What Next for the Labor Movement? A Conversation with Dave Kamper

Truth to Power is a regular series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better world.

This installment accompanies an excerpt from Dave Kamper’s new book Who’s Got the Power: The Resurgence of American Unions.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Steve Dubb: What led you to write Who’s Got the Power: The Resurgence of American Unions, and what messages do you hope people gain from reading it?

Dave Kamper: I wrote the book because there is something I am particularly good at and that is being wrong. I work for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which is basically the labor movement’s think tank. I remember one day in 2022, I was talking with some colleagues about the week ahead and they were like, “Hey, there is this union election for these Amazon workers in Staten Island. Should we pay any attention to that?” And I said, as confident as I had ever been in my life, “They are going to get crushed.”

That was the beginning of a long string of me being completely wrong about one thing after another, and led me to realize that maybe my years of pessimism in the labor movement were misplaced. So, I decided I wanted to write something optimistic. I think we need an optimistic book for horrible times.

And I tried to write it so that you didn’t have to be a labor expert to read it. I tried to write something that someone who thinks unions might be interesting would pick up the book and learn something.

SD: You put a lot of emphasis on the COVID-19 pandemic as being a precipitating event for labor activism in the past few years. How has the pandemic altered the course of unionism in the United States?

DK: For one, I think it is genuinely true that workers were essential and special and then we didn’t treat them that way. And they took it personally.

Second, we had massive government intervention because capitalism didn’t work to solve the problems. And lots of workers realized that a different future was possible.

We were able in the midst of a terrible disaster to create a system of effectively universal basic income, a form of expanded unemployment insurance. We stopped student loan payments. We put an eviction moratorium on the books. We expanded healthcare to tens of millions of people. It became an inflection moment where what was previously thought normal, people realized was not normal.

SD: So, I have this pet theory about the 2024 election. People talk about it as an election about inflation. But, to your point, there were all those social benefits—and when did they disappear? During the Biden administration. I think it cost Democrats politically. This doesn’t get talked about.

DK: No, it doesn’t.

SD: I was curious if you shared that analysis or not?

DK: So, I live in Minnesota. A state senator named Zaynab Mohamed made an ad during the 2022 political cycle called “Easier, Not Harder.”

It is easily the most brilliant distillation of this message that I saw anywhere, which was: “Hey, we proved that we could make life easier for people. How about we keep on doing that?” I get the sense that the Biden administration wanted to pretend that the pandemic was behind us, instead of saying, “This was a moment that we all came together. Let’s lean into that a bit. Let’s talk about the ways we made things better for people. And maybe we can do more of that.”

I am a historian by training, in British history. In the Second World War, the British government had massive government programs to protect everything. They had rationing. They had price controls. And one of the interesting things that happened during World War II was that the average British person ate better than they did before the war because rationing made them eat vegetables. It made them eat fruit. It made them eat a more balanced meal. The Labour government swept into power in 1945 basically by saying, “Hey, you know all the good parts of all this government intervention? Let’s keep that. Let’s take private profit out of housing. Let’s take private profit out of healthcare. And let’s take care of people.” They swept into power on that program. I am a little disappointed that we didn’t seize the opportunity here.

SD: Another argument that you advance in your book concerns the rise of what you call the “children of 2008.” Could you talk about the Great Recession, the Occupy uprising of 2011, and how those events shape union activism, organizing, and militancy today?

DK: The term was from someone I interviewed for the book—a graduate student who was organizing here at the University of Minnesota. His point was: “We have seen major institutions fail us. Everything has failed us. The banks failed. The government failed. Private industry failed. But also, the public sector failed us in a lot of ways. We’ve got nothing left.”

What the Occupy moment showed—I freely admit that I did not appreciate it at the time—was that the direction of change had to be in the direction of solidarity. I came of age into the Left in the 1990s, when the cool thing was to go off the grid. You were going to withdraw from global capitalism. You were going to take care of yourself, so you were not going to be complicit in this terrible system.

