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TODAY’S LABOR MOVEMENT NEEDS A BIGGER VISION  
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David Bacon
December 2, 2025
Labor Notes
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_ The labor movement has to become a movement that inspires people
with a broader vision of social justice. There’s something
fundamentally wrong with the priorities of this society, and unions
have to be courageous enough to say it. _

It is time for the labor movement to use its organization and
resources to fight to stop this wave of repression. As part of that
effort, labor needs to propose a freedom agenda for immigrants.,
Photo: David Bacon

 

_[This article is part of a Labor Notes roundtable series: HOW CAN
UNIONS DEFEND WORKER POWER AGAINST TRUMP 2.0? We will be publishing
more contributions here and in our magazine in the months ahead.
__Click here to read the rest of the series._
[[link removed]]_—Editors]_

During the Cold War, many of the people with a radical vision of the
world were driven out of our labor movement. Today, as unions search
for answers about how to begin growing again, and regain the power
workers need to defend themselves, the question of social vision has
become very important. What is our vision in labor? What are the
issues that we confront today that form a more radical vision for our
era?

The labor movement needs a freedom agenda. When Zohran Mamdani spoke
after his primary election victory in New York City, he declared, "We
can be free and we can be fed." Mamdani is telling our unions and
workers that we can reject the old politics of agreeing to war abroad
and repression at home, in the hopes that at least some workers will
gain.

PEACE ECONOMY

We don't have to go back to the CIO and the radicalism of the 1930s to
find voices in labor calling for a radical break from the past.

In the 1980s, while Reagan was President, William Winpisinger,
president of the Machinists, told his members, thousands of whom
worked in arms plants, that they would gain more from peace than from
war. Under union pressure in 1992, Congress even passed a bill calling
for redirecting a small part of military spending into conversion for
a peacetime economy.

One big part of that program is peace. Another is reordering our
economic priorities.

Right now working class people have to fight just to stay in the
cities. They’re being driven out, and this has a disproportionate
impact on workers of color. Unions and central labor councils need to
look at economic development, and issues of housing and job creation.
That would start to give us something we lack, a compelling vision.

IMMIGRANT RIGHTS

Since 2006 millions of people have gone into the streets on May Day.
The marches in 2006 were the largest outpourings since the 1930s, when
our modern labor movement was born. In one of the best things our
labor movement has done, we began raising the expectations of
immigrants when we passed the resolution in Los Angeles in 1999
changing labor’s position on immigration.

We put forward a radical new program: amnesty, ending employer
sanctions, reunification of families, protecting the rights of all
people, especially the right to organize. That came as a result of an
upsurge of organizing among immigrant workers themselves, and support
from unions ranging from the United Electrical Workers to the
Carpenters.

Congress, however, has since moved to criminalize work and migration,
and proposed huge guest worker programs. States have passed bills that
are even worse.

Mississippi, for instance, made it a state felony for an undocumented
worker to hold a job, with prison terms of up to ten years. Florida
has made it a crime to give an undocumented person a ride to a
hospital. And administrations from Bush to Trump have implemented by
executive order the enforcement and guest worker measures they
couldn’t get through Congress.

LABOR’S SILENCE

When Democrats campaigned against Trump by accusing him of sabotaging
an immigration bill that would have put billions of dollars into
immigration enforcement, they prepared the way for Trump's onslaught
once he was elected. Labor, which should have prepared our own members
for the fight to come, stayed silent.

In the wave of raids that have followed, hundreds of our own members
have been taken, not just for deportation, but on bogus criminal
charges or simply swept off the streets by masked agents. Unorganized
workers have been terrorized by the raids—a gift to employers as
workers are pressured to give up any hope of a union or a higher wage.

Some unions today are part of the network fighting to protect workers
and communities from immigration raids. SEIU California leader David
Huerta faces misdemeanor federal charges after opposing ICE during a
raid in Los Angeles' garment district.

It is time for the labor movement to use its organization and
resources to fight to stop this wave of repression. As part of that
effort, labor needs to propose a freedom agenda for immigrants that
will really give people rights and an equal status with other workers
on the job, and their neighbors in their own communities.

