Labor’s Resurgence Can Continue Despite Trump

[Note: This Substack is co-authored with labor researcher and writer extraordinaire Chris Bohner. You all should subscribe to Chris’ great newsletter on labor.]

Does Trump’s re-election mean that the US labor resurgence is over? Not necessarily.

It’s true that the new administration is preparing major attacks against workers and the labor movement. And many union leaders will assume that the most we can hope for over the next four years is to survive through purely defensive struggles.

But unions are actually still well-positioned to continue their organizing and bargaining momentum. Here are eight positive factors that should ward off despair — and that should encourage unions to invest more, not less, into organizing the unorganized:

1. The economic forces fueling Trumpism also favor labor’s continued resurgence. After the pandemic laid bare the fundamental unfairness of our economic system, workers responded with a burst of union organizing and the most significant strike activity in decades. The same underlying economic forces — chronic economic insecurity and inequality — helped propel Trumpism to a narrow victory in the 2024 elections. But Trump’s actual policies will inevitably exacerbate economic inequality, undermining the Republican Party’s hollow pro-worker rhetoric.

Stepping into the breach of Trump’s fake populism, unions remain workers’ best tool to provide a real solution to economic insecurity. And projected low unemployment will continue to provide a fertile economic environment for new organizing. As long as we remain in a tight labor market, employers will have less power to threaten employees who dare to unionize their workplaces and workers will have more bargaining leverage against employers, increasing the chances of successful — and headline-grabbing — strikes. 

2. Unions can still grow under Republican administrations. It’s certainly true that the organizing terrain will be significantly harder under Trump and a hostile National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). But it’s still possible to fight and win even in these conditions. 

It’s worth remembering that US labor’s current uptick began with the statewide teachers’ strikes that swept across red states in 2018 during Trump’s first term. And NLRB data shows that putting major resources towards new organizing can go a long way towards counter-balancing the negative impact of an adverse political context.

Unions organized significantly more workers under George W. Bush’s administration than under Barack Obama. Why? The main reason is that the labor movement in the