Last year was heralded as a “decisive year” for global democracy, as more than 4 billion across the globe were eligible to participate in national government elections. The prevailing media narrative was that the fate of democracy everywhere would be determined in polling stations from Jakarta, Indonesia to Jersey City, USA. The mood was one of excitement — and apprehension. Some alarmed commentators went so far as to claim that “democracy” was “in peril”. Post-election analyses concluded that voters had dug a “graveyard for incumbents”, punished the centrists in favour of extremists, or that young voters in the US and Europe lurched towards the far right.
Todd Brogan is director of campaigns and organizing for the International Trade Union Confederation in Brussels, and was previously director of campaigns for the Amalgamated Transit Union in the US. He contributes here in a personal capacity.
Outside of the West, the actual picture was more nuanced. In most countries, incumbent parties did not in fact lose. Nor did 4 billion really participate in this grand democratic spectacle. Ultimately, some 1.2 billion — 61 percent of eligible voters — cast ballots in 2024, mostly outside of Europe and the US. Democracy, at least in its electoral form, lived to see another day.
The bigger problem with this narrative, however, is not its western-centrism. Rather, it is that it fixates on the ballot box as the centre of all democratic participation, obscuring how much our everyday lives are shaped outside the confines of formal politics.
Democracy for Whom?
The idea that democracy begins and ends with the exercise of the political franchise is commonplace. Indeed, voting for a local council or a national parliament is probably the most familiar democratic experience for the greatest number of people in our world today. In some countries, it stands as the furthest point of advancement in an ongoing and often contested process of democratization.
While fitful, imperfect, and often contradictory, democratization in the twentieth-century United States was undeniable. It was ultimately the state itself that expanded the electoral franchise via women’s suffrage and the Voting Rights Act, but the process originated deeper in society — in workplaces, the private sphere, and the commons. Popular action led to new national policies like the National Labor Relations Act, the Great Society programmes, racial desegregation, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Democracy was enacted in the mass upheavals of the workers’ movements in the 1930s, civil rights and peace movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the women’s movement of the 1970s, the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and the disability rights and climate movements of the 1990s. The “democratic way of life” was on the march.
Unions serve as pillars of democratic life, through which diverse groups of working people democratically and collectively pursue their common interests at work and in society.
In succeeding decades, however, American democratization reversed course. Corporations became persons by law, enabling them to flood the political process with lobbyists forking over billions of dollars in campaign money. More fundamentally, the democratic rights of working people came under assault. From 2018-2021 alone, more than 361 pieces of legislation in 47 states were introduced to restrict access to the vote. The new Trump administration leaped into action this year with unprecedented attacks on women, trans people, immigrants, trade unions, and the working poor, all considered illegitimate participants in a wealthy white man’s society.
In 2025, only a few months after democracy’s banner year concluded, a full 61 percent of Americans say they’re not happy with the way democracy is working. This fact, independent of whatever Trump’s most recent assault on the United States’ hollowed-out democratic institutions may be, raises the more fundamental question of how this widespread alienation from democracy can be addressed, so as to not only defend, but also deepen it.
Expanding the Franchise
American philosopher John Dewey confronted conditions not dissimilar to our own in his 1927 essay The Public and Its Problems. “Optimism about democracy is today under a cloud”, he observed. Dewey is best known for arguing that democracy was not merely a procedure for self-government but a collective “way of life”, “a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best”.
Dewey believed that the “heart and final guarantee of democracy” was free and open deliberation between common people and within the groups to which they belonged. Even at this level, however, the number of Americans exercising their democratic freedom of association — be it through a Parent-Teacher Association, social club, trade union, or political organization — was already in free fall by the turn of the century, declining by anywhere from 25–50 percent since the 1970s. That trend continues today, with social alienation particularly common among working-class people.
For Dewey, a dues-paying member of the American Federation of Teachers, democracy was both glaringly absent and urgently needed in one sphere in particular: the economy. In 1938, as the war machine in Europe gained steam, he predicted, “It is so common to point out the absurdity of conducting a war for political democracy which leaves industrial and economic autocracy practically untouched, that I think we are absolutely bound to see, after the war, either a period of very great unrest, disorder, drifting, strife … or a movement to install the principle of self-government within industries.”
