As Go Unions, So Goes America

Power concedes nothing but to collective action.

The contrast couldn’t be more striking. On one side: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris walking the picket line with striking UAW workers, and Harris launching her campaign in Milwaukee declaring her support for the freedom of working people to join unions. On the other side: Trump and Elon Musk gleefully cackling about firing striking workers, as Musk and other plutocratic Trump supporters hope for the Federalist Society (FedSoc) Supreme Court justices to declare the entire NLRB, if not collective bargaining itself, unconstitutional. As this post will show, their hostility to unions is a prerequisite for the success of their broader political project. 

First, you may have heard that public support for unions “has been increasing” – but you probably haven’t heard just how big a deal that is in the context of the last 15 years. Since the Great Recession, we’ve seen the credibility of, and approval for, just about every major institution plummet – yet we’ve seen support for unions increase. 

Those trends become even more pronounced if we look at the change in the difference between those who have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the institution and those who have very little confidence in the institution. 

There’s more. Look at the change from 2009 to 2023 in this Gallup polling question on unions. Respondents are asked whether they think unions “mostly help” or “mostly hurt” a list of things, including union workers, non-union workers, the US economy, and union companies. It’s not surprising that nearly everyone (almost 80%) believes unions mostly help union workers. What is striking is two things: (1) a substantial majority of Americans (roughly 60% in both cases) also believe that unions mostly help the US economy and the unionized companies; and (2) the “mostly help” numbers have increased substantially across the board since 2009 – but most dramatically for “US economy” and “non-union workers.”  

Moreover, while opinions about nearly everything else – from the economy to presidential approval to the effectiveness of vaccines – have sharply diverged along partisan lines in this period, approval for unions has increased across the partisan board. 

The “Fuck Yeah” Factor

Why is all of this happening? Why are unions enjoying a cross-partisan surge of not just approval, but a widely shared recognition that everyone benefits when unions are stronger? The answer is simple and powerful – and almost completely invisible in our current media landscape. 

Let’s be honest: If you’re reading this post, chances are good that you have at least some agency in your working life. You might be a knowledge worker who can telecommute, you might have pretty good pay and benefits, you might manage other people, and so on. Chances are also good that you strongly support unions. You might read about a successful UAW strike and think, “Yay! Good for them!” 

That’s not the experience of most working-class people in America, especially if they do not belong to a union. They and their peers often have little or no agency in their work life – unpredictable schedules, no paid leave, dangerous working conditions, and the ever present threat of being fired at will. When they see other working-class people like them standing up to their bosses and winning, it’s a game-changer. They don’t think, “Yay! Good for them!” They think, “Fuck yeah! I want that too!” 

This “fuck yeah” is exactly what scares plutocrats like Trump and Musk the most. It’s the seed of social proof that blossoms into meaningful solidarity and powerful collective action. As Frederick Douglass famously said, “power concedes nothing without a demand” – and a true “demand” is much more than, say, a preference revealed on an issue poll. Entrenched power will only respond to demands that are wielded by a countervailing power. Ordinary people need institutional collective power to make their demands heard, let alone met. 

To be clear, voting is an essential democratic freedom, but it’s not the collective power I’m talking about. Voting is like going to a restaurant and choosing between entrees on the menu. Collective power is like sitting at the table deciding what’s on the menu.

Broadly speaking, America only has two major civil society institutions left that allow ordinary people to exercise the latter form of power. One is unions. The other is churches – specifically, white Evangelical churches. I explained how the latter institution has taken over the Republican Party and fueled the MAGA movement in “How White Christian Political Might Made the Republican Party Hard Right, in 8 Charts.”   

There are crucial differences though: unions themselves are democratic institutions, while political Christianity is not. Unions are supported exclusively by their members’ dues, while political Christianity has long been subsidized by capitalists, especially in the extractive industries, as well as by favorable tax treatment.

