The labor movement in the United States used to be respected and looked to for leadership; people cared about what positions labor took, watched when they mobilized, noticed the causes they supported. This was especially true among the left. Today, for most of the country, crickets; including much of the left. And yet, labor is a source of potential power unrivaled by any other bottom-up social grouping in the country.
As one who has written extensively about labor organizations around the world and in the United States,[2] this author has long been thinking about the future direction of the US labor movement. This thinking is not just based on writing or academic research, although he has done both. However, he also has over 40 years of experience as a labor activist, including approximately eight years of experience specifically working with labor/community/church coalitions; as one who has worked in blue, white, and pink collar jobs over this time and in multiple locations across the country; and, most importantly, for over nine years as a rank and file printer and activist in his union, working extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as 18 months working/organizing in the South, mainly in Kentucky and Tennessee. He also served two terms as elected Chair of the Chicago Chapter of the National Writers Union, putting him on the National Executive Council of the NWU. In other words, this author has considerable experience on the ground and in the productive trenches of this country.
It is argued here that there has not been a labor movement in the US since 1949, when right-wing leaders of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) expelled 11 so-called “left-led” unions with somewhere between 750,000 and a million members (Rosswurm, ed., 1992; see also Emspak, 1972; Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin, 2003); since then, we have had only a trade union movement. What’s the difference? A labor movement looks out for the well-being of all working people in the country, while a trade union movement only looks out for members of its member unions, although sometimes talking as though they represent all workers.
And, especially since 1981, when the trade union movement failed to defend the striking air traffic controllers in the PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) strike when attacked by President Ronald Reagan, the trade union movement leaders have done little but watch its ranks shrink, its prestige fall, and its power decline: millions of jobs have been shipped overseas while the manufacturing economy has been decimated, with their relatively high-paying jobs destroyed, and most of the service sector jobs since created have remained ununionized, underpaid, and with many fewer protections for workers.[3]
Yes, acting together, the trade union movement has worked to elect Democrats such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the presidency, but between signing NAFTA (North American Free Trade Act) in 1994, and the failure to pass a bill to enhance labor organizing, none could be considered blazing successes for workers, regardless of rhetoric. Individual unions have succeeded here and there, but only episodically and not consistently, and usually only because of some tactical feature that gave it a winning advantage in a particular struggle. Inspiring not.
The only consistent trade union success since the early 1980s has been in sucking up US government money—often between $30-75 million annually, approximately $1 billion in total since 1983—which has allowed AFL-CIO foreign policy leaders to carry out its’ foreign policy behind the backs of most of the organization’s leaders and all of its affiliated union members, yet in our name. These efforts have been generally intended to mistreat foreign workers by undercutting their efforts against multinational corporations and US government foreign policy projects (see Bass, 2012; Carew, 2018; Schuhrke, 2024; Scipes, 2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2020).[4] There’s room for tons of corruption there in addition to the moral rot at the top of the labor movement.
Labor’s foreign policy program has been carried out since the end of the 1890s-early 1900s—long before its “opponent” to justify its nefarious activities, the Soviet Union, was founded after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917—and it continues to date, long after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. In over 100 years, the top-level leaders of the AFL and then AFL-CIO have never given an honest account of their foreign operations to union members that can be verified by independent researchers (Scipes, 2010).
Their work has been atrocious. This has been exposed by dogged union members like Fred Hirsch, George Schmidt, Kim Scipes, Steve Zeltzer, Carol Lang, Frank Hammer, David Nack, Jeff Schuhrke, Rob McKenzie, and others like researchers Nelson Bass, Anthony Carew, Beth Sims and more (see Scipes, 2020). What has been clearly established is that these so-called labor “leaders” have helped overthrow democratically-elected governments, supported dictators who repressed labor, fought progressive labor movements, and undermined labor-supported governments who challenged US Government policies and activities around the world. In almost every case, with the possible exception of Solidarnosc in Poland in the early 1980s and that’s debatable, hurting workers and their allies. This, and more, has been established beyond any doubt; i.e., unequivocally.
