For the political left in America today, the future is bright. The seriousness of inequality is now conventional wisdom. Socialism is no longer a political punchline. The popularity of unions is high. It would seem to be the best time in a half-century to revitalize the languishing labor movement. Yet with all of the political energy – and despite some high-profile successes – the labor movement as a whole still languishes. Why?

The easy answer is that a decades-long political and propaganda campaign by rightwing and business interests has produced a system of labor law increasingly tilted against workers, making it incredibly difficult to build and maintain unions in the majority of US. states. This is true. But it is also beside the point. Turning around America’s anti-union culture is a long-term project. Organizing working people is something that must happen every day, regardless, because the alternative is for humans to be crushed by the power of capital. The fish can’t stop swimming just because the water is rough.

The AFL-CIO is the biggest organized labor group in America. It has 12.5 million members from 55 different unions. It is the closest thing we have to shorthand for “unions”. Reinventing the wheel tends to be a big waste of time. If we want a true, thriving, powerful labor movement in this country, the AFL-CIO will be its beating heart. It therefore must be capable of conjuring great visions and making them real.

It has not done that for quite some time.

The left should be led by labor, and labor should be led by a strong AFL-CIO

Ideally, the labor movement, which represents the interests of everyone who works for a living, would be the strongest progressive force in the country. Its appeal is broader than that of any special interest or specific issue. It has the virtue of combining self-interest (it will raise your wages), public interest (it will rebuild a strong middle class), and pure righteousness (it puts power into the hands of everyone, not just a privileged few). The left should be led by labor, and labor should be led by a strong AFL-CIO. But today, neither of those things are true. The left is a wild coalition of causes, united most fervently not behind union leaders but behind a cast of political figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whose message of democratic socialism and economic equality is … exactly what the labor movement should represent. Unions have fallen so far out of the public consciousness that they have to rely on politicians to get their points across. That’s not good. Organized labor should be leading elected officials to the public, not vice versa. It’s hard to do that when scarcely a tenth of the work force you claim to represent are union members.

The AFL-CIO has long operated on the theory that pouring money into national electoral politics will result in power. The past 40 years of history show that’s not the case. During that time, union membership has fallen by more than half, economic inequality has exploded, and Republicans hostile to the working class have steadily accrued more political and legal influence. All of these things are related. A strong labor movement should not have allowed any of them to happen.

The truth is that power does not come by serving as an ATM for the Democratic party; power comes from organizing workers. The best way to change red states to blue states is not to show up every other year and pour money into TV advertisements, it is to set up shop permanently and show regular, struggling working people exactly what they can win by embracing solidarity. Class consciousness is not built by campaign slogans. It comes about naturally when people go through the process of organizing. The hard work of building organized labor is an investment that will pay political dividends for decades. Had labor unions taken the more than $100m they spent on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and instead used it to hire organizers who would actually organize workers, the labor movement would be better off, and the Democratic party would too.

It is only by constantly seeking out new people to unionize that the labor movement can keep up with the changes in our economy. How well is this going? The five most valuable companies in America today are all tech companies, and none of them are unionized. When Ocasio-Cortez says “We aren’t going to beat big money with more big money. We’re going to defeat big money with big organizing,” she is voicing a strategy that the AFL-CIO should have embraced decades ago.

It is possible to organize entirely new industries if you just make the effort

I am not just here to complain. In 2015, my colleagues and I at Gawker Media became the first major online media company to unionize. In the three years since then, a wave of unionization has swept through the media, creating thousands of new AFL-CIO members and proving that it is possible to organize entirely new industries if you just make the effort. The latent interest was there in our industry, and it is there in other industries, waiting for enlightened unions to tap into it. The labor movement has the power of logic on its side. Selling someone on unionizing is like trying to sell them a pay raise. Once you brush aside the scaremongering, the logic speaks for itself.

The teachers’ strikes that have roiled the nation recently were organized completely from the bottom up. Labor’s grassroots are strong, but not its treetops. It would be nice to have a central power around which the labor movement revolved, rather than institutional unions that have to sprint to catch up to the radicalism of their own members. Unions can grow if they are willing to expend the resources to organize. But organizing takes money. A choice must be made to make it a priority.

There are obvious, concrete steps the AFL-CIO should take. Fundamentally, it should stop prioritizing taking money from unions to give to politicians, and spend its time helping unions attract new members – either by redirecting most of its political spending to worker organizing, or by kicking some of the dues money that its member unions pay back to them, earmarked for hiring organizers. As a national organization, the AFL can build and fund cross-union organizing taskforces to unionize important targets such as Amazon, as well as low-hanging fruit such as Starbucks and other companies that claim to have a social conscience, yet do not have a unionized workforce. If money is tight, the AFL can leave its grand headquarters across from the White House and move to cheaper space. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize. Everything should be relentlessly focused on raising union density in America. Even if organizers concentrate only on states that do not have union-busting “right to work” laws, there is plenty of room for improvement. In blue California, for example, only 17% of workers are represented by unions. There are millions of people still to help.

It should also work to bring back into the fold the SEIU, the Teamsters, and other active unions that left the AFL in disgust in 2005. If the AFL-CIO could, say, double its membership, the question of political influence would take care of itself. There is a bit of boxing wisdom that goes: if you’re getting your ass kicked, do something different. Otherwise you will continue to get your ass kicked. This is a lesson that the leaders of American organized labor have yet to absorb.

As a labor reporter, I speak to heroes all the time. People who do the hard work of bringing us all together. People who will never be famous, but who believe deeply that working-class solidarity will be our salvation. These people are brilliant, capable, idealistic – and disillusioned. They want a movement. Instead, the AFL-CIO gives them a bureaucracy. Bureaucrats have their place, but they are particularly unsuited to the task at hand: to seize the attention of millions of working Americans, thrust the idea of unions into their consciousness, and say: “Hang on to this for dear life!”

Our labor movement needs a Eugene Debs, an Emma Goldman, a Cesar Chavez. Instead, we have Richard Trumka. Richard Trumka has done many good things in his life, but it is fair to say that in his nine years atop the AFL-CIO, he has not become the charismatic leader of an unstoppable wave of union revitalization. His name does not drip from the lips of adoring young idealists. Nor is it whispered with fear by America’s most powerful billionaires. During his time as our nation’s most visible union figure, union membership has declined from 12.3% of the workforce to just 10.7% in 2017. If things keep going as they have been, we will soon be in single digits, and union membership will become an odd curio, like the ability to ride a unicycle, rather than a fundamental characteristic of an economy that works for workers, not hedge funds.

As with climate change, the erosion of unions is a crisis that unfolds slowly enough to ignore until it is too late. It is essential that organized labor act with an urgency that matches the peril it’s in. The AFL-CIO today has fewer members than it did when it was formed in 1955, though our nation’s population has doubled. What is the plan for creating the next 12.5 million AFL-CIO members? I don’t know. And I pay attention to these things for a living. There is no plan. All of those individual heroes organizing individual workplaces in individual towns are not a match for global big money. We need to organize industries. We need a movement. For better or worse, the AFL-CIO is the only institution capable of making that movement a reality. Its leaders must inspire a nation, or turn over the keys to someone who can.



