Viewpoint: We Won’t Win Until We’re Troublemakers

Unions weren’t strong enough, in numbers or in influence with their members, to make a difference in this election. One sample showed union households at only 54 percent for Kamala Harris vs. 43 percent for the billionaire, with non-union households at 51 percent Trump, 47 percent Harris. If union voters had listened to their officers, Trump’s numbers would have been in single digits.

The Democrats would have been better for working people on a host of issues, but not enough better that they inspired people who are hurting to want to vote for them. In office, they just haven’t delivered. In particular, Bill Clinton’s NAFTA, which cost at least a million U.S. jobs, still rankles strongly, especially in the Midwest.

For many workers, it wasn’t a switch to Trump; it was why bother? Michigan Congressperson Rashida Tlaib said, “People declined to vote at all because they felt it had no impact on their lives.”

Harris lost (compared to Biden 2020) far more voters than Trump gained. In Wayne County, home to Detroit, she lost 61,000 votes; he gained 24,000. Nationally Harris lost 160,000 votes in majority-Black counties, compared to 2020; Trump lost 28,000. Overall, a lot more potential Democratic voters stayed home than switched to Trump.

Of course, as everyone acknowledges now, the Democratic Party strategy in recent campaign cycles has been not to try to campaign toward blue-collar voters or union members but rather to go for the better-off. Perhaps they lacked the arithmetic to know that in the United States the working class is still the majority.

U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer said in 2016, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” That didn’t work in 2016, and it didn’t work this year.

NO STATUS QUO

The status quo sucks! The voters that the labor movement should be seeking to influence are looking for candidates who are disruptors. Troublemakers. Working-class voters want a candidate who will put a thumb in the eye of the establishment, like Bernie Sanders. It is supremely ironic that a billionaire was able to adopt that persona.

The sad truth is that union members are just too few to elect national candidates—or to make any politician, regardless of party, listen to workers’ demands. The way out of the electoral mess is to make the labor movement strong and respected, so that not only our own members but others care what we say and do, and look to unions when pulling the lever.

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“Strong” means two things: we are big, and we are willing to stand up for ourselves against the bosses. Union researcher Chris Boehner has found that current organizing is one-tenth of what the labor movement accomplished in the 1970s.

“Imagine if labor… started organizing 1 percent of eligible workers [a year] as unions did in the 1970s, not the current one-tenth of 1 percent rate,” wrote Boehner. “Instead of 107,000 workers voting for a union in 2024, the number would be more like 1.1 million workers.”

People, including voters, are inspired by those who stand up for themselves. Witness the 76 percent public support for the Auto Workers’ Stand-Up Strike against the automakers a year ago. That strike called out the profiteering CEOs, knocked them on their heels with smart tactics, and got both members and bystanders cheering.

I don’t pretend to have the answers to what unions should do in politics. But I know our strategies won’t tip the balance until unions are troublemakers again.