DEFEND CIVIL RIGHTS

In the past, the possibility of fighting for our ideals—what we
really want—has been undermined by beltway deal making. We have to
be consistent in our politics.

Labor needs an outspoken policy that defends the civil rights of all
sections of U.S. society, and is willing to take on an open fight to
protect them. If Trump's raids and terror campaigns scare unions into
silence, few workers will feel confident in risking their jobs (and
freedom) to join them.

Yet people far beyond unions will defend labor rights if they are part
of a broader civil rights agenda, and if the labor movement is willing
to go to bat with community organizations for it.

JOBS FOR ALL

A new direction on civil rights requires linking immigrant rights to a
real jobs program and full employment economy. It demands affirmative
action that can come to grips with the devastation in communities of
color, especially African-American communities.

And none of that can be done without challenging Trump's war policies,
but equally the war policies that have come from Democratic
administrations.

CLIMATE JUSTICE

Today part of a freedom agenda is not only conversion from military
production, but conversion from fossil fuel dependence.

Jeff Johnson, past president of the Washington State Labor Council,
drew the connection between labor support for climate conversion
legislation and social justice. "I knew we had to educate my members,
so that they would understand that we can't support more fossil fuel
exploration," he told me. "We have an existential crisis that is
social, political and racial, in addition to climate. And we know that
the impact of climate change will hit those communities who had the
least to do with causing it."

INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY

At the heart of any radical vision for our era is globalization—the
way unions approach the operation of capitalism on an international
scale.

When the old Cold War leadership of the AFL-CIO was defeated in 1996,
I heard incoming AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer (later President) Richard
Trumka say unions should find partners in other countries in order to
face common employers. At the time it represented a big change—that
unions would cooperate with anyone willing to fight against our common
employers. It rejected by implication the anti-communist ideology that
put us on the side of employers and U.S. foreign policy, and that
shamed us before the world.

Three decades later, however, this idea is no longer radical enough.
It’s an example of pragmatic solidarity, although it was, at the
time, a good first step out of that ColdWar past.

What’s missing is a response from the labor movement to U.S. foreign
policy. International solidarity involves more than multinational
corporations. There is no doubt that military corporations benefit
from selling the bombs that Israel uses in its Gaza genocide, but
political support from Trump, and Biden before him, for Israel is more
than just an effort to defend their profits.

Corporate globalization and military intervention are intertwined, and
in the labor movement there’s not enough discussion about their
relationship. That’s why we got manipulated in the response to 9/11,
and by justifications for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

Unions in the rest of the world are not simply asking us whether we
will stand with them against General Electric, General Motors, or
Mitsubishi. They want to know: Will you take action to oppose the Gaza
genocide and arms shipments? What is your stand about aggressive wars
or coups?

U.S. corporations operating in a country like Mexico or El Salvador
are, in some ways, opportunistic. They’re taking advantage of an
existing economic system, and trying to make it function to produce
profits. They exploit the difference in wages from country to country
for instance, and require concessions from governments for setting up
factories in their countries.

But what causes poverty in a country like El Salvador? What drives a
worker into a factory that, in the United States, we call a sweatshop?
What role does U.S. policy play in creating that system of poverty?

In our union movement, we need that kind of discussion. We turn
education into simply a technical matter about techniques for
grievance-handling and collective bargaining. We don’t really work
with our members to develop a framework to answer these questions. So
our movement becomes ineffective in fighting about the issues of war
and peace, globalization, and their consequences, like immigration.

EDUCATE THE MEMBERS

When the AFL-CIO campaigned in Washington against the Central American
Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for instance, labor lobbyists went up to
Capitol Hill and tried to mobilize pressure on Congress to defeat it.
But what was missing was education at the base of the labor movement.

Had we educated and mobilized our members against the Contra war and
the counterinsurgency wars in El Salvador and Guatemala (and certainly
many of us tried to do that), U.S. workers would have understood CAFTA
more clearly a decade later.

The root of this problem is a kind of American pragmatism that
disparages education. We need to demand more from those who make the
decisions and control the purse strings in our unions.

Since grinding poverty in much of the world is an incentive for moving
production, defending the standard of living of workers around the
world is as necessary as defending our own. The logic of inclusion in
a global labor movement must apply as much to a worker in Mexico as it
does to the nonunion worker down the street.