And I think in the wake of the disasters of 2008–2009, the Occupy movement sent this message that we are all in this together. We are the 99 percent. The way forward is not to retreat. It is to be together and move forward together. And then they did stick together, and they have been doing it ever since in ways that are just fantastic to see.

SD: How would you say the rise of Black Lives Matter and the subsequent racist backlash have affected the labor movement? 

DK: One of the things that didn’t make the book but I found fascinating is that in 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd uprisings, the AFL-CIO did a whole series of town halls around the country with rank-and-file members to talk about the union movement and policing and racism. The report that came out afterwards was sort of dull reading, but the notes of those town halls, my goodness they are raw. There are strong emotions expressed like labor needs to be standing up for those of us who are most oppressed regardless of who they are. And castigating a lot of labor leaders for not leading on that.

One wonders if there is a missed opportunity there. Because of course solidarity has to mean looking out for those who are experiencing the most oppression, those who need the help the most.

SD: You write at length on leadership reform movements—including at the Chicago Teachers Union, the Teamsters, the United Auto Workers (UAW), and maybe even the Hollywood unions. What have reformers achieved and what constraints do reformers face?

DK: The reformers have achieved a lot. Let me explain what I’m talking about when I say reformers. There is a school of thought called the rank-and-file strategy, which says workers should get involved at the grassroots level and oppose sleepy, do-nothing leadership in their unions. What the rank-and-file strategy rarely talks about is, “Here’s what we should do when we attain power.”

What the Occupy moment showed…was that the direction of change had to be in the direction of solidarity.

What made these reform movements successful, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) being the first clearest example of this, is that you had reformers—classroom teachers who became union leaders—who were incredibly smart and strategic and capable once they took power. I met the previous leadership of CTU before the reformers took over. On the issues, there is no difference between them and the reformers. But what they didn’t have was a plan to win, a strategy to do something different, a political willingness to take on challenges.

Another example: Shawn Fain, president of the UAW. The union went on strike five months after he got elected. Many people in the first five months are just figuring out how to make the phones work. Instead, he and his team went in and said, “OK. We’re going to go in with a clear strategy.” It was a brilliantly executed strategy. And they carried it out with tremendous skill and capacity.

One of the things that we never like to talk about in the labor movement, and I think in the progressive space broadly, is competence. We really try to judge people by their commitment to the movement, which I get. But there are a lot of people who are committed to the movement who are not very good at it.

If you look at Karen Lewis, former president of the CTU, or you look at Shawn Fain and the UAW, they were fiery and passionate, but also clearly had a good understanding of how to wield power.

As for the Hollywood strike, while they had a very good understanding of how to use power in their space, they previously had never gotten over internal infighting. What happened with SAG-AFTRA this time is that they put their differences aside and ran a unity slate. That unity slate has kept up.

Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters’ campaign at UPS had a brilliant strategic campaign, and they carried it out. In the months since, O’Brien has made a number of decisions I don’t approve of. That doesn’t take away from the brilliance of the UPS campaign, which was exactly the kind of campaign that you should run for a target like that. Again, it’s competence.

SD: Some of your examples were traditional working-class unions, like the Teamsters, autoworkers, and flight attendants; others were unions that represent intellectual or cultural workers, like the Hollywood unions, the teachers’ unions, and the graduate student worker unions. How are unions affected by the shifting composition of union members?

DK: A colleague at EPI noted that the decline of American unionism from the 1950s to 80s maps onto the decline of manufacturing because the labor movement that came out of World War II—what we still think of as “the labor movement”—was based in manufacturing. But that is not what it is now. The majority of UAW members do not work for the Big Three automakers.

There was a long time I think where everyone in the labor movement, even those who were in those unions, tried to pretend that wasn’t happening. We pretended we were still a union of what we think of as traditional blue-collar jobs.

And what I think has been happening in a lot of places involves proletarianization—that is, jobs that used to have professional cachet have lost that. Graduate students are a perfect example.

