The second Trump presidency began with a procession of American CEOs bending the knee. Top bosses from Amazon, Facebook, and Google had each clashed with the right-wing upstart in his first term, but at his second inauguration, they filled the second row, donating 1 million dollars each as party favours. Open fractures in this uneasy alliance may yet appear, but for now, the titans of US capital have keenly avoided any hint of their prior independence, let alone resistance, to Trump’s revived regime.
Keith Brower Brown is the climate-labor organizer at Labor Notes and an Affiliate Researcher at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
With the bosses fully brought to heel, the task of opposition has fallen squarely to their employees. The new administration quickly launched brazen assaults on public workers, immigrants on the job, public healthcare, political speech, and labour rights at large. Little so far has slowed that down. But the recent rise of a rebellious wing of the union movement, part of a broader revival that began during Trump’s first term, offers a potential leadership already connected across these battlefields — and a fighting chance. Indeed, as Trump’s assault intensifies, unions may be the best hope the US has for stopping the right-wing onslaught.
Sparking a Fire
In the long wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, an avalanche of public austerity and corporate offensives sowed fury among union members. Yet while workers suffered, top union officers largely stayed committed to avoiding conflict with employers, hoping to ride out the storm.
That made conditions ripe for rank-and-file revolt. In 2010, a militant reform caucus took over leadership of the 26,000-strong Chicago Teachers Union. By 2012, the union waged a city-wide strike that ended years of austerity by winning 17-percent raises. More inspiring still was how teachers used their contract fight to win for their students, drawing the line against exploding class sizes, gruelling standardized testing, and privatized charter school invasions. It was what labour scholar Eric Blanc called the “first serious union challenge to the bipartisan reform consensus on K-12 schools”.
In the following years, teachers in dozens of states quietly built militant networks on the Chicago model. That culminated in a 2018–19 teachers’ strike wave that struck hardest in Republican-dominated states like Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, where teachers won through a nine-day wildcat strike without sanction from union officers. That courage has carried through to the slower, ongoing strike wave in Massachusetts, where teachers in six regions have struck despite laws declaring their strikes illegal, facing major fines. As a 15-year science teacher told Labor Notes, “I've come around. Not all laws are just, and that is an unjust law. Teachers deserve the right to strike for just wages.”
Just a few years after the teachers’ strike wave hit, reformers in the Teamsters and United Auto Workers swept new presidents into office of these unions, whose combined membership tops one-and-a-half million. Within another few years, these unions waged major strikes at car factories and Amazon hubs. Often connected through booming Labor Notes conferences, the fire has spread into new rank-and-file movements of electricians, grocery workers, and entertainment workers, to name just a few.
Barely out of infancy, the modest labour revival in the US now faces a ferocious storm under Trump.
In the post-pandemic years, low unemployment helped boost courage across the US labour movement. Even unions with no change in leadership sometimes gravitated towards a more combative stance, as organizing models from Jane McAlevey and Labor Notes gained popularity among union activists, and many young activists fresh off the Bernie Sanders campaigns turned to workplace organizing.
By the numbers, for the last six years this revived unionism in the US has meant about 300,000 workers per year have been involved in major strikes. That’s fully triple the number of major strikes seen in the quiet two decades prior, but still half the level of the restive 1980s.
Campaigns to organize new union members have also grown, along with surprising new levels of public support. From 2021 to 2023, union membership grew by over 400,000. At workplaces with over 500 members, the union-election win rate shot up to 86 percent, up from last decade’s 63 percent. These efforts gained a modest boost from Biden appointees and friendlier rules for some union elections, although enforcement was far too weak to matter against large corporations. Polls found 70-percent approval of labour unions, up from a low of 49 percent in 2009.
The largest union wins have come at hospitals and college campuses. New organizing has been far rarer in manufacturing, logistics, and especially construction — sectors with especially direct kinds of leverage over capital, and where union growth is particularly important if the labour movement is to expand its political influence. Construction unions actually shrank from 2022–24, in the peak years of Biden administration subsidies and pro-union nudges to private builders.
Thus, despite some promising wins, the bitter truth is that US union density is still falling, and last year dipped to a record low of 9.9 percent, down from 10 percent in 2023. New unions simply haven’t outpaced the growth of the workforce, nor overcome a decades-long corporate strategy of workplace relocations, high-tech monitoring, and subcontracting aimed to isolate workers and gut unions.
But the problem is also at least partially self-inflicted. Union finances, let alone their 14 million members, have gone largely untapped for the task of new organizing. Unions now hold 33 billion dollars in net assets, twice the figure of one decade ago. That most trade union officials have piled up reserves instead of organizing or striking is a sobering sign of how much reform yet remains to be done.
Class Collaboration or Independence?
