Exercising Working-Class Power and Leadership in 1937... and 2025?
A study in possibilities
Last week, I provided you with an ultra-condensed history of the labor movement over the last ninety or so years. This week, I’m condensing even further, providing what is essentially an “abstract” to that report, and linking that to NYC labor’s participation in next weekend’s No Kings march.
On a moment of peak possibility, and thereafter…
We can quibble about what year marked the height of labor power in workplaces or in the halls of government. But starting a labor narrative in 1937 is useful because that year’s convergence of
an extremely high speed with which unionization was taking place
labor’s presence in the key sectors of the economy (structural power)
widespread solidarity among workers across those sectors and working-class communities (associational power)
a high degree of militancy and a sense of responsibility among activists for implementing the unionization project and worker empowerment by their own hands right in the workplaces
almost certainly meant that it was the moment of peak possibility, both for changing the nature of work and workplaces and advancing a social-democratic political project. Perhaps as late as 1941-42, top union leaders believed that in recognition of labor’s power and cooperation in the war effort, labor would receive genuine partner status alongside the state and corporations in establishing and superintending both the wartime and postwar economic and political order.
Yet as a result of external attacks, including changes in labor law that started as early as 1938-39, and internal tendencies toward hierarchies and top-down organization, three increasingly problematic tendencies emerged in the labor movement.
An ebbing of shop-floor power, but even more important, an ebbing of the rights and responsibilities of workplace activists (and therefore of the organized working class as a whole) to act as agents of their own destiny. And even (to a lesser extent, but gradually cumulative) the sense that was a realizable and legitimate aspiration.
Along with this problem of quality was one of quantity: the startling numerical decline of union density, only partially masked by public worker unionization – workers whose right to strike and engage in other disruption of production are generally severely circumscribed.
An almost overwhelming increase in risk-averse behavior by union leaders. Although we can find exceptions, as a general rule, union leaders have been, and continue to be, a deadweight on any project to return to the conditions of 1937.
What about October 2025?
This is a very bleak time for labor, with potentially far worse to come. If the Trump project continues, labor faces, at best, the Hungarian restrictions of labor laws, to the point where the power of unions in workplaces is virtually non-existent and unions themselves are largely irrelevant. This is the anti-worker aspects of neoliberalism on steroids. At worst, the Italian fascist reconstitution of labor unions as the labor arm of the state. (Look, already, at government encroachment in both the corporate and academic sectors, which again, in the worst case, will grow.)
Yet, simultaneously, these extreme conditions also hold out both the necessity to fight back now while there is still time, and the tantalizing possibility that such a fight, waged boldly, might lead back to the kinds of 1934-1935-1936 growing upsurge that produced 1937. That under extraordinary conditions, many things are possible.
That would require the labor “movement” (in quotes because there is no real sense that there is an actual movement) to take desperate risks AND (!) engage with their members: educate them, listen to them, call them into motion, find a million workplace leaders. Stake a real claim that labor is a leading presence – even better, THE leading presence – in an increasingly disruptive anti-Trump movement.
So far, this has not happened; unions have largely remained on the sidelines. Even on May Day, even on Labor Day – clearly purposefully scheduled to call forth labor – labor was only a prominent presence in a few cities. (Detroit was one welcome exception; in New York, where Labor Day is “celebrated” five days later, only a handful of unions carried political signage.)
We will see if there is any change next weekend, but here’s something I don’t understand at all...
In New York City, while No Kings steps off in the 40s and is scheduled to march (again, obviously purposefully) to 14th St, Union Square, the New York Central Labor Council has called on unions to gather far downtown on Canal St. (for those outside New York City, that’s like minus-10th Street) and march uptown to 14th St.
I guess one benefit of this separatism is that we will clearly see and gauge the effort, and the nature of the union effort: its character, its size, its tone, the “official” demands unions have printed on their placards, what happens when it finally converges with hundreds of thousands of “other” protestors, the post-march psychological effect of this separatism on both the unionists that attend and their fellow workers that don’t. I guess we will see whether it is an announcement of labor’s irrelevance or whether this represents labor finally seizing the mantle of anti-Trump leadership. Can labor stake a claim that its millions of organized representatives of the working-class will be at the forefront of a fight both against fascism and for a far more just and democratic political and economic order – those great aspirations of 1937 – in a time of terrible peril?