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.