Barely out of infancy, the modest labour revival in the US now faces a ferocious storm under Trump. The new regime has already illegally fired tens of thousands of federal workers, and declared it was breaking contracts and cancelling the right to unions for 700,000 federal union members. Conspicuously public arrests of immigrants, like a farmworker organizer dragged from his car or dozens of farmhands detained in a California grocery store parking lot in January, alongside politically targeted deportations of Palestine solidarity supporters, have aimed to sow widespread fear. With rule reversals and steep cuts at the already tiny US federal labour law enforcement agency, the Depart of Labor, bosses at Amazon and Ford have taken the message that they can fire union activists with impunity.
Against such danger, union leaders in the US are weighing two possible paths.
The Trump sequel has landed with little hesitation to attack unions, while claiming to be the champion of both corporate titans and the working stiff.
One path would be a defensive collaboration with Trump. This tragic parade kicked off with the International Longshoremen’s Association president fawning over Trump, and expanded in the Teamsters’ president’s attacks on immigrants in public appearances with Trump allies. Even UAW President Shawn Fain, the brightest star of the reform movement, has pledged to seek common ground with Trump on tariffs, albeit not on his whole agenda.
For many labour leaders, these dalliances reflect an attempt to build support — or at least a truce — with right-wing union members. Exit polls estimate that 55 percent of union members voted for Harris versus 43 percent for Trump in 2024, a similar share to 2020. But the working-class world around union members shifted right, as the Financial Times reports: “In contrast to 2020, the majority of lower-income households or those earning less than $50,000 a year voted for Trump this election.” Labor Notes contacts in construction and logistics regularly report that Trump supporters within union ranks have grown more outspoken and hostile, if not always more numerous. What Mike Davis called “the barren marriage of American labor and the Democratic Party” has come to an impasse, and union officers are tempted to seek a rapport with Republicans in office as a narrow defence both without and within.
The other possible path for unions is to build an independent opposition to Trump, working across and beyond organized labour’s ranks. Since the Democratic defeat in the 2024 elections, party leaders have publicly folded, pleading “What leverage do we have?” That pre-emptive surrender has opened a political vacuum. Trade unions and their 14 million members are the strongest organized force that could fill the void, offering a more strident, working-class-led resistance than Democrats and CEOs were ever able to during the first Trump term.
Turning the Tide
Early signs of that kind of militant opposition are already emerging. Federal workers across multiple unions have rapidly built a network to oppose the 20,000 summary firings to date, along with the hundreds of thousands more threatened. It is surprising that top officers from the largest federal unions, as well as the national union federation, the AFL-CIO, made a public gesture of support for this rank-and-file-led network. But against an administration keen to slash federal workers and programmes, work stoppages may be a dull weapon. Their leverage will depend on rallying concerted support from veterans, pensioners, and national park visitors they serve, along with disruptive solidarity from elsewhere in the labour movement.
Daring cross-union demonstrations and even strikes could turn the tide further. In the largest state, California, teachers’ unions are coordinating for a potential state-wide strike this May. Auto workers have led a call for joint bargaining deadlines, strikes, and political action in May 2028. If not a general strike, this would be the closest thing to one that US unions have attempted since the 1940s. Official coordination across unions has been confined, after that militant era, to sleepy tables of head honchos brokering turf wars and electoral endorsements. A recent outlier, often cited by UAW and Chicago teachers as inspiration for 2028, is what writer Sarah Jaffe terms “the Minnesota model”, where a set of unions have tried out coordination on contract expirations, political education, and legislative fights during the last decade.
Compared to Trump’s unsteady new coalition, the union movement can take heart that its recent revival grows from older, deeper roots.
To succeed at building a broad opposition to Trump, these cross-union efforts will have to do more than add up the narrow layers of officers and activists in unions. They’ll have to translate the democracy and militancy that unions have started to deploy in the workplace into the realm of politics, growing the layers of union members who step up as political organizers in their neighbourhoods, churches, and other rare points of working-class community.
That would require breaking with years of deferential, top-down union politics that involve few members, and only narrowly persuaded them to oppose Trump at the ballot last year. Rather than diluting union politics into broad endorsements of lesser-evil Democrats, unions will need to run fewer and better; preferably their own. As Bernie Sanders began publicly advocating after the election, more independent electoral runs, built around union power and worker candidates, will be crucial for labour to present a clear political alternative to a Democratic Party at its lowest approval rating in history, just 29 percent. Hopes for a pro-labour politics that could break party lines were kindled by the near-win of Dan Osborn, an independent who led a 2021 strike at Nabisco, against a Republican Senator in Nebraska, along with ballot measure wins for paid sick leave, minimum wages, and union protections in states Trump carried handily.
Seven years since the teachers’ strike wave announced that a fighting unionism was back in the US, there are no guarantees of more years to come. The Trump sequel has landed with little hesitation to attack unions, while claiming to be the champion of both corporate titans and the working stiff.
But compared to Trump’s unsteady new coalition, the union movement can take heart that its recent revival grows from older, deeper roots: in a rebellious tradition of factory workers and nurses fighting managers at work, long before unions had any legal standing. That gives the union movement a shot to rally a broader working class in opposition, not collaboration, against the Right. As an old Kentucky coal miners’ song goes, wherever the strike is on, “There are no neutrals there.”