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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MEETING LABOR’S MOMENT  
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Joseph A. McCartin
May 4, 2024
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ In this new book, labor reporter and union organizer Nolan assesses
today's labor movement in the United States and offers proposals aimed
at helping it grow. _

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_The Hammer
Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor_
Hamilton Nolan
Hachette Books
ISBN-13: 9780306830921

RECENTLY WE HAVE witnessed a union upsurge. Starbucks baristas,
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Trader Joe’s clerks,
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Wells Fargo bank tellers,
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Google programmers,
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and many other groups have been fighting to form unions. Meanwhile,
already-unionized workers have been engaging in strikes at a level we
haven’t seen in decades. In 2023, the Bureau of Labor Statistics
measured [[link removed]] 33 work
stoppages that involved at least 1,000 workers each, more than six
times the number it registered in 2009. Autoworkers,
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screenwriters,
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actors,
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and others hit the streets within the past 12 months to demand higher
pay, the end of two-tiered wages, and protections from technological
change.

This union revival has been accompanied by a resurgence of labor
journalism. A new generation of reporters is stepping up to take the
mantle from elders such as Steven Greenhouse, formerly of _The_ _New
York Times_, one of the few prominent reporters on the labor beat
during the 1990s. Today, outfits from _Bloomberg_ to _Teen Vogue_
feature first-rate labor reporting.

Hamilton Nolan, author of the new book _The Hammer: Power, Inequality,
and the Struggle for the Soul of American Labor_, has participated in
both labor reporting and the resurgence of labor organizing. The son
of 1960s radicals, he did not set out to cover unions. He was
attracted to online journalism as a broad “platform from which to
yell about who society’s villains are.” But after being hired by
the irreverent news and gossip site _Gawker _in 2008, he developed a
distinctive voice covering the Great Recession’s impact on workers
and over time evolved into the site’s “de facto labor reporter.”
In 2015, Nolan transitioned from the role of observer to that of
participant, leading an effort to organize
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_Gawker_’s young staff into the Writers Guild of America, East
(WGAE). _Gawker_’s staff became the first online journalists to
unionize.

Like most labor veterans, Nolan had to overcome setbacks. No sooner
did _Gawker_ workers secure their first contract than the company was
bankrupted in 2016. The fatal blow was a lawsuit filed by wrestler
Hulk Hogan, who claimed damages when _Gawker _posted a sex tape in
which he had appeared. Funded by Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and
right-wing zealot who despised _Gawker_ for its coverage of him,
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that lawsuit forced the site out of business. Nolan credits the
workers’ union contract with preserving the jobs of most _Gawker_
employees as the company was acquired by Univision and then shut down.
In the meantime, _Gawker_’s breakthrough triggered the unionization
of other digital media companies,
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such as _HuffPost_, _Salon_, _Slate_, _Vox_, and _Vice_.

The _Gawker _union fight was transformative for Nolan. He likens it to
“finally grasping the right tool after rummaging around in a toolbox
for years.” Unions, he came to believe, have the only tool—“the
hammer” of collective action—through which working people can
“reclaim their rightful share of the nation’s wealth.”

Inspiration and frustration alternately drive Nolan’s narrative.
Inspired by the courage and sacrifice of rank-and-file union members
and activists, he introduces readers to a rich cast of characters that
include Black longshore workers in South Carolina, California’s
low-waged childcare providers, the immigrant members of Las Vegas’s
powerful Culinary Union, hotel employees in Miami and New Orleans,
fast food workers in West Virginia, and Nabisco strikers in Portland,
Oregon. He shows how such workers have discovered and learned how to
deploy the power of solidarity.

Nolan’s frustrations are directed at a labor movement that he
believes is failing the millions of unorganized workers who, in his
view, would organize if only unions took the risk of investing in
their organization. He fears that the movement is failing to meet its
moment. His fears are not groundless. Despite the union victories of
2023, union density dropped last year
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from 10.1 percent in January to 10 percent by December, a trend Nolan
believes will continue unless unions stop waiting for the passage of
laws that will make organizing easier. Unions can’t afford to
“rest their strategy for revival on their ability to fix something
that they have continuously failed to fix for seventy-five years,”
he argues. Rather, they must take their fate into their own hands.