Further, these high level labor officials have directly attacked labor democracy here in the United States, gutting it for all to see. In 2004, over 400 union representatives at the California AFL-CIO bi-annual Convention, representing over two million union members, voted unanimously to condemn the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy program (Hirsch, 2004). This was not a fringe result: California contained at that time one-sixth of the entire national organization’s membership. Their formal resolution went to the 2005 National AFL-CIO Convention in Chicago, where the resolutions committee changed it to supporting this foreign policy program, and then would not even let opponents (such as from California) debate it on the Convention floor, where it passed (Scipes, 2010, 2012a, 2012b).
Worse, even while nonetheless being helpful to foreign workers in a few cases, the AFL-CIO has acted to legitimize the imperialist National Endowment for Democracy (NED) by serving as one of its four “core institutes,” along with the international wing of the Democratic Party, the international wing of the Republican Party, and the international wing of its domestic archenemy, the US Chamber of Commerce, in NED’s on-going project of supporting and advancing the US Empire (Bass, 2012; Scipes, 2010: 96-105).
It is not seen how this bodes well for workers, either at home or around the world. And will only get worse: business unionism is dead and stinking, even in the few places it has been “successful.”
Thus, the trade unions’ leadership has generally done little to advance the interests and well-being of US workers, while acting in differential manners—usually bad—with foreign workers (Scipes, 2025). I don’t think this was what Karl Marx and Frederick Engles were expecting when they echoed the French feminist, Flora Tristan, urging “Workers of the World, Unite!” (see Armbruster-Sandoval, 2013).
The reality is that leadership of the AFL-CIO has been an “epic failure” for US workers (Scipes, 2017, 2025). Perhaps the best single domestic marker is union density rate: in 1954, approximately 35.4 percent of all non-agricultural workers were in unions and almost all were in the private sector; in 1983, when data first became compatible with today, it was 20.1 percent overall, totaling 17.7 million members; in 2024, it was 5.9 percent in the private sector, 32.2 percent in the public sector, for a total of 9.9 percent of all workers being unionized, with 14.3 million members (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025).
Yet, despite the general failure of the trade union movement leadership, especially since 1981, the reality is that unions are one set of institutions that, at their best, are of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers. You see workers fighting to make their unions “real,” trying to make them part of a trade union movement that serves the interests of all workers if not the entire society, over the years (among others and most recently, see Blanc, 2019, 2025; Burns, 2022; Hammer, 2023; Kelly, 2020; Kolins Given and Schrager Lang, eds., 2020; McAlevey, 2016; Nolan, 2024). We see workers creating reform movements over the years trying to and fighting to transform their unions for the benefit of the entire membership if not all workers.[5]
Perhaps the most successful reform movement of late has been the reform organization UAWD (Unite All Workers for Democracy) inside the United Auto Workers (https://uawd.org/). UAWD came together after many members fought for direct elections of UAW leadership instead of the convention elections, which had led to a one-party state since 1946 and the election of Walter Reuther. Over time, a number of top-level UAW leaders were charged with corruption, and in a consent agreement with the Federal government, the UAW had to shift to direct elections for top officers. UAWD put forth a partial slate headed by Shawn Fain and then proceeded to win every leadership position they sought, ultimately gaining control of the international union’s executive board. In turn, Fain and his administration led the 2023 fight against the Big Three auto companies—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler—which then won their strike in the Fall. While the UAW did not win all of its demands in the strike, it clearly demonstrated the power of organized workers who have a leadership that will fight for and with them. And following that successful strike, in 2024, Volkswagen workers at Chattanooga, Tennessee voted to join the UAW, with help from the German union, IG Metal, and in the face of governors from six southern states telling them to not do so.
