Copyright © 2025 by Dave Kamper. This excerpt originally appeared in Who’s Got the Power: The Resurgence of American Unions, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
Solidarity, we have always thought, is more difficult at a distance. The great, mythic union victories of the 1930s, like the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–1937, when the United Auto Workers beat General Motors and opened the door to organizing the auto industry, were won by workers who lived and worked alongside each other. You could find whole blocks of homes where every single one had a worker at the factory in it.
On Saturday night they went to the same beer hall; on Sunday they worshipped in the same church. If they were part of one of the many ethnic immigrant enclaves in Northern cities—Italians, say, or Poles, or Czechs—they might have a newspaper in their home language, even as the younger generations spoke English without any accent.10 The reinforced connections between home and work made it easier for workers to trust each other, to stand up with each other, to fight together.
But skeptics, and for some time I counted myself one of them, failed to realize that what we thought was a universal truth, wasn’t. There have always been examples of solidarity working at a distance, but we dismissed them as flukes or happy accidents. But distance means different things to different people. And for Millennials and Generation Z, who grew up in a digital age where people thousands of miles away were just as easy to connect with as people down the street, solidarity could cross the nation with ease.
The more of these folks you talk to, the more it becomes clear that the Occupy movement in 2011 was an inflection point. At the beginning, Occupy looked like a stunt, performative theater designed to make participants feel morally superior while accomplishing nothing. Alex Press “recoiled in embarrassment” at the “hippie bullshit” when she first looked at photos of Occupy NYC, but she went with a friend to the encampment in Boston and stayed.11 It changed her life; Press is now one of the nation’s most incisive labor journalists.
Despite some of the ridiculous trappings, the folks involved in the Occupy encampments were highlighting a real issue. The Tea Party had just swept into power in the House of Representatives. President [Barack] Obama’s agenda for reform—never a particularly ambitious one, to be honest—was dead. The Great Recession had thrown millions out of work and cost millions more their homes, but the financial systems that kicked it all off were barely touched, and the economic recovery was slow and uneven.
Labor historian Gabriel Winant recalls discussing with others how the experience of Occupy—rather than the message or the wins or the losses—might affect a whole political generation as well as:
The individual lessons it taught and the ways that it became embedded in the life histories of those who went through it. As in all intense social movement cycles, participants would find themselves doing things they would have never anticipated, alongside people they would not otherwise have known. They would change not the state but themselves, and then carry that change with them elsewhere.12
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And it wasn’t just Press and Winant. Occupy was the first major national mobilization against concentrated wealth since the 1999 World Trade Organization protest in Seattle ended in clouds of tear gas. There were hundreds of Occupy encampments, some were short-lived, some lasted longer, and for every person who attended one, scores more heard their stories, imbibed their spirit. And while the people in New York and the people in Boston and the people in Duluth didn’t talk to each other face-to-face, by 2011 (unlike 1999) you could share social media posts, send digital photos instantly, and create text chats with activists from anywhere to share experiences.*
Maybe Occupy was a lot of hippie bullshit. Maybe it was kind of silly. But it was there. For people, especially younger Americans, facing the absolute certainty that their future prospects were going to be more tenuous than those of their parents. Occupy was the option on offer to challenge the status quo.
It’s also significant that Occupy was a movement based in collective solidarity; its signature slogan, “We are the 99%,” was a cry for collaboration and cooperation and organizing.
When I was entering the American Left in the 1990s, the cool thing to do was to go off the grid. It’s not a surprise that Gen Xers, raised in the age of Reagan, would view withdrawing from consumer culture and the rat race as the ultimate act of rebellion. But for people raised in the shadow of the 2008 financial collapse, the multidecade disaster of the so-called War on Terror, and the ever-widening gap between the ultrarich and the ever-widening gap between the ultrarich and the rest of us, individual solutions seemed inadequate. It was necessary to band together, and events far from home would matter for them just as much as things they saw every day. Where Generation X promoted individual emancipation, the children of 2008 embraced solidarity as a core virtue.
Notes
- The classic work on the close connections between where and how workers lived, and the unions they built, is Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, England, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
- Alex N. Press, “Occupy Wall Street Made Me a Socialist,” Jacobin, September 21, 2021, https://jacobin.com/2021/09/occupy-wall-street-anniversary-boston-dewey-square-99-percent.
- Gabriel Wynant, “A New Political Identity,” Dissent, September 17, 2021, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-new-political-identity.
*Also, unlike in 1999, long-distance phone calls had effectively become as cheap as local calls. Because it wasn’t about new technology like email or social media, the rise of free long distance doesn’t get the same attention, but it surely was just as—if not more—important.