In Nolan’s view, “America is a vast, virgin landscape for labor
organizing, an enormous array of potentially powerful groups just
waiting for someone to invest the time in pulling them together.”
Yet after decades of decline, sadly, unions are frozen in a defensive
crouch and their leaders have had “neither a plan nor the capacity
to organize workers at a large scale, even when conditions were in
[their] favor.” Richard Trumka, the mine workers’ leader who rose
to the presidency of the AFL-CIO in 2009 and died of a heart attack in
2021, was “a man who, at least, tried” to rouse unions to act,
Nolan says. But Nolan is less generous in assessing Trumka’s
successor, the first woman to lead the AFL-CIO, Liz Shuler. He sees
her as “an unflashy woman who radiates a sense of practicality”
but is short on inspiration. He disparages the goal of Shuler’s
signature initiative, the Center for Transformational Organizing
(CTO), which seeks to organize
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a million new union members by 2032. He points out that, at that pace,
unions will fall further behind the curve in an economy that is
expected to generate more than 10 million new jobs during the coming
decade.

The problem is less the quality of Shuler’s leadership, Nolan
admits, than the structure of the AFL-CIO, a federation traditionally
geared more toward protecting the interests of its existing members
than evangelizing new ones. Indeed, he is unsparing in his
characterization of the federation. After attending its 2022
convention, he concluded that the attending delegates were,
“generally speaking, indistinguishable from the crowd at the
Mid-Atlantic Insurance Industry Convention.” The AFL-CIO “offers
pleasant bureaucracy when we need heroics.” It’s “not bad,” he
sighs, “it is just _blah_.”

Nolan’s critique is not original. In 1967, Walter Reuther of the
United Auto Workers (UAW) resigned his AFL-CIO vice presidency,
accusing the federation
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of “becoming increasingly the comfortable, complacent custodian of
the status quo.” In 2005, Andy Stern, then president of the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU) complained,
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“Our world has changed, our economy has changed, employers have
changed. But the AFL-CIO is not willing to make fundamental change.”
In frustration, both Reuther and Stern opted for secession.
Reuther’s UAW left the AFL-CIO and formed an ill-fated alliance with
the Teamsters called the Alliance for Labor Action. It lasted only
three years. Stern led a handful of the AFL-CIO’s largest unions out
of the federation in 2005 to form a rival group called Change to Win.
Within five years, it began unraveling, with most of its affiliates
ultimately drifting back into the AFL-CIO.

Nolan wisely avoids calling for a repeat of those secessionist
failures. Instead, he pines for a transformative leader who might
redeem the federation from within. While he allows that it is
“unhealthy for movements to become too invested in the idea of
having a savior in human form,” his book quickly puts that thought
aside and all but anoints Sara Nelson, the charismatic president of
the Association of Flight Attendants, as the one leader who might save
labor.

Nelson assumed leadership of her union in 2014 and rocketed to
national prominence
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during the government shutdown in January 2019, when she called for a
general strike in support of furloughed federal workers and threatened
to keep her members off scheduled flights unless stressed-out air
traffic controllers and other federal workers were paid. Days after
she spoke out, enough controllers called in sick to freeze traffic in
the New York area,
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which brought the shutdown to a swift end, earning her credit for
having productively channeled labor’s anger.

As an indisputably shrewd and nervy leader who considered running for
AFL-CIO president after her 2019 turn in the national spotlight,
Nelson becomes a what-might-have-been figure in Nolan’s telling. Had
she not tripped and fallen while out for a run in July 2021, leading
to two hip surgeries and months of rehab, Nolan thinks Nelson might
have assembled a coalition of unions that would have allowed her to
defeat Shuler for the AFL-CIO presidency at its 2022 convention.
“That stumble may have changed the history of the American labor
movement,” he writes. A significant chunk of the book focuses on
Nelson, extolling her formidable communication skills in contrast to
labor’s other leaders; “of all union leaders in America, she gives
the most rousing speech,” he observes, while “her passion for the
labor movement propels her like a nuclear reactor does a submarine.”

It is understandable why Nolan wants to see in Nelson a figure who
might have revitalized the labor movement without splitting it. But
how one leader—no matter how charismatic—could single-handedly
transform a labor federation that Nolan elsewhere characterizes as
little more than “a Kiwanis Club for unions” he does not say. When
discussing Nelson, Nolan pines for “an LBJ-style master of power
politics bringing recalcitrant unions to heel with a velvet glove over
an iron fist,” even though he admits elsewhere in the book that the
position of AFL-CIO president has “an explicit lack of actual power
to make the member unions _do_ anything.”

