The conventional narrative about union decline places most blame on globalization and technological changes. These two forces of change are presented as facts of life and are considered somehow neutral, structural, inevitable. But humans—mostly white, wealthy men who can buy their access to decision makers—are behind every decision regarding robots, trade, workers, and unions (and the planet, too). Like the decision made by executives in Silicon Valley icon Apple, who began the assembly of iPhones in factories in China, where most iPhones are still made and where real unions—that’s independent unions—are forbidden.

That said, it’s helpful to think of a union as a mechanism: nothing makes it inherently good or bad, although its internal rules heavily influence its effectiveness. As is also the case with a government, a union can be good or bad based on the rules governing its respective elections, including campaign financing, whether the bargaining unit of the workers is fairly constructed or gerrymandered, and whether the people it represents have open access to decision-making processes. If the governance systems encourage participation by the best and most diverse workers, the union will reflect the best and most diverse workers’ values. Conversely, if the organization is a do-nothing union, it will reflect the least-good values among the workforce, just like elected politicians and their constituents. Unions often differ based on the culture of the employer and on the type of workforce, no different from states, which differ based on the types of people that make up its population. (Think Texas versus Massachusetts.) Unions, then, are far from monolithic.

[...] "[...] it felt awesome to walk around the hospital picketing and take ownership of it and be like, ‘This is our hospital.’ [...]" [...]

The strike line stretched the length of half a football field, a suburban block. One hundred percent of the nurses were out on the line, and of the techs like Rhodes, only seven workers ever crossed the picket line, meaning that they worked when everyone else was outside picketing: seven people from the lab who apparently received extra-sweet raises. Anyone who has ever been on strike before—and plenty of hospital workers in Rhodes’s new union had—understood that the dynamic on a picket line is crucial. And so union organizers brought big speakers and made song lists—more like dance mixes—selected by the workers in the days leading up to the walkout. People who were total strangers, often from the neighborhood, were coming to the line each day, picking up signs and marching with the workers. Folks were playing games like mannequin on the line: when the line stopped dancing, everyone would freeze and pose and make crazy faces, and someone would take photos so they could later vote who had the best pose, then start again. The nuns in the Catholic church adjacent to the hospital opened their doors for the workers, and often their kids, to use the restrooms throughout the day.

West Virginia in 2018 was already a right-to-work state, where workers have no right to collective bargaining, where union membership is voluntary, and where the entire apparatus of the state is aimed at preventing exactly what wound up happening: an explosion of worker power. To Peters and other raise-denied workers listening to the conservative legislators testifying in hearings about controlling what they could and could not do with their own paycheck, this piece of legislation was a pure, unmitigated insult to their intelligence.

The final two issues of the strike were financial: the rising cost of health insurance coupled with eight years with no raise. The proposals for their health care went beyond merely raising the employees’ share of the cost. The health insurance plan changes for 2018 also included a provision called Go 365, a phone app that required workers to wear devices like a Fitbit to transmit their personal data to offset some of the proposed copay increases. “It was a complete, total invasion of our privacy,” Peters pointed out. In addition, the health insurance would have been using a new calculation that based the charges on total family income, not the individual employee’s. “By adding my husband, I was facing a two-hundred-dollar-a-month increase,” Peters says. “So when the governor offered a one percent pay raise in January, people had had enough.”

There’s something else that is fundamental to and instructive about these stories, something bigger and more important than any one issue: in order to unionize and win big, workers need to build and rebuild deep solidarity. People can choose their friends, but they can’t choose their comrades. Strikes, and good union campaigns to win big on issues, are the best political education because they unite all kinds of different people, encouraging and enabling people to get beyond the self-segregation and prejudices people hold about one another (and that antisocial media reinforce). In unions, most workers decide to vote to unionize not because someone tells them to—that’s never worked. No, they vote because the experience of a well-executed union campaign helps workers understand, on their own, that their employer’s effect on their lives goes beyond assigning them to an overtime shift and preventing them from getting time with their family; that their employer is part of a bigger system that is contributing to the failure of their kids’ schools, the rollback of anti-pollution and anti-gentrification laws, the gross inequities of the tax system, and more. It’s no accident that the states, cities, and counties with the strongest union presence have consistently voted in favor of progressive policies. This is the crucial reason the corporate right wing has been relentlessly attacking unions. A well-unionized worker is a woke worker, and woke workers can change the direction of this country.

[...] To win passage of the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt compromised by exempting two occupations dominated by African Americans—agricultural and domestic labor—from the provisions of the NLRA. This effectively condemned many African Americans to a second-class status under the first national labor law covering workers across the private sector. (This provision is still the law of the land, and today also represses many Latinx and other people of color.) Government workers were also excluded. It would take almost thirty years until another round of worker pressure, stemming from the civil rights movement, and a 1962 executive order by John F. Kennedy, to begin to soften the path for public-sector unionization, which I’ll discuss later in this chapter.