The movement to which he referred has a name: the labour movement. Following years of hard-fought victories in the first half of the twentieth century that dramatically improved the lives of millions, by the 1950s, nearly one-third of the US workforce belonged to a union. In 2024, however, that number dropped below 10 percent for the first time — despite the fact that a majority of Americans support unions and believe their decline has been bad for the country. Nevertheless, as is the case with so many aspects of life in our democratic societies, they seemingly have no institutional outlet through which to address this problem.
Unions Power Democracy
The phenomenon of trade-union decline is sadly not limited to the US. With the exception of South America, trade union membership has declined in every region measured by the international Labour Organization over the past two decades.
That decline has been disastrous for democracy. Unions serve as pillars of democratic life, through which diverse groups of working people democratically and collectively pursue their common interests at work and in society. Yet for decades, they have been under ceaseless attack by employers and governments alike. The International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC) Global Rights Index found that the number of countries attacking free speech and assembly grew from 26 percent to 42 percent from 2013–2023. In 2023, an astounding 77 percent of countries denied working people the right to establish or join a trade union.
A 2024 data analysis by the ITUC affirmed that “where workers are guaranteed fundamental labour rights, democracy is generally stronger and more sustainable”. This should come as little surprise. A majority of voters are workers, and the average worker spends one third of their life on the job. Globally, nearly 90 percent of them do not have a union.
In strong unions, democracy is pervasive because it is effective.
When the workplace is experienced as exclusively autocratic, with no unions through which workers can democratically organize themselves and negotiate with their employers or develop shared political goals, the development of democracy as a whole is stunted. Dewey recognized this way back in 1888, when he wrote that “democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial, as well as civil and political”.
Last year, the ITUC launched a campaign “For Democracy” speaking to that deeper vision and idea of what democracy could and should mean. The organizers of the campaign argue that, “Unions are forges for democracy. Millions speak their minds for the first time in their union. They learn how to protect one another. They experience the brilliance of collective deliberation and the power of collective action.”
However imperfectly, union members strive to practice what they preach. In Them and Us Unionism, a pamphlet published by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, the union insists that, “Building collective power requires true democratic practice, so that workers feel ownership of their union. Democracy is more than just holding votes — it is an active commitment to make sure that as many members as possible are informed and participating in their union.”
In their 1999 book for the rank-and-file activist network Labor Notes, Democracy is Power: Rebuilding Unions from the Bottom Up, authors Mike Parker and Martha Gruelle explain that by democracy, they “mean much more than fair election procedures … we mean a culture of control by the members”. They also note that the “larger goal is for workers to exert power collectively in the workplace and society.”
Rising to the Challenge
Unlike Dewey, who viewed the means as an end in itself, unions put a premium on what democracy actually delivers. After all, it is through democratic deliberation that workers can identify their common material needs, and through collective action ensure that those needs are met.
In strong unions, democracy is pervasive because it is effective. Practiced well, union democracy secures stronger contracts and agreements by ensuring worker participation and trust. It builds cohesion, ownership, and shared sacrifice that ensures successful strikes and campaigns. It builds independent, working-class politics because workers themselves develop political positions and decide on electoral endorsements.
While union members may not always share a political party, they find common cause in the workplace, where democracy is experienced least — and where its future will be decided.
When this experience of democracy at work is denied, the workplace and by extension the economy are left to the devices of petty dictators. The worst of them will accumulate tremendous capital, monopolize sectors of the economy, and capture whole governments. This is best exemplified today by the influence exercised by the world’s richest man and online promoter of fascist ideologies, Elon Musk, in the Trump administration, German electoral politics, and the government of Javier Milei in Argentina. In his capacity as CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and X, Musk is one of the world’s most egregious union busters and all-around opponents of workers’ rights. He personally works to ensure democracy never enters the workplaces where his wealth is created.
Confronting the Musks of his day, at the height of fascism’s power across continental Europe, Bulgarian trade unionist and prime minister Georgi Dimitrov warned that, “you cannot eliminate fascism, grant democratic rights to the working masses, consolidate and develop these rights without challenging the very rule of capitalism, for fascism is nothing but the ruthless, terrorist dictatorship of big business”.
Our world looks radically different from some 100 years ago, when the forces of fascism first threatened liberal democracy in a bid to smash the labour movement, but the fundamental challenge remains the same. Thankfully, workers around the world are already fighting on the frontlines, organizing for democracy on the factory floors and in the supply chains where billionaires rule as kings. While union members may not always share a political party, they find common cause in the workplace, where democracy is experienced least — and where its future will be decided.