Labor Movements Are Enjoying a Resurgence Amidst Historically Weak Union Membership

Yet despite these grim statistics, we have seen an uptick in labor militancy which includes a wave of strikes by educators in West Virginia in 2018, “Striketober” in 2021, Hollywood writers and actors in 2023, and the historic United Auto Workers’ “Stand Up Strikes” which began in 2023 targeting the Big Three automakers. All of these industrial actions point to a resurgence of worker-led labor rebellion, despite the hostile conditions to labor. On the one hand, union membership has been hollowed out by neoliberal restructuring and the systematic legislative assault on collective bargaining that originated with Taft-Hartley in 1947 and then only intensified with the Reagan administration’s firing of over 11,000 striking PATCO air traffic controllers in 1981, leading to the normalization of strikebreaking. The neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 1990s not only weakened unions but reconstructed the U.S. economy in a way that undermined labor’s organizational base and eroded the stable employment that once cultivated union growth.

The collapse of organized labor was not merely the result of economic shifts, but the consequence of a political project with the intention of suppressing the ability of workers to act collectively, and—at least institutionally—this project has arguably succeeded. Yet, paradoxically, it sowed the conditions for renewed insurgency, as years of stagnant wages, decimated social safety nets, and ballooning inequality left workers with little recourse outside confrontation, which has clearly been embodied in recent waves of strikes. The United Auto Workers’ “Stand Up Strikes” in 2023, which targeted all three major automakers for the first time in history, were not just contract disputes, but political acts which reasserted the principle that the wealth of the Big Three was built on decades of labor concessions.

Similarly, the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA walkouts that paralyzed Hollywood underscored how technological transformations like streaming and AI were being leveraged to deepen precarity in creative industries. What unites these seemingly disparate struggles is a refusal to quietly absorb the costs of an economy that has become increasingly organized around shareholder value and exorbitant executive compensation. This resurgence of labor militancy actually exposes the fragility of American labor institutions. The traditional union form remains hemmed in by labor laws designed to curtail it while new worker movements, which include Starbucks and Amazon, struggle to confront fierce employee opposition.

The Trump administration has complicated the terrain of labor organizing as the administration has pursued policies that further entrench corporate power. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under Trump has systematically rolled back worker protections, narrowing the scope of who counts as an “employee” and making it harder for unions to organize in franchised and subcontracted workplaces, directly benefiting giants like McDonalds and FedEx. At the same time, the administration’s massive tax cuts for corporations and the appointment of anti-union judges has deepened the imbalance between capital and labor. The gap between Trump’s populist rhetoric and its policy outcomes illustrates the vapid politics of appealing to working class anger in service of an agenda that ultimately undermines workers’ ability to act collectively. The Trump years have clearly been marked by a particularly aggressive position toward organized labor through direct institutional attacks. 

This tension reveals that class struggle in the United States has always been bound with the larger struggle over democracy itself. When unions are strong, they not only deliver wage gains, but expand the political horizons of working-class people and help produce eras when labor acted as a counterweight to capital in shifting national policy, as seen during the New Deal in the early to mid-20th century. When unions are weak, inequality flourishes and broader democratic institutions falter under the weight of capital’s hubris. Today’s strikes therefore raise the question of whether they will crystallize into durable institutions or if they will be episodic with short-term impacts.

For decades, the American political class has treated labor decline as an inevitability; a natural by-product of globalization or automation, and AI is simply another chapter in this well-trod book. But as the strikes witnessed over the past five years demonstrate, workers themselves are forcefully rejecting this narrative. Workers are insisting, in practice, that precarity is not their destiny but a political condition that can be defied through collective struggle. Whether these insurgencies will crystallize into durable institutions will determine not only the future of American working life, but the trajectory of the nation itself.