It is important to understand that unions are important to many workers, that they make a difference in the workplace, and they usually mean higher wages, better benefits, seniority systems, and a recognizable “rule of law” in the workplace, the latter which places some limits on management authority and discipline; a big difference from the situation of most workplaces where workers give up most if not all of their rights when they enter company grounds.
So, where does this lead us?
A study this author did originally for his PhD dissertation (Scipes, 2003) suggests a way forward although it will take a few pages to discuss.[6] It was a comparative-historical sociological study of unionization in the steel and meatpacking industries in the greater Chicago area (including Northwest Indiana) between 1933-1955, the CIO years, which examined how the unions in these two industries were unionized and subsequently developed across the period.
Despite drawing from the exact same labor pool—white ethnics from eastern and southern Europe, African Americans from the rural South, and some Mexicans—at the same time and in the same geographical place, and initially under the exact same union leadership before the packinghouse workers broke away, the unions developed in qualitatively different manners. The steelworkers were dominated by union leaders, who did not operate in a democratic manner; i.e., they operated from the top-downward. These leaders limited their focus solely on unionizing workplaces, utilizing skilled staff members and lawyers to win gains for workers, but at the expense of worker activism and popular democracy. The meatpackers were led by rank and file members and based on popular democracy of one person, one vote, and dependent on the worker power they developed in the workplace, utilizing this power to not only change conditions in the workplace but also in the communities in which workers lived; i.e., bottom-up. Two totally different ways of organizing and developing unions.
But was this difference important? To analyze this, the study focused on one issue that was faced by both unions—white supremacy and racism—to see if their approaches were the same or differed. Examined systematically in the study, and summarized here, the union responses differed, again qualitatively: the steelworkers’ organizations ignored the issue of white supremacy and racism, while the packinghouse workers directly confronted it: in 1939, in racist, segregated Chicago, eight out of 14 packinghouse local unions were headed by African Americans!
From this study—and differing from much research on the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), the labor center both of these unions ultimately joined—it was recognized there were two different conceptualizations of trade unions within the CIO; ultimately, two totally different ideas of what a union should be and how it was to operate. One saw unionism as organized from the top down, by “leaders,” who confined their conception of unionism to the workplace and decision-making power to the leadership, including their lawyers, and which ignored the communities in which their members lived; I referred to this as “business” unionism and this was exemplified by the steelworkers. The other conceptualization, titled “social justice” unionism and exemplified by the packinghouse workers, was based on democratic control by the rank and file members, and utilized the workplace power that the packinghouse workers constructed to not only effect workplaces and the union itself, but also the communities in which members lived.
As argued, social justice unionism (SJU) is superior to business unionism. Most importantly, it is more popular democratic, where workers really do run their unions. More than that, however, it has a larger social vision: it recognizes the limits of our social order and seeks to end social inequities and attain social justice for all members of our social order and, at best, for everyone in the world. That is better than only being concerned with another 30 cents an hour, although SJU doesn’t ignore the economic aspect: it’s just not confined by it or by the limitations of individual workplaces.
The basic idea of social justice unionism is collective vision and solidarity. It sees improvement not just for a limited number of chosen individuals or their unions, but the improvement of the collective whole, for all working people and their families.
This is a qualitatively different approach than business unionism, which has limited itself to workplace issues and primarily wage increases for worker-members; business unionism ignores the reality of all workers being members of various communities and does not understand that a few doing well in a world where many are not is not a sustainable approach to life. And with less than six percent of all private sector workers being unionized today—down from about 34 percent in the early 1950s—it illuminates the overwhelming failure of business unionism, which has been the dominant form of unionism in this country since 1949-50 (see Scipes, 2025).