In the next section, we’ll look at what kinds of results the two institutions have helped achieve in different regions of the country. Spoiler alert: unions contribute to virtuous cycles of more democracy, agency, inclusion, and flourishing; the white Christian nationalism of political Christianity contributes to vicious cycles of more repression, social control, racial/gender hierarchies, and inequality.

An Extraordinary Natural Experiment 

After the 2008 election, 157 million Americans lived in 26 so-called “right to work” (RTW) states, and the other 174 million lived in the 24 states in which there was greater freedom to join a union, which I will call a “right to union” (RTU) state.¹

There are very few demographic differences between the two regions. Whites and Latinos make up the same roughly 61 percent and 17 percent of the population, respectively, in both regions, while Blacks make up a substantially greater share of RTW states (5 points), and AAPI make up a substantially smaller share of RTW states (-6 points). In other words, based on race and ethnicity alone, we would expect Democrats to do much better in the right to work states, where Black people make up a greater share of the population. Additionally, while those with college degrees make up 6 points more of the population in right to union states, that differential hasn’t changed since 2008.²

Now, let’s look at how things have changed in both regions since 2009, beginning with unified control of state legislatures, the bodies that drove the state-level changes since then. To be clear, because the comparisons between the regions are so stark, I do not want to leave the impression that there isn’t substantial room for improvement in RTU states on labor issues or more broadly – there definitely is; they just don’t actively attack unions using right to work laws. Furthermore, because much of labor law is federal, RTU states are limited in what they can do to curb the anti-union practices of the national and multinational firms doing business in their states, like Walmart, Amazon and Starbucks.

While Republicans already controlled more RTW state legislatures and Democrats more RTU state legislatures in 2009, about half the people living in each region lived in a state with either a divided state legislature (yellow) or controlled by the opposite party. Today, over 90 percent of those living in RTW states live in states with unified Republican control, while 80 percent of those living in Right to Union states live in states with unified Democratic control. (Note: Here and throughout, the percentages refer to the people living in each region, not the number of states in the region.³)

I’m centering unified control of state legislatures because after the 2008 elections, unified legislatures in both regions wasted little time going on a legislative spree. Each region’s unified state legislatures enacted a similar agenda to other states in that region. As a result, RTW and RTU states’ laws moved in opposite directions on a wide range of issues, from abortion, to voting restrictions, to gun control, to worker protections, and more. 

By sorting all 50 states by their RTW status, we can look at the change in the percentage of the population affected by state laws enacted between 2009 and today.⁴ For example, even prior to the SCOTUS ruling that overturned abortion rights, 92% of those living in RTW states lived in states that increased their attacks on abortion rights between 2008-2021.⁵ 

Consider: 

• Abortion: While some states passed laws to expand the right to abortion access, many RTW states passed pre-viability abortion bans between 2009 and 2024. As a result, the number of people subject to pre-viability abortion bans increased by 19 percentage points in RTW states – but in RTU states, the share of people living under pre-viability abortion bans decreased by 17 percentage points.

• Voting rights: These states also diverged in voting rights during this period. When looking at the democracy scores compiled by Jake Grumbach for each state,⁶ we found that democracy scores increased overall across RTU states, but declined in RTW states. For example, 43% more people gained access to no-excuse absentee ballots after 2008 in RTU states, but there was only an 8% increase in RTW states, whereas the share of people who had to show photo ID to vote increased by 62 points in RTW states, but by only 8 points in RTU states. Overall, 92% of people living in RTW states lived in a state that passed voting restrictions after Obama assumed office, opposed to 34% in RTU states. The attacks on voting rights in RTW states had their intended effect, and the Cost of Voting⁷ increased by 0.16 in RTW states even as it decreased by 0.71 in RTU states. Many of these laws targeted voters of color, and the share of Black voters that reported voting decreased by 5% in RTW states from 2008 to 2020, but remained unchanged in RTU states. 