The industries the unions were targeting to make major gains for all workers included steel and automotive industries, where the employer class was making the biggest profits. The unions knew that the governors controlled the state-based National Guard units. Unions went all out, raising more money for the campaign in 1936 than all previous union donations combined for the elections from 1906 through 1935. They also put record numbers of boots on the ground, not only for FDR, but also for the governorships in Pennsylvania and Michigan, the two states that housed the biggest workforces in the targeted industries. After FDR’s reelection and the election of progressive governors in both of those states, unions started to build the foundation of the American Dream and chip away at inequality. When General Motors workers in Flint, Michigan, held a sit-down strike—they stopped working but stayed in the plants—they prevented any potential replacement scab workers from coming in to replace them. If Michigan’s governor had called out law enforcement to forcefully remove the striking workers, GM management would have won—but because unions had worked hard to help elect a governor they could better control, they worried less about the threat of law enforcement. Similar dynamics played out in the big steel strikes in Pennsylvania. After much effort on the part of unions, the federal government occasionally sent those forces first to defend unionizing workers, and, later, African Americans during the civil rights movement. Shifting the federal government’s apparatuses toward defending the rights of workers to unionize and strike, and later the rights of African Americans to vote and challenge discrimination, was all it took to build massive, decades-lasting structural achievements.

Throughout the late 1930s and through the 1940s, workers continued to form unions in record numbers and income inequality steadily fell. In just four years, from 1934 to 1938, the percentage of nonagricultural workers in unions jumped from 11.5 percent to 26.6 percent. This would have been unimaginable in 1932. The gap between the billionaires and workers declined because the power equation shifted. The workers made that shift by making strong organizations of their own, bargaining collectively, and holding the kind of strikes that could create a crisis when employers were unreasonable. Big gains for the whole of the working class were being extracted in key profit sectors of the economy. The mobilization for World War II and the tight labor markets it produced, however, overshadowed serious dangers on the horizon for workers and their new unions.

Even though the Supreme Court upheld the NLRA in 1937, it also issued perhaps the most serious blow to American workers, one not well recognized at the time as the key weapon that would slowly undo workers’ ability to fundamentally redistribute power and therefore wealth: the Mackay Radio & Telegraph decision. In Mackay, the same justices who upheld the NLRA ruled that striking workers could be permanently replaced by strikebreakers. Labor scholars have pointed out the uniquely schizophrenic nature of the court’s rulings that year—one decision affirming that workers have the right to strike and can’t be fired for doing so, but on the other hand, another legal decision that gave employers the right to permanently replace them if they did—which had the effect of firing workers for striking.

Mackay wasn’t well understood at the time as a knockout punch to unions. In just a few short years of serious organizing and real gains via strikes, the societal norms constructed under the New Deal had effectively made it culturally unacceptable to replace striking workers. Another forty-four years would pass and two more rounds of the employer offensive would be launched before President Ronald Reagan weaponized the Mackay decision and replaced 100 percent of the nation’s 12,000 highly skilled air traffic control workers during a strike in 1981. The “societal norms” and “culture” that prevented employers from using Mackay were created because of the brilliant strategy of the early years of the CIO, and by the agency of workers fully engaging the entire community in labor fights.

Imagine the frustration of the billionaires. They had legally secured the right to replace strikers via Mackay, but in effect they had their hands tied by smart worker-organizing strategy. [...]

For the first time in sixteen years, in 1946, the Republicans took control of Congress, winning majorities in both the House and the Senate. And for the second time in twelve years, the threat of a genuinely united American working class forged a tactical alliance between big corporations in the North and their racist pro–Jim Crow Southern allies. It didn’t take long after the new Congress was sworn into power in 1947 to gut the NLRA. Congress passed the Labor-Management Relations Act (commonly referred to as Taft–Hartley for the bill’s lead sponsors, Ohio Republican Robert Taft in the Senate and New Jersey Republican Fred Hartley in the House), a sweeping amendment to the NLRA that was so extreme it was vetoed by President Harry Truman. But the racist, anti-worker, pro-corporate majorities in Congress had enough power at that point to override Truman’s veto.

The list of changes was significant. It included making it permissible, once again, for employers to use paid work time to actively campaign against unionization; a ban on sympathy strikes and boycotts; an end to wildcat strikes (where workers simply walk off the job with no notice, sometimes in defiance of their unions, not just their employer); an end to the closed shop (whereby employers could hire only people who were union members); the creation of so-called right-to-work laws, which gave states the option to make union membership voluntary; and a clause mandating that union leaders and members had to sign affidavits stating they had not been a member of the Communist Party or socialist parties. With the zeal of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s inquisitions, the practical impact of this last provision was that thousands of the most successful rank-and-file organizers were purged from the unions, regardless of whether they had ever been official members of any party.