It used to be that if you went to graduate school, you’d have an academic job for the rest of your life. There is absolutely no certainty of that now. Most of the folks getting those degrees are doing so in a very precarious type of world.

And similarly, with the Hollywood campaigns, the majority of these folks are not stars but are living paycheck to paycheck. I have a friend who works for the Directors Guild and represents people who work for Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy Kimmel would have been fine if his show were shut down, but there were hundreds of people that worked for that show who don’t make big salaries, who are doing blue collar–type jobs, who are really at risk.

I think solidarity is growing because while the titles are different, and the education levels required are different, everyone is dealing with the same conditions now. Nobody is getting paid enough; everyone is getting massive disrespect on the job. Everyone’s basic benefits are at risk. So few jobs have pensions. Even public sector pensions are falling apart.

So, everyone is finding themselves in the same boat. I think that can serve to break down a lot of barriers. We also have really good examples of specific cross-sector solidarity. Like all the people from non-autoworker unions who showed up at UAW picket lines and who spoke out on that. And all the workers who won’t cross a Starbucks picket line even though they really want their morning coffee fix. These acts of solidarity matter.

SD: What about the “alt-labor” movement, such as day laborer centers and immigrant worker centers? What do you see as the relationship between these new forms of worker organizing and traditional unions?

DK: I had a chapter planned on this, but my publishers—they did this both cruel and wise thing—they told me I got 60,000 words, that’s all.

I used to be a real skeptic on alt-labor until I moved here to Minnesota. The CTUL (Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha, or Center of Workers United in Struggle) is one of the great worker centers. It really opened my eyes.

I think solidarity is growing because while the titles are different, and the education levels required are different, everyone is dealing with the same conditions now.One of the great things about CTUL is the very close and active partnership they have with the unions in town—they are just considered another part of the labor movement here.

There are challenges on both sides about trust. There is still a large segment of labor leaders who distrust nontraditional forms; they worry about them as threats to their power, which I think is silly, but they also worry about them as just putting a Band-Aid on capitalism. I think the worker-center and alt-labor movement has moved way past that now. But there is still often a lack of trust.

And there is also a lack of trust from alt-labor entities towards the institutional labor movement. There are still folks in the labor movement today who will threaten to call ICE in certain circumstances. At an immigrant workers center, you’re not going to talk to those people. You kind of understand that. It seems to me a reasonable response. And I think that is a big part of it.

The worker centers and all the alt-labor out there are showing the way forward. If you put me in the room with the top labor leadership, the first thing I would say is, “You need to embrace that.” That’s only the way we are going to scale, I think.

SD: A couple of key union victories of the past few years were the pro-union vote at the 8,000-worker Staten Island Amazon plant and the 12,000 baristas at 500 Starbucks shops that have voted for union representation. Yet both groups have faced extreme corporate recalcitrance in negotiating a first contract. What can unions, workers, and allies do to break these logjams?

DK: I have deep admiration for the workers engaged in these struggles. I don’t ever want to say that I know better than them. That’s not correct. But it does sort of seem like they made a common mistake of focusing on winning a union election and not winning a union.

The union election is a step in the process. What really matters is the building of a union up and down the line. At Starbucks, I think workers have been more successful at that. I think they have a real union organization. And the fact that they are still sticking together after all this time is really quite amazing.

The Amazon Labor Union at Staten Island has had a lot of internal strife. And they have clearly lost a lot of membership strength. Both are workplaces with huge turnover. That means if you let up the organizing gas for a second you lose a huge chunk of your workforce.

I feel like the Starbucks workers have been more successful at renewing themselves. But the Amazon workers at Staten Island have also just had a harder time; the anti-union onslaught is just worse there.

In both cases, they had miraculous wins. Nonetheless, you kind of see them waking up the day after saying, “What are we going to do now?”

Jaz Brisack is one of the first people to be involved in the Starbuck’s campaign in Buffalo, NY. In the book, Get on the Job and Organize, Brisack talks about how folks on the ground in Buffalo had a strategy to call for a national boycott. They couldn’t get the rest of labor on board with that. They make a pretty strong argument in the book that a national boycott would have worked with Starbucks. It wouldn’t work with Amazon, but maybe you could have gotten enough people to boycott Starbucks.

