Trampoline Unionism

"Power expands, it doesn't contract."

Apr 15, 2024

This week, more than 4000 auto workers at a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee will vote on whether or not they want to unionize the UAW. If they vote yes—and, unlike in the past, there are good reasons to think that they will—this election could very well go down in history as the first domino in a chain of events that will unionize the entire auto industry in the South. And then, just maybe, more. Much, much more.

Here, quite briefly, is what the UAW did: The union’s leadership was fucked up and corrupt. An internal democratic reform movement succeeded in booting out the old leaders and installing Shawn Fain. Fain and Co. then immediately led the biggest and most aggressive strike against the Big Three automakers in the union’s history. They won the strike. Then they immediately announced plans to organize not just one, but every nonunion auto maker in the country. A hundred and fifty thousand workers total. Then they went right to work doing it. Now we are about to find out if they can pull it off. As a rule I do not make predictions but I think the smart money is on the side of Power to the People in this case.

Now everyone loves Shawn Fain. “Shawn Fain for president!” is the sort of thing that starry eyed lefties have been saying lately. And they should! Fain and the team around him deserve every bit of credit for what they have accomplished in scarcely a single year. The point I want to make, though, is that if your takeaway from all this is that the miraculous upsurge of the UAW can only be due to the arrival of a Christ-like savior in an “Eat The Rich” t-shirt, that is not correct. Everyone should be doing what the UAW is doing. The greatest service they are performing for the labor movement right now is not just organizing new union members—it is proving that other unions have no excuse not to be doing exactly the same thing.

Did Shawn Fain inherit some set of conditions that made all of this easy for him to pull off? No! If anything, the opposite is true. He inherited a union that has been losing membership for decades, and was demoralized and discredited by having a number of top officials thrown in jail for corruption, and was also divided by a contentious leadership election. All of the UAW’s inspiring successes in the past year have not occurred because they were lucky enough to have some advantageous landscape that other unions can’t hope to replicated. They have occurred because they fucking tried. And the energy of every success has been funneled into the next project, growing as it goes, like a jumper on a trampoline getting higher and higher.

Big, hard strikes, like the one that the UAW won last year, can take a serious toll on members. But they also produce invaluable energy and attention. Members see that they can win. Nonunion workers in the same industry see that the union can win against the big bad companies. They see that the union gets contracts that are good. They want that stuff. All big splashy union wins inevitably cause other working people to say to themselves, “That looks pretty good.” There is always an upsurge in interest in organizing produced by these wins. What the UAW did so effectively is to harness that post-strike interest around the country—and, even more importantly, to have the vision and ambition to recognize that it was smarter to go big than to try to narrow down the aspirations of the auto workers across the nation who wanted what the UAW has.

Big internal reform win. Channeled into big strike win. Channeled into big organizing plans. The energy grows. It does not diminish. Consider how easy it is for a union (or a political party, or any organization faced with an uphill task) to take the opposite approach. It is common to hear, “Whew, that was a huge win! Now it’s time to rest and regroup.” At every step, from Shawn Fain’s election to the decision to make the strike bigger than ever to the decision to try to organize more ambitiously than ever, it would have been more normal to hear a leader say, “We pulled that off—now let’s pull back and gather our strength and spend a year forming committees to discuss what’s next.” This is standard. This is seen as responsible. And, if the UAW had pursued this standard, responsible form of leadership, we would not be talking about them now, and they would not be making history. They would not be on the cusp of changing an entire industry, an entire region. Conservatism would have sunk them back in the muck. Let this be a lesson.

The first time that I interviewed Sara Nelson, in 2019, she gave me a quote that I still think about: “People think there’s only a limited amount of power that you have, and if you exert some power, you’re not gonna have enough for the next fight. That’s just not how it works. Every time workers really grab their power and take action, it encourages the next group of workers to have that power and act more. Power expands, it doesn’t contract.” The constant impulse to stop doing daring, ambitious things, understandable though it may be, is wrong. It is not responsible leadership. It is deadly leadership. It is an act of turning off the tap of power, rather than opening it further. Instead of resting to rebuild our forts, it is crucial to take the energy generated by one battle and use it to propel us into the next battle. A bigger battle. A bigger fight. A bigger win. More! Bigger! Stronger! Seize the opportunities, or they will blow away in the breeze.

“Organize the South” is both a standing battle cry and a cliche in the labor movement. We have been hollering it ever since the CIO launched Operation Dixie in 1946. (And we’re still talking about Operation Dixie today, because it was the last time that the labor movement took the mandate to organize the South seriously.) The reasons that we need to organize the South are the same today as they were then: First, because it is where the most oppressed workers are who need the protection of unions the most, and second, because companies use the South as a domestic version of Mexico, a place to move operations to escape unions and pro-worker politics and regulations. There is a chapter in my book about South Carolina, the state with the lowest union density in America, and the tattered and beaten down state of organized labor there. There is something of a conventional wisdom in the union world that the South is a black hole for money, a hostile landscape where wins are too hard to come by. But do you know who does not believe that? The workers in the South. I have reported all over the South, and I have never heard a worker or organizer there say that workers cannot be organized. What they have said is that they need help. They need investment. They need resources. They need support that doesn’t pack up and move back to DC after a couple of years. They need a labor movement that believes in them.

This, to me, is the most exciting thing about what the UAW is doing in their Southern organizing drive. For one thing, they are tackling the heart of the very idea that the South can be a place that companies can use to escape union power. Unionize the South’s auto factories, and that proposition is dead. Even better, winning some of these union drives at huge factories will create a beachhead of union power that can serve as a base for more union organizing—not just in auto factories, but everywhere. A town is very different when it has thousands of newly organized union members in it. Suddenly those people are telling their friends and neighbors about the union. Those thousands of newly unionized auto workers creates tens of thousands of workers at stores and restaurants and warehouses and factories who say to themselves, “Why can’t I have what they have? Why can’t we do what they did?” Suddenly every boss in town and every piece of shit mayor and rat fuck Southern governor can no longer tell working people that unions aren’t right for them, aren’t possible there. They are possible. There is living proof. And this is how it spreads.

These unionized auto factories can be the trampolines into an even broader wave of union organizing, a wave big enough to truly start to change the South. In order for that to happen, though, other unions must begin to act like the UAW. I love Shawn Fain as much as you all do, but we should resist the impulse to see him as some once-in-a-generation savior. He is a guy doing what everyone else should be doing. If other union leaders are jealous at all the fawning press Shawn Fain is getting: good. You’re all supposed to be doing the same thing! And you all can! He started with no more power than dozens of other unions have right this minute. Hell, the UAW didn’t even have the only big, national strike last year. Hollywood did also. My own union, the Writers Guild, won an inspiring and hard-fought strike in 2023 that was every bit as visible as the UAW’s. There is absolutely no reason why the WGA and SAG-AFTRA cannot gather the same post-strike energy that the UAW had and use it to propel an equally ambitious new organizing drive in the entertainment world. (Video game industry? Tech? Every last portion of Hollywood that is yet to be union? There are plenty of possibilities.) And I hope that they do. It is not too late. The power we have is still ready to expand, not contract.

More trampoline, less quicksand. Let’s get going. We have a whole lot of ass to kick.

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