But things are actually worse. In the union world with a supposed ethos of cooperation, equality, and “brotherhood/sisterhood,” the fact is that many business unions are not democratic, especially not in the way most Americans think about democracy. Most Americans consider democracy to be “one person, one vote,” that you get to have a say in issues that affect you, that everyone who is a member of an organization gets to have their say, etc., etc., (i.e.., “popular democracy”), but that is not the democracy found in most business unions; these unions usually allow the formal leadership to define the boundaries of what is acceptable to do or say regarding union affairs—this is known as “polyarchic democracy” (Robinson, 1996)—although once set, members can talk fairly freely. But even here, this constrained “voice” is still different from actually affecting policy and union positions. And the reality is that, in most business unions, popular democracy recedes the further one gets from the shopfloor.
Recognizing these qualitatively different conceptualizations is important because it was found that how the activists, formal leaders and rank-and-file members interacted and thought about their union determined subsequent organizational behavior.
And that brings things to where we are now: there are still two forms of unionism available to unions and their members. I think this is important to recognize: we union members do not have to passively accept a continuation of the status quo but can organize to make this debatable among union members, allowing all of them in each union to decide how to go further.
Presenting these options so clearly allows workers who are organizing to decide which model they want to adopt for their union, and it allows those already in business unions—the overwhelming number of existing unions today—to decide if they want to continue on the path they are on, or do they want to try to transform their respective unions into social justice unions? Recognizing these two different possibilities and what union members want to do in light of this understanding is important. It is being argued that workers in every union should get to discuss how they want their particular union to move forward; it is not sufficient to continue with an unexamined “business as usual.” It is important that these issues get discussed by the members of each union themselves; this is not limited to union leadership or even activists. But this consideration is even more than “what can we do for the community?”, as important as that is; it relates to the very survival of our unions.
Ideally, unions becoming or transforming themselves into social justice unions would consider the range of “community” interests from the local to the global, ultimately seeking to join with unions and other people’s organizations around the world to make things better for all.
The reality is that the trade union movement today is so weak that unions rarely have a chance to win their battles without gaining public support. Unions have often recognized this and have appealed to community support to help them win their battles. Yet, what do the communities get back from today’s business unions? Usually nothing. This one way form of “solidarity” is simply not sustainable; you can only withdraw water from a well so many times without giving back before it runs dry.
Transforming business unions into social justice unions offers a solution: they build on their foundation in the workplace but join with community members, however defined, to work together in ways to improve life for all concerned.
There are issues that simply cannot be solved on a local, regional, or even national basis; the climate crisis jumps immediately to mind, although there are other issues such as global sexual slavery and related issues, pandemics, war and empire that can only be approached from a global perspective. We have to understand issues such as these from a global perspective and begin educating and organizing our union sisters and brothers on this level. [7]
But our ideas about our unions must at least allow for this, if not actively encourage work on this level by all members. Key to this is implementing an educational program that confronts these issues and encourages workers to think about how their union could work to address issues key to workers in this larger sense. The old slogan, “Think globally, act locally,” encapsulates these ideas.
Social justice unionism offers a viable future for workers. It is based on building collective power in the workplace. It utilizes its power on the shopfloor to also fight to better the communities in which its members live. It works to include all members into the decision-making processes in the union and works to ensure representativeness of leadership. It is based on the members, not just the formal leaders, running the union (see, for example, Caputo-Pearl, 2024a, 2024b).
This also means reporting all major union activities to the membership, and allowing free and fair elections, both for leadership and what they do. A foreign policy, such as business unionism has projected over the last 120 years, would be impossible in the face of extensive member involvement in their unions, which most business unions don’t seek and definitely don’t prefer.
However, the key difference between these forms of unionism is the involvement of each union in their larger community. And this is absolutely crucial in the advancement of unionism in the southern US, which has been the primary site of labor’s weakness since the failure of Operation Dixie in 1948 (Goldfield, 2020)
Think, if you can, about the United Autoworkers (UAW) union’s victory in Volkswagen in 2024 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. An important victory by the UAW. With joining the union, the lowest paid workers earn about $32 an hour. While I don’t know what the average wage is in Chattanooga, I’m willing to bet it’s much closer to $12/hour than $32. Other than wishing they had one of those “high paying” jobs at VW, I doubt most workers could care less about what happens at the VW plant. And should the union get attacked by politicians or other fools, most workers will stand by and ignore it as “I don’t have a dog in that fight.”