By directing so much of _The Hammer_ toward praising Nelson and
critiquing Shuler and other labor leaders, Nolan misses a point more
vital to labor’s resurgence than which of these talented women would
make a better AFL-CIO president. At its most successful, organized
labor has always needed leaders as different as Shuler and Nelson to
work in tandem, complementing each other’s strengths, because
successful labor leadership requires a division of labor, teamwork,
and solidarity. Nearly a century ago, the perceptive radical A. J.
Muste observed that the union was a unique institution that “seeks
to combine within itself two extremely divergent types of social
structure, that of an army and that of a democratic town meeting.”
Rarely does an army general prove equally adept at leading a town
meeting. Thus, John L. Lewis relied on Philip Murray as he launched
the CIO in the 1930s; César Chávez leaned on Dolores Huerta as he
built the United Farm Workers.

The point is less about who sits in the top-floor office at the
AFL-CIO than whether the occupant of that suite is in sync with those
leading the fight on the picket lines, and whether both are aligned
around a winning strategy. This book is eloquent in its celebration of
rank-and-file activism, but it has little to say about what would make
for a winning strategy for organized labor in the 21st century. Nolan
devotes a scant two pages to summarizing a four-point program he has
heard Nelson advocate, but, at least in his recapitulation, it
scarcely amounts to a strategic plan that could defeat a power like
Amazon. Two years after the Amazon Labor Union’s successful
breakthrough
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at JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, no progress has been made
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on winning a contract at that facility, nor has that lone victory been
replicated. Labor needs strategies capable of forcing powerful
entities like Amazon to the table. It has yet to perfect them. And,
unfortunately, this book doesn’t shed much light on what they might
be.

At crucial moments in organized labor’s history, the Left helped it
grasp how capitalism was changing and how it might best be challenged
and tamed. The AFL’s founder, Samuel Gompers, thus formulated the
ideas that informed 19th-century craft unionism in dialogue with
Marxist radicals in 1870s New York, while John L. Lewis turned to
socialists and communists for ideas and organizers as he advanced a
strategy for unionizing the 1930s mass-production economy. Today,
young labor leftists such as Nolan are poised to play a similarly
important role in preparing labor to successfully confront
21st-century capitalism, a project upon which the future of the planet
arguably depends. But if they are to make the most of that
opportunity, they will need strategies that amount to more than the
simple injunction to “organize!”—which, in a word, is the
distilled message of this book. Organize, yes. Organize, of course!
But how, where, when, with whom, against which targets, demanding
what, toward what ultimate ends?

Fortunately, there are labor activists giving thought to such
questions. Some of the most creative are associated with a movement
called Bargaining for the Common Good
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educators in Chicago, Saint Paul, and Los Angeles, but which has begun
to spread to other public- and private-sector struggles. BCG’s
strategy is premised on the notion that labor must rethink the narrow
bounds of collective bargaining as it took shape in the 20th century,
expanding its participants, opening up its processes, and revising its
purposes in response to the realities of 21st-century neoliberalism.

During the first week of March, activists in Minnesota inspired by the
BCG model waged a weeklong series of coordinated strikes and other
actions
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by janitors, park groundskeepers, nursing home and home care workers,
laborers, teachers, airport workers, nurses, and their community
allies behind the slogan
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“What could we win together?” By having each other’s backs, they
found that their whole was more than the sum of its parts; each group
won significant gains, and their collective power was in turn
enhanced. In recent years, other activists have used that collective
power to organize new workers, such as janitors at Target
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and other big-box stores. It is this kind of approach that must spread
if we hope to take on Amazon, and Nolan would do well to give more
attention to such models.

Historically, labor leaders have disliked their Hamilton Nolans.
Gompers mocked the pen-wielding radicals of his time as meddlesome
“long-haired men and short-haired women.” Pioneering labor scholar
Selig Perlman identified hostility to intellectuals
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as a signature trait of 1920s union culture. But labor’s Hamilton
Nolans have played an indispensable role in its history, repeatedly
prodding it to lift its gaze toward the horizon, reminding it of its
larger mission. Fortunately, Nolan and his generation know that they
need the labor movement, warts and all, to realize their dreams of a
sustainable, equitable, anti-racist, and democratic future. It is a
boon for the movement that so many currently share Nolan’s belief
that labor “should be at the center of American politics.” One
hopes that today’s cautious unions and young radicals learn how to
work together better in the years ahead—for our future may turn on
whether they do.

 

Joseph A. McCartin is a professor of history and the executive
director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor
at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He writes broadly on US
labor issues and politics. He is the 2024–26 president of the Labor
and Working-Class History Association.

* Organized labor movement
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* AFL-CIO
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* organizing
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* Labor History
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