Sent on behalf of AFT Guild Political Action Vice-President Jim Miller
Labor Day 2025: Why Unions Still Matter and Might Just be the Key to Saving Democracy
As Labor Day approaches, it’s a good time to think about what unions have done for American workers and society. In many ways, unions are the embodiment of participatory democracy that powerful forces in our society are currently trying to eliminate. The story of American labor is a long one that illustrates how hard it has been for ordinary Americans to get not just a bigger piece of the economic pie but also a more robust role in American society and government. Despite the fact that the labor movement faces existential threats at present, it stands as the last best hope for workers, union and nonunion, who want to stand up against the scourge of inequality and the concentration of power in the hands of a new oligarchy.
Unions have evolved along with American democracy. Most labor histories begin around 1877, the year of the Great Railroad Strike that signaled the beginning of a militant upheaval of American workers bucking up against the growing inequality and oppression they faced in the midst of the American Industrial Revolution. It’s important to note that any honest assessment of American labor history should start before then, however, and include the struggles of workers of all backgrounds against indentured servitude and slavery as well as the emergence of early Workingman’s parties in the 1820s. One might also want to include the struggles of the emerging women’s movement that grew alongside the abolition movement and included an economic component in things like the Seneca Falls Declaration.
Unions are essentially working people standing together to form collective power in the workplace and in the political arena. Historically, unions have been the only significant institutions representing the rights of working people in America. Before unions, workers had virtually no rights in the workplace and for many years of our early history, non-property-owning men could not even vote. Thus, the history of the union movement is the history of working Americans getting together to establish some basic economic and political rights and to have a voice in American society.
At present, Americans have a more favorable view of unions than they have had in decades, and more and more workers are questioning not just how they work and for how much pay, but also what the meaning of work is and whether their jobs should define their lives. As the groundbreaking organizing victory at Amazon in New York and similar efforts at Starbucks across the country illustrate, even workers at some of the hardest places to organize are fighting for a union.
Why?
In economic terms, as Paul Krugman has noted American workers might have finally had enough with getting the short end of the stick in comparison to those in other wealthy countries where some jobs might still be “grueling and poorly paid” but are “less awful” than in the United States. Krugman reminds us that in countries like Denmark, even McDonald’s workers can be paid as much as $20 an hour and that the “the U.S. does stand out among wealthy countries for having a low minimum wage, for offering very little vacation time and for failing to offer parental and sick leave.”
And unions offer answers for both pressing bread and butter economic needs and broader, equally persistent issues like the health of American democracy as a whole.
As a recent Economic Policy Institute report observed, high unionization rates are good for workers across the board. In the 17 states with the highest union density:
*The state minimum wage is 19% higher than the national average and 40% higher than it is in states with lower union density.
*The median income is $6000 higher than the national average.
*A higher share of unemployed workers receives unemployment insurance.
*More workers have health insurance than in states with less union density.
*More workers have paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave than those in low union density states.
When it comes to the health of American democracy, unions also get the goods as the EPI report explains:
*There are fewer restrictive voting laws in states with the highest union density while over 70% of low-union-density states have passed voter suppression laws between 2011 and 2019.
With all the good that they do, it’s no wonder that unions are hip again or that those who want to undermine our democracy in the service of the economic elite are trying as hard as they can to get rid of us.
As Nancy MacLean outlined in Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, the American plutocracy’s grail quest was to “save capitalism from democracy, permanently.” In Donald Trump, the billionaire class has the man they have dreamed of for decades who can seal the deal for elite rule, and he is openly trying to do just that—crush the union movement, gut civil rights, destroy environmental and climate protections, enshrine the divine right of corporations, and give big tax breaks to the rich, many of whom see taxes as a form of “gangsterism” robbing them of their natural right to hog all the resources.
It is, in the view of folks like Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” We need to view all this very clearly: Trump is here to deliver the kill shot on the very chance of a more robust, inclusive democracy or even the ability of movements to call for it for the foreseeable future. Hence, his assault on unionized federal workers and their collective bargaining rights along with the very idea that the public sector, public education in particular, has any value in American society.
Unions are playing a key role in contesting this, from pushing back against it by organizing workers and communities, to fighting for immigrants’ rights, to pushing for a special election in California to contest Trump’s efforts to rig the 2026 midterms via Texas redistricting. Labor unions are always essential in that they offer an alternative vision of what American democracy can be. As labor writer Hamilton Nolan puts it:
When does the typical American ever experience democracy? As a child, they are told what to do. At school, they are told what to do. When they grow up, they get a job, and are told what to do. If they go to church, they are told what to do. And everyone with any common sense can see that voting, the one activity explicitly branding and participating in democracy, seems to change nothing, as power is concentrated, and decisions are made by unknown people in places remote from the everyday experience of a normal person. From this base of nothing, we expect Americans to treasure democracy as their greatest value. That is a hard ask, when it is something they have never seen in the wild . . . Unless—unless—they happen to be in a union. In a decent union, their opinion will matter. They can directly participate in discussions that lead to a set of demands. They can decide, collectively, to take direct action to win their demands . . . It is not democracy as a slogan, but democracy as lived experience.
This Labor Day let’s celebrate the role of the union movement in expanding the reach of American democracy, providing a site of “lived democracy” for union workers, and recommit ourselves to insisting that the egalitarian principles of social justice unionism prevail throughout the entirety of American society. In this dark moment, as educators and unionists, we can provide a light, a larger sense of solidarity that can lead our way out of our present crisis of to a better future for us all.
In Solidarity,
Jim Miller, Political Action VP
AFT Guild, Local 1931