If we are serious about labor and unions, that is not acceptable; we need other workers and the general public’s support if we’re going to win our battles because, excluding a limited number of specific situations, we no longer are strong enough to win our battles without public support. But we must put sincere effort into building that support; it cannot be left at the rhetorical level.
This, however, is not going to change by itself: activists in each union/unionizing effort need to stimulate discussion within their organization about whether they should confine their unionism just to the workplace, or to use that power for the good of all.
It is suggested that each of us try to find a group of union members in each local union, or group who is organizing workers into new unions, who think having this debate within one’s union to be crucial, and work to unify this core. Then they could create a campaign to spread this issue throughout the union, initially through one’s workplace and/or local and then through the national or international union they are affiliated with. It should be run the same way as any organizing campaign; and that is to win.
When confronted by this question—how do we want our union to go forward, alone or with our neighbors (from the local area to the globe)?—this is a question that encourages workers to think about these issues and get involved in participating in strengthening the union. Once a union is seen as something everyone participates in, or at least as many as possible, instead of just something that “others” do, we strengthen our individual unions. When we come to common responses, then we can extend our conceptualization of the union to other unions, locally, regionally, and nationally.
This can be extended globally when we find out what is happening elsewhere: there are workers around the world seeking to join globally to fight for a better world for all. Yes, this is happening among workers in other imperial countries but, as we see particularly in the case of SIGTUR (Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights), workers in Africa, Asia and Latin America are finding ways to unite across their geographical regions and the globe to organize for a better world for all (O’Brien, 2019; see a review by Scipes, 2020). I think they would be delighted to have North Americans join in their project, and that can only happen when unions take that broader, social justice union approach.
In short: innovate or stagnate. Business unionism of the past 40 years (in particular) has been a failure: union density in the early 1950s was approximately 35 percent of the private sector; today, it is less than six percent. Public sector unionism—basically non-existent in the early 1950s—adds some, but the total number of workers in unions today is still less than 10 percent of the workforce. Either we think about unionism in new ways and establish new ways of thinking about and joining other movements, or most of our unions die a long, slow, painful death.
It’s time we started to rebuild the labor movement: for the good of all!
There are two ways of thinking about this that come immediately to mind.[8] First, like the Packinghouse Workers’ “Back of the Yards Council,” a union can join with other people in the community to address problems in the community, such as youth unemployment, lack of skills training, drug abuse, things like these that people in your community need. Projects like this are important and each union needs to buy into and initiate such projects.
Secondly—and I think this needs even more thinking and development—is the idea of building “community” unionizing. What if the union, say in some industrial plant, developed this idea of unionizing every business possible in the local area, however defined? What if union activists joined with community organizations to train as many people as organizers as possible, put up some serious money to support these efforts, and worked to supply strategic thinking to these processes? What if every fast food joint in your community were unionized into the same union, so the owners of Wendy’s could not support McDonald’s when a union drive was taking place?
And as this developed, say what if workers unionized in home improvement services like Menards or Lowe’s or whatever, had developed ties of solidarity to the fast food workers’ union who has ties with the gas station attendants’ union…? And what if they developed ties of solidarity with the school bus drivers’ union? And the teachers’ union? In solidarity, there is strength.
And what if such a high level of solidarity was created over time—obviously in close connection to the industrial union—that if a community coalition union obtained a set level of support, say 70 percent of a strike vote, whereby the workers in the industrial plant would also walk out and join the strike effort of others, giving the strike additional strength? What I’m talking about here is building a pathway to support everyone who was willing to work for it to improve their standard of living. What if we decided to struggle, not snivel?
Now, excuse me: this is total fantasy; you can’t make it happen; you are dreaming!