That’s why the debate over the Iraq War at the AFL-CIO convention
was so important. From the point when it became clear that the Bush
administration intended to invade Iraq, union activists began
organizing a national network to oppose it through U.S. Labor Against
the War. What started as a collection of small groups, in a handful of
unions, became a coalition of unions representing over a million
members, the product of grassroots action at the bottom of the U.S.
labor movement, not a directive from the top.

That experience was put to work when the genocide began in Gaza, as
national and local unions and activists organized the National Labor
Network for a Ceasefire. When the United Auto Workers endorsed its
call, the union also set up a divestment and just transition working
group, "to study the history of Israel and Palestine, the union’s
economic ties to the conflict, and to explore how to achieve a just
transition for U.S. workers from war to peace."

Opposing intervention and war means fighting for the self-interest of
our members. It means being able to identify that self-interest with
the interest of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The same money
that pays for bombs for the Israeli government is money that doesn’t
get spent on schools here at home. We can’t have a full-employment
economy in the U.S. without peace.

The arguments by political centrists in the Democratic Party that we
must choose to fight only about workers' immediate economic interests,
and stay silent about Gaza or racism, hides the connections workers
have to make to challenge the sources of their own poverty and the
attacks against them. As veteran organizer Stewart Acuff says, "While
economic justice must run through everything our movement does, we
cannot deemphasize any strand of injustice."

Union members are not ignorant of this basic fact. In fact, they are
becoming more sophisticated, and better at understanding the way
global issues, from war to trade, affect the lives of people in the
streets of U.S. cities. But the percentage of union members is
declining, and the organization they need to put that understanding
into practice is getting smaller. Deeper political awareness alone
will not create a larger labor movement.

NEED A SOCIAL MOVEMENT

Just after World War II , unions represented 35 percent of U.S.
workers. It’s no coincidence that the McCarthy years when the Cold
War came to dominate the politics of unions was the moment when that
strength began to decline.

By 1975, after the Vietnam War, union membership had dropped to 26
percent. Today only 9.9 percent of all workers, and 5.9 percent in the
private sector, are union members.

Declining numbers translate into a decline in political power and
economic leverage. California (with one-sixth of all union members)
and New York (with one-eighth) have higher union density than any
others. But even there, labor is facing an all-out war for political
survival.

While the percentage of organized workers has declined, unions have
made important progress in finding alternative strategic ideas to the
old business unionism. If these ideas are developed and extended, they
provide an important base for making unions stronger and embedding
them more deeply in working-class communities. But it’s a huge job.
Raising the percentage of organized workers in the United States from
just 10 to 11 percent would mean organizing over a million people.
Only a social movement can organize people on this scale.

In addition to examining structural reforms that can make unions more
effective and concentrate their power, the labor movement needs a
program that will inspire people to organize on their own, one which
is unafraid to put forward radical demands, and rejects the constant
argument that any proposal that can't get through Congress is not
worth fighting for.

A BROADER VISION

The labor movement has to become a movement that inspires people with
a broader vision of social justice. Our standard of living is
declining. Workers often have to choose between paying their rent or
their mortgage or having health care. There’s something
fundamentally wrong with the priorities of this society, and unions
have to be courageous enough to say it.

Working families need a decent wage, but they also need the promise of
a better world. For as long as we’ve had unions, workers have shown
they’ll struggle for the future of their children and their
communities, even when their own future seems in doubt. But it takes a
radical social vision to inspire the wave of commitment, idealism, and
activity.

The 1920s were filled with company unions, the violence of
strikebreakers, and a lack of legal rights for workers. A decade
later, those obstacles were swept away.

An upsurge of millions in the 1930s, radicalized by the Depression and
left-wing activism, forced (relative) corporate acceptance of the
labor movement for the first time in the country's history.

There are changes taking place in our unions and communities that can
be the beginning of something as large and profound. If they are, then
the obstacles unions face today can become historical relics as
quickly as did those of an earlier era.

_David Bacon is a labor journalist and photographer, author of Illegal
People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes
Immigrants and other books._

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