• Education Spending: RTW states decreased their elementary education spending by $233 per capita in the period from 2008-2019, and RTU increased their spending for the same metric by $266. Per capita education spending decreased among RTW states as a whole by $101, while the RTU states invested on average $392 more dollars each year on students per capita.⁸ 

As I’ve written before, the Upper Midwest provides a striking case study of this dynamic. Despite their similar demographics, cultures, and geographies, Minnesota’s political trajectory sharply diverged from that of its neighbors after 2009 – with Minnesota remaining RTU, Wisconsin becoming RTW, and Michigan becoming RTW in 2012 and returning to RTU in 2024 – along with all of the correlating differences on abortion, democracy, and more. This divergence cannot be explained by demographics, let alone by changing demographics – but much of it can be explained by the well-financed right-wing political projects that won statewide in 2010 in Michigan and Wisconsin but narrowly lost in Minnesota. 

Now, let’s look at how working people fare in each region to make clear just how much worse working people fare in RTW states now – putting to bed the lie that unions don’t make a difference for those who don’t belong to them. 

This table features new scores compiled by OxFam for wage policies, worker protections, and organizing rights in each state. It is clear that, on average, workers in RTW states fare far worse across all three of these dimensions than workers in right-to-union states (see the text below the chart for what policies went into these scores).

When you put it all together, Right to Union States saw a greater increase in economic output between 2008 and 2022, with the average state income per capita among those in RTU going up by $22,470.29, compared to just a $15,915.02 increase in RTW states. Households in RTU states were also more prosperous. The average increase in median household income in the RTU states was $11,716.94, but it was just $7,858.29 in RTW.

Everything Old Is New Again

As I said, demographics don't explain the difference between how these two regions vote. Except I did leave out one big difference, which is both cause and effect of what you’ve just read: White Evangelicals make up almost a quarter of the population in the RTW states, over twice the share in the RTU states.⁹ And union members make up 14 percent of the population in the other states, over double the share in the RTW states. 

The importance of this difference goes far beyond that headcount. After all, 14 or 25 percent of the population doesn't sound like a lot, and in absolute terms it isn't. White Christian nationalists in RTW states and working people in RTU states gain power not by their numbers alone, but by the fact that each of their interests have institutional expression. 

It’s no accident that the original Confederacy makes up the core of the RTW states.¹⁰ As Robby Jones and many others have chronicled, political Christianity in the South was instrumental in providing the moral basis for slavery, as well as enforcing the kinds of social hierarchies that forestall collective action and help keep wages low.

To a great extent, the RTW vs. RTU labor market fight has been one of the defining differences between roughly the same geographic regions since the founding of the nation. The Southern rebellion in 1861 was literally over the terms of the rapidly expanding nation’s labor market. After Reconstruction was sabotaged through the terrorism of the KKK and more, Jim Crow Constitutions updated the ante-bellum low wage economy through convict labor and sharecropping. 

Nonetheless, the South enjoyed higher unionization rates from the 1930s to 1947, thanks to the New Deal and to pro-union terms attached to federal defense production. But in 1947, aligning with Republicans, Southern Democrats enacted the Taft Hartley Bill – which, among other things, allowed the South to opt out of key aspects of the Wagner Act system by passing right to work laws. 

As I explained in The Atlantic earlier this year, Taft-Hartley was something of a time bomb that only started to go off in the mid-1970s. A series of Supreme Court rulings, along with other policy and cultural changes, allowed those states to restore their previous commitments to being low-wage economies with rigid social and economic castes. That put a stop to the brief mid-20th-century period when, thanks in part to partisan competition enabled by the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, levels of economic well-being started converging in the two regions, which I wrote about in The Two Nations of America. 

In short, in a capitalist society, low wages depend on forestalling collective action, and anything approaching social democracy is impossible without unions.