Well, 30 years ago, the great late labor historian and activist, Staughton Lynd, edited a book titled ‘We Are All Leaders’: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (Lynd, 1996). In this book, Lynd presents accounts of different versions of community-based unionism that I think are worth revisiting. And the one I remember the most is by my friend, Peter Rachleff, and his article is titled “Organizing Wall to Wall: The Independent Union of All Workers, 1933-37.” In it, Rachleff reports the efforts in efforts to build a community-wide union, the Independent Union of All Workers, in Austin, Minnesota, site of a packinghouse and a UPWA local (later known as P-9).
But even more interesting was that the IUAW was not just limited to Austin but spread throughout the area. According to Rachleff,
Between 1933 and 1937, the IUAW organized locals in Austin, Albert Lea, Faribault, Thief River Falls, Bemidji, Owatonna, Mankato, and South St. Paul, Minnesota; Mitchell and Madison, South Dakota; Fargo, North Dakota; Alma, Wisconsin; Waterloo, Mason City, Algona, Ottumwa, Ft. Dodge, and Estherville, Iowa. The IUAW also influenced activists in Madison, Wisconsin, Cedar Rapids and Sioux City, Iowa; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Omaha, Nebraska; Kansas City, Kansas; and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In many of these cities, the IUAW sought only to spread industrial unionism among packinghouse workers but also to organize “wall to wall.” Their efforts—expressed in organizing drivers, strikes, strike supporters, local politics, and various ‘cultural’ activities—threatened entrenched power throughout the region (Rachleff, 1996: 52).
Now that is what I’m talking about: building grassroots power from the ground up, in social justice unions controlled by their members, closely connected to each other and to their respective communities, and for the purpose of working together to improve conditions for all involved.
Obviously, any project thinking on those kinds of terms would take not only financial but human resources with significant dedication, determination, and desire. But it offers a way forward, benefitting the large majority of people, building solidarity across each region involved, and looking for ways to expand even farther, including uniting with workers in other countries around the world.
In my study of unionism in the Chicago area, through its nature of being a comprehensive historical-comparative examination, I have demonstrated the power of social justice unionism when it is based on democracy, inclusion, and solidarity.
The alternative is a continuation of our “6 percent” business unionism and its abject failure.
We have seen the re-emergence of union building from below over the last few years, beginning with the establishment of CORE, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, in the Chicago Teachers Union in late 2009-early 2010 (Kolins Givan, 2020; McAlevey, 2016).
Now is the time for workers to coalesce and seek opportunities to either generate new social justice unions or transform business unions into social justice unions. In many ways, the former project would be easiest since you wouldn’t have to overcome business union practices. But transforming business unions into social justice unions might offer quicker benefits: we already have established the concepts of organization and collective action among members.
An immediate task for social justice unionists, from my perspective, is to start the discussion within every union and labor organization possible about what form of unionism do we want to see going forward; which gives us the most power and best opportunities? Should we go on alone, and not worry about anyone else, or do we need to build strong ties with our communities for the good of all, and try to advance a movement for social justice, inside the union and across the community—if not the globe?
The approach chosen will determine whether the upsurge since 2010 expands or withers like a candle in the wind; whether we try to build a progressive labor movement or settle for a half-assed trade union movement that has failed, epically.
Your call.
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Kim Scipes, PhD, National Writers Union, AFL-CIO
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References
All URLs operational as of March 29, 2025, unless otherwise noted.
Armbruster-Sandoval, Ralph. 2013. “Review of AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?” Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 42, No. 4, July: 614-615.
Bass, George Nelson. 2012. “Organized Labor and US Foreign Policy: The Solidarity Center in Historical Context.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Political Science, Florida International University, Miami. On-line for free at https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/752.
Blanc, Eric.
— 2019. Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics. New York: Verso.
— 2025. We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. Oakland: University of California Press.
Burns, Joe. 2022. Class Struggle Unionism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Caputo-Pearl, Alex.
