By Steven Littlewood, Senior Research Fellow, Unions21 | 6 min
Unions21 has broken America! But as I landed on the tarmac of Boston’s Logan airport I was not greeted by screaming crowds like the Beatles, but by the news that President Trump had terminated the collective bargaining rights of almost a million federal workers via executive order.
It was an inauspicious beginning for a conference on strikes at which there was, for understandable reasons, a lot of pessimism towards the intellect but an encouraging amount of optimism towards the will. It was certainly a new experience for me to hear the chair say “welcome to the conference” and be met with enthusiastic Oprah-style whoops, but whether this was the determination of the US labour movement or just natural American exuberance I’m not sure.
Meeting the moment
The opening session was rallied by Sara Nelson, leader of the Association of Flight Attendants and a leading voice in the US union movement in recent years. Nelson called upon the delegates to prepare for a long, hard four years of fighting back against anti-union action ushered in by the president’s attack on federal workers, which she called “PATCO on steroids”.
However, the fighting talk was tempered with a dose of pragmatism, ensuring that the conference was not merely a platform for empty rhetoric, but a forum for honest discussions about the capacity of unions to meet the moment and what is needed to develop and prepare. Nelson stressed the importance of solidarity and cooperation between unions to defeat the onslaught, but was realistic about their readiness at this precise moment - as she reminded the audience that membership density in the private sector now sits at just 6% in the US.
Invoking the legendary US organiser Mary “Mother” Jones, Nelson said: “Mother Jones knew that when you fight you might not win, but she was also a great strategist and she knew you can’t lead members into unwinnable fights.” It was encouraging that this combination of determination with cool, strategic planning set the tone for the rest of the conference.
Sessions on success
In the first session I attended, senior officials from the United Auto Workers and Chicago Teachers Union, both with recent experience of successful strikes, talked about building towards coordinated national action across the union movement, but the date they were aiming for was May 2028 – a recognition of the challenges needed to align contract renewal dates, engage members, build support and do all of the things necessary to make this a winnable fight and not a hollow gesture.
The UAW organising official also acknowledged that there were issues stemming from the fact 50% of their membership voted for Trump. Anything framed as an anti-Trump protest would, she said, automatically lose large swathes of members, so a successful national dispute would have to be rooted in real workplace concerns and centred on improving member conditions. This does not mean a parochial focus on each union’s immediate interests - the aim was to resist attacks on all workers and improve conditions for all working people - but a recognition of the need to meet members where they are and to communicate in ways that do not alienate members but build the broadest possible coalition.
The second session I attended was a workshop on How to Get Strike Ready, run by two incredible Teamsters organisers. Not all of the lessons were transferable to a UK context - fortunately we don’t have to worry about what to do when “some asshole with an open carry licence brings a gun to the picket line” - but the lessons about structure testing, building branches and cultivating the sense of ‘group’ needed for a successful dispute were those we need to be learning.
This session had the most memorable line of the conference as Richard the Teamster apparently ad-libbed a key lesson: “If you can’t organise a picnic, you are not strike ready!” This summarises many of the lessons about structure testing that I wrote about in our Unions21 report last year in one pithy phrase. “I really should make that into a slide in the presentation,” said Richard; personally I would have it chiselled into stone for every organiser.
Again, the focus in this session was not on organising purely to strike, but acknowledging that lacking the ability to strike effectively is a huge disadvantage. A successful union might never need to strike, but they should always be ready to if needed and they should always be assessing their capacity for industrial action.
The third session of the day asked “do workers always have structural power?” and encouraged us to think creatively about what sources of leverage workers have even where they appear to lack structural power. One contributor noted that sometimes unions with high structural power, e.g. dock workers, face more aggressive attacks as a result, which can be a weakness, while those workers who are underestimated can find ways to take effective action under the radar - for example, coordinated fainting fits among Cambodian textile workers. The key is to find your points of leverage and build your capacity.
In the final afternoon session I delivered Unions21’s industrial action research findings as part of a panel discussion on strike waves. There was a lot of interest from the audience in the comparative positions of the US and UK union movements.
It’s now or never
On the face of it we are in very different situations. While American colleagues face huge attacks on their rights to bargain and organise, UK unions have an enormous opportunity under the Employment Rights Bill and the Make Work Pay agenda to expand both. While the Trump administration takes a sledgehammer to workers’ rights, the UK government’s stated policy is to offer the biggest boost to trade union rights in a generation or more, making it easier to access members, seek recognition from employers and take industrial action.
Where there is common ground, however, is that both movements are in a ‘do or die’ moment. The UK’s 16% membership density in the private sector might compare favourably with the US’s 6% but it is still far too low. If we don’t seize the opportunities of Make Work Pay to improve that number now, it will be too late. Similarly, the US speakers were clear-sighted that the current political and industrial climate in the US needs the union movement to take the initiative or risk being condemned to extinction.
For me, the key takeaways from the conference were those universal lessons that apply to unions in both expansive and defensive positions, whether they are currently in dispute or not. Be pragmatic, make strategic choices, and always be testing your structures.
“If you can’t organise a picnic, you are not strike ready!”