Then you get to the question of how to coordinate ourselves across the whole movement. That is still a skill we really lack. It is also a structural challenge because we don’t have a movement where anyone is in charge. Control is so decentralized across the movement. It is very difficult for us to move in one direction.

SD: If there was ever a time for labor unity, arguably that is now. NPQ published an article by Jackson Potter of CTU calling for a general strike, not as rhetoric, but for real. And the UAW has called for aligning contracts to expire in May 2028. But there is also this challenge you just named of coordination. Do you see a path where you could have a general strike that is not just a press release, but is effective?

DK: The old line from 100 years ago from an organizer named AJ Muste that a union is “equal parts army and town meeting” is exactly right. When we can march together and point in the same direction, we’re unstoppable. But we spent most of our time sitting in rooms arguing with each other.

The union election is a step in the process. What really matters is the building of a union up and down the line.

You have to do [a general strike] by persuasion because there is no coercive mechanism to get the labor movement to act together.

So, first you have to give them time. Yes, 2028 is a long way away but that’s probably how much time you have to put into it. And then—and Jackson Potter and CTU are a big part of this—they are going place by place, unit by unit, and my suspicion is that there’s a lot more conversation happening than bubbles up because it is not happening in big press conferences.

American labor is structured such that the union local is master of its own fate. That’s great for tactical flexibility on the ground. It’s terrible if you want to get 20,000 locals to do the same thing. But by setting a long-term target, people have time to go place by place by place and say, “Would you get on board with this?”

And because we haven’t seen anything close to a general strike in the United States since probably 1919, even a tiny percentage going out on strike at the same time will seem amazing and powerful. Imagine if even 500,000 workers went out on strike at the same time—that would be monumental, the biggest labor action we’ve had in anyone’s lifetime who isn’t 109 years old.

It is still a heavy lift. But that’s how you’re going to have to do it. You are going to have to do it by persuasion. You can’t just to do it by press release. You have to do the hard work, pounding it out place by place. When you have strong unions like UAW and CTU who are embracing that and showing real leadership on it, I think that’s inspiring.

SD: Your book was largely written before Donald Trump was elected president for the second time. Since Trump’s inauguration, federal workers in particular have faced unprecedented attacks. What is the union movement doing well in this moment and what does it need to do better to fend off attacks and sustain the energy of the past few years that you write about?

DK: One of the lessons of history is that the labor movement is always a little slower to react than we wish. I think these first nine months have just been so overwhelming. I know a lot of people who predicted very bad things. I think even many of those people are surprised by how bad it has been.

So, for better or worse, but for understandable reasons, I think the labor movement has mostly been trying to back off and wait things out.

The most hopeful thing right now is the labor movement is exceptionally popular, which we see both in terms of public opinion polls, but also just in daily life. When I go to the grocery store wearing a union jacket now everybody talks about it: “You’re a union member, good for you.”

Ten years ago, no one would have even known that I was wearing a union jacket. The popularity of the movement means that there is a space for us to act.

We were feeling this way during the first Trump administration too. And it was Sara Nelson [president of the Association of Flight Attendants] calling for a general strike during the 2018–2019 government shutdown and a bunch of flight controllers not coming to work and the airlines were going to shut down—and all of a sudden, the government opened back up. There is still a lot of power in labor acting together.

But I think the movement is still reacting. Groups like the Federal Unionists Network have exploded in size after Trump’s election in 2024, and they are gaining momentum. Will they find their footing in time to catch up? I sure as hell hope so.

But I’d rather be going into this fight with the labor movement of 2024–2025 than with the movement of 2016–2017 or 2004–2005 or really any earlier labor movement of our lifetimes. It’s got more energy, more optimism, and new and engaged leaders.

We have been getting our asses kicked quite a bit, but I’d still have this labor movement fighting it than other labor movements that I have seen.