— 2024. “Los Angeles Teachers Road to Durable Power: Part 1: 2014-2016.” Convergence, September 2. On-line at https://convergencemag.com/articles/los-angeles-teachers-road-to-durable-power.
— 2024. “How Labor Can Fight Trump’s Authoritarianism.” Jacobin, December 19. On-line at https://jacobin.com/2024/12/utla-labor-trump-authoritarianism-unions/.
Carew, Anthony. 2018. American Labour’s Cold War Abroad: From Deep Freeze to Detente, 1945-1970. Edmonton, Canada: AU (Athabasca University) Press.
Emspak, Frank. 1972. “The Break-up of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 1945-1950.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Goldfield, Michael. 2020. The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s & 1940s. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hammer, Frank. 2023. “US Motor Workers, UAW, Strike: Stand Up and Fight!,” a video interview by Nigel Smith for the Workers’ International Network Archive. On-line at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ivH1q0GE5k .
Hirsch, Fred. 2004. “Build Unity and Trust Among Workers Worldwide.” July 29. On-line at https://www.labournet.net/world/0407/hirsch.html.
Kelly, Kim. 2022. Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Kolins Givan, Rebecca. 2020. “On Strike for Our Students and the Common Good” in Kolins Given and Schrager Long, eds.: 1-10.
Kolins Givan, Rebecca and Amy Schrager Lang, eds. 2020. Strike for the Common Good: Fighting for the Future of Public Education. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lynd, Staughton, ed. 1996. ‘We Are All Leaders’: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
McAlevey, Jane F. 2016. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nolan, Hamilton. 2024. The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. New York: Hachette.
O’Brien, Robert. 2019. Labor Internationalism in the Global South: The SIGTUR Initiative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rachleff, Peter. 1996. “Organizing Wall to Wall: The Independent Union of All Workers, 1933-37” in Staughton Lynd, ed.: 51-71.
Robinson, William I. 1996. Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosswurm, Steve, ed. 1992. The CIO’s Left-led Unions. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Schuhrke, Jeff. 2024. Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade. New York: Verso.
Scipes, Kim.
— 1984. “Industrial Policy: Can It Lead the US Out of Its Economic Malaise?” New Labor Review, No. 6, Spring: 27-53. Updated and republished in pamphlet form (December). Pamphlet on-line at https://yumpu.com/en/document/read/35435605/industrial-policy-can-it-lead-the-us-out-of-its-economic-malaise.
— 1996. KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994. Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines: New Day Publishers. 316 pp. [This book has now been put on-line in its entirety for free, below books, at https://www.pnw.edu/personal-faculty-pages/kim-scipes-ph-d/publications/].
— 2000. “Communicating Labor Internationalism: The KMU’s ‘International Solidarity Affair’.” January 3. On-line at http://globalsolidarity.antenna.nl/scipes.html. (No longer available on-line; republished in Scipes, 2021 as Chapter 12: 205-229.)
— 2003. “Trade Union Development and Racial Oppression in Chicago’s Steel and Meatpacking Industries, 1933-1955.” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago. Listed under his full name, Steven R. “Kim” Scipes.
— 2010. AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. (Paperback published in 2011.)
— 2012a. “Globalization from Below: Labor Activists Challenging the AFL-CIO Foreign Policy Program.” Critical Sociology, Vol. 32, No. 2: 303-323. On-line at https://researchgate.net/publication/254084376_globalization_from_below.
— 2012b. “Kim Scipes on the AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?” Video interview by Steve Zeltzer of Labor Video Project, April 13. On-line at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUsLrlie_Q.
— 2014a. “Building Global Labor Solidarity Today: Learning from the KMU of the Philippines.” Class, Race and Corporate Power, Vol. 2, No. 2, Article 2 (July). On-line at http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol2/iss2/2.
— 2014b. “Social Movement Unionism or Social Justice Unionism? Disentangling Theoretical Confusion within the Global Labor Movement.” Class, Race and Corporate Power. Vol. 2: Iss. 3, Article 9 (December). On-line at http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol2/iss3/9.
