logistics, K-12 schools, hospitals, airports, and beyond. Maximizing the ability of these unions to leverage their chokepoint power will require much greater levels of coordination than we have mustered so far. But this is increasingly possible with large locals in key geographies participating in grassroots demonstrations and organizing schools like those initiated by Indivisible, May Day Strong, and Labor Notes.

International unions have often worked together, but mostly at the electoral and policy levels. We have an opportunity to bring them together at the base, in action, through the coordinated work of local unions.

MOBILIZATIONS ON LABOR’S DAYS

May Day Strong has shown that when strong locals work with national community networks, across sectors and geography, we can bring out the best organizing instincts in our movement. The coalition began in March as a way to support the UAW’s call for contract alignment and strike action on May Day 2028, and to cohere a labor and community strategy for fighting back in the aftermath of Trump’s presidential victory in 2024. We convened labor and community leaders, with significant participation from UAW, CWA, SEIU, UNITE HERE, UE, AFT, and NEA national and local affiliates.

We decided to focus on already labor-centric days on the calendar—May Day and Labor Day—and used the distributive technology from No Kings protests to recruit much larger numbers of participants into these events than are traditionally engaged through labor networks. Such efforts allowed us to create a set of decentralized host-based tech tools for local event building that enabled local union and community leaders to organize their own events. As we hoped, this produced much broader and stronger participation from labor and allies, with sharper messaging focused on fighting the bad billionaire bosses running our government.

Knowing that labor cannot act alone, we launched these efforts with community organizations and national progressive networks.

It worked beyond what we thought was possible. This year we had the greatest number of May Day marches in U.S. history. Labor Day, meanwhile, grew from an initial 25 BBQs the AFL-CIO was officially planning to promote to 1,200 events in all 50 states, with the federation adopting the “Workers over Billionaires” message.

This fundamentally transformed Labor Day in much of the national media coverage and the experience of participants. Events that had been largely moribund and apolitical pageants became politicized actions targeting corporations and the anti-union assault by the billionaire class.

However, we have a long way to go to create a serious disruption to the powers that be. Whether it’s Labor Day or No Kings (the latest of these demonstrations took place on Saturday, October 18), holidays and weekend protests still allow business to continue as usual.

BOYCOTTS AND SICKOUTS

Often, local struggles have sparked national transformation: think of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Flint Sit-Down Strike.

We can now conceive of a new period of social strikes: “mass strikes, general strikes, or other large-scale nonviolent actions,” as Jeremy Brecher of the Labor Network for Sustainability argues. These actions can be joined with political education by groups like May Day Strong and Labor Notes, national protests like those led by organizations or networks like 50501, Indivisible, and the Fight Back Table (which organized the #HandsOff marches on April 5), boycotts of MAGA-aligned corporate villains, and more. They can draw on and plant seeds for supermajority organizing for durable power, bargaining for the common good, and serious progressive electoral work.

To pull this off in short order will require strategic convenings, regional meetups with key players across the labor movement and in powerful community organizations, and an orientation to pressuring politicians and corporate titans to reject creeping authoritarianism.

With ICE agents tear-gassing aldermen, brutalizing bystanders, and kidnapping small children in broad daylight in downtown Chicago and the Trump administration sending the military into more cities, our time is running out.

We need the full range of tactics in our toolbox to protect each other, generate mass action, and build the movement needed to turn back the Trump agenda. We can learn from the most successful boycotts in recent memory: the Black clergy and supporters who refused to shop at Target after it eagerly complied with Trump’s attack on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and the millions who canceled their subscriptions to protest against Disney and the right-wing Sinclair news media empire for taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

It is time for labor and the left to consider other corporate targets that are feeding the authoritarian turn: Home Depot, Palantir, T-Mobile, Family Dollar, EdTech giants undermining the democratic potential of public education, and more. All workers possess some form of purchasing power. Union workers have even more, plus the organization to coordinate mass participation in consumer boycotts.

Similarly, while most union members are unwilling to consider an open-ended political strike, there may be an appetite for precise and focused sickouts with clear demands and targets. The vast majority of union members do not have a legal right to strike mid-contract, but we all have sick days to burn. Sickouts were essentially what put millions of immigrants and their supporters in the streets on May Day 2006 in response to the draconian anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner bill.

As federal agents and National Guard incursions wreak havoc on blue states and cities with Democratic majorities (including many within red states), we can anticipate the formation of municipal alliances that push governors to tax billionaires to fill in gaps from Trump’s enrichment of the 1 percent, ask whether they ought to be sending taxes to an occupying federal force, and otherwise increase protections for their residents.

All this is possible, but none of it can happen without the labor movement stepping up to meet the moment.

Jackson Potter is vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union. Alex Caputo-Pearl was a teacher in South Los Angeles for 22 years, then president of United Teachers Los Angeles. He currently works as a teacher in the L.A. Community Schools Initiative and serves on the UTLA bargaining team.