— 2015. “Celebrating May Day—KMU Style.” Countercurrents.org, October 8. On-line at www.countercurrents.org/scipes081015.htm.
— 2016. “Multiple Fragments: Strength or Weakness: Theorizing Global Labor Solidarity” in Kim Scipes, ed.: 23-48. (On-line at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315617986_Multiple_Fragments–Strengths_or_Weaknesses_Theorizing_Global_Labor_Solidarity.)
— 2017. “The Epic Failure of Labor Leadership, 1980-2017 and Continuing.” Class, Race and Corporate Power, Vol. 5, No. 2, Article 2. On-line at https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol5/iss2/5/.
— 2018. “Another Type of Trade Unionism IS Possible: The KMU Labor Center of the Philippines and Social Movement Unionism.” The Journal of Labor and Society, Vol. 21, No. 3, September: 349-367. On-line at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327472612_Another_type_of_trade_unionism_IS_possible_The_KMU_Labor_Center_of_the_Philippines_and_social_movement_unionism.
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— 2021. Building Global Labor Solidarity: Lessons from the Philippines, South Africa, Northwestern Europe, and the United States. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. (2022-Paperback.)
— 2022. “Labor Activists Launch New Organization to Challenge AFL-CIO Foreign Policy.” Covert Action Magazine, June 3. On-line at https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/06/03/labor-activists-launch-new-organization-to-challenge-afl-cio-foreign-policy/.
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— 2024. “Building Global Labor Solidarity: Where We Are Today (Early 2024). Class, Race and Corporate Power, Vol. 12, No. 1, Article 3. On-line at https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol12/iss1/3/.
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[1] This is an extended and developed version of an article that was initially published on the activist website, Z Network, during May 2024. On-line at https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/us-labor-today-and-the-way-forward/.
[2] A list of this author’s writings, with many connected to the original article, can be found at https://www.pnw.edu/personal-faculty-pages/kim-scipes-ph-d/publications.
[3] For arguably the best effort to understand changes in the global economy and their effects on US workers over the past 40 years (1981-1983) from the perspective of a labor activist, see Scipes, 2023. For a contemporary baseline study, see Scipes, 1984.
[4] Since Spring 2022, opposition to the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy has been led by LEPAIO, the Labor Education Project on the AFL-CIO’s International Operations (see Scipes, 2022). It has conducted educational programs, both in-person and over Zoom, and picketed the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC on September 11, 2023, the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile, in which the AFL-CIO’s regional organization, AIFLD (American Institute for Free Labor Development), played a major part. LEPAIO’s web site is at https://aflcio-int.education/, where a number of webinars and other materials are available for free.
[5] Labor Notes, a monthly newsletter for labor activists, and a network built up around the trade union movement particularly in the US and Canada, deserves recognition for the key role it has played in sustaining such activism since 1979, which continues today. Unfortunately, recent work with the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center has tarnished its reputation somewhat. See its website at https://www.labornotes.org.
[6] This study, with the tentative title of Unions, Race and Popular Democracy: Building a Progressive Labor Movement for the Mid Twenty-first Century, will be published later this year (Fall 2025) or in Spring 2026.
[7] This author been one of the foremost proponents of global labor solidarity in the world since 1983. For an extended essay on efforts to build global labor solidarity, see Scipes, 2024; see also my 2021 book, 2016 edited volume, and 2014 edited section, as well as a number of his published articles, especially 2000, 2014a, 2014b, and 2016. I also have seen my work combatting the labor imperialism of the AFL-CIO as contributing to building global labor solidarity (Scipes, 2010, 2020). This is in addition to my 1996 book on the KMU Labor Center of the Philippines, with research updated in 2015 and 2018 (Scipes, 1996, 2015, 2018).
[8] Much of the remainer of this article is taken from the recently written “Epilogue” of the aforementioned Unions, Race and Popular Democracy.