Project 2025: Making All of America “Right to Work” 

If you (like many Americans) think Project 2025 is just a right-wing extremist fantasy that can never become law, think again. Many of its wishlist items have already been enacted in RTW states, such as banning abortion, eliminating DEI programs, and undermining the independence of our elections. Trump can try to distance himself from Project 2025 all he wants, but there’s no question that he and Vance are deeply linked with it, both in terms of personnel and ideology, and that Project 2025 is likely to serve as a playbook for a Trump-Vance administration.

For an overview of the many anti-worker, anti-prosperity policies in Project 2025, the AFL-CIO has an excellent interactive tool. Below are some of the “highlights,” including page numbers in the 900-page document. Most of these policies are currently preempted by national labor law – but that could change under a MAGA administration. And some have already effectively been implemented by RTW states: 

• Banning unions for public service workers (page 82), such as teachers, firefighters, and postal workers. This alone would cut American union membership nearly in half. 

• Letting bosses eliminate unions mid-contract (page 603) and letting employers create their own sham company-run unions (page 599).

• Banning employers from voluntarily recognizing unions (page 603). Georgia and Alabama have already passed bills withholding state economic incentives from employers who voluntarily recognize unions. 

• Firing civil service workers and replacing them with Trump anti-union loyalists (page 80).

• Letting companies stop paying overtime (page 592) and allowing states to opt out of federal overtime and minimum wage laws (page 605).

• Eliminating child labor protections (page 595). Several states have already loosened child labor protections.

Conclusion

Healthy democracies require more than free and fair elections; they require citizens who have the chance to practice the habits of democracy. The benefits of unions to democracy accrue from allowing working people to organize themselves collectively and democratically to act on their own behalf. 

As I detailed in “More Than the Weekend: Unions, the Past and the Future of Democracy,” research shows that unions strengthen democracy, promote racial and gender tolerance, resist authoritarianism, and increase support for a more generous state. It is the practice of acting democratically and collectively to negotiate contracts and set working conditions that produces more inclusive, effective citizens, and more responsive and accountable government. 

Power will concede nothing to the median voters’ preferences as revealed in survey crosstabs; it never has and it never will. Yet this poll-obsessed mentality has turned the notion of democracy on its head – leaving active roles only for aspiring politicians and parties competing to offer the most appealing menu for voters, and none to individual voters who might want different menu options altogether. 

There are, of course, many popular “demands” on government that are never addressed – most notably now, a woman’s right to an abortion. In this society, it takes much more than a mere demand for power to concede anything. It takes institutional collective power for the many to overcome the entrenched power of the few. There is no national right to an abortion because of the symbiotic relationship between institutionalized political Christianity and the Republican Party – most notably expressed in the FedSoc justices named to the Supreme Court, an institution which for most of our history has acted as the wealthy and the powerful’s last line of defense against democracy. 

On the other hand, those who have the good fortune to be in a union can take for granted what most other working people can only hope for – better wages, time off, control over their schedule, protection against arbitrary dismissal, health care, pensions, and more. It is not that those things are impossible in a capitalist economy, and it is not that those preferences are not continuously revealed in surveys, and it is not that those demands are never made – think Occupy Wall Street. It is that without the countervailing power of collective action, power concedes nothing; it never has and it never will.  

So, to come back to where we began. As far as I can tell, while Gallup’s annual Labor Day poll results received wide circulation, I am the only one drawing attention to the contrast between increased public approval of unions, and plummeting support for and trust in just about everything else – the nations governing institutions (Presidency, Congress, Supreme Court), as well as what are generally considered non-partisan governmental institutions (the military, the police), and not to mention the church and organized religion. And that, in a period when we take for granted that increased approval of anything with partisan inflection among Democrats will produce the opposite response in Republicans and vice versa, we see that unions enjoyed meaningful gains in approval not just from Democrats, but from Republicans and Independents as well. 

None of this can be attributed to slick advertising or PR, but to the tangible success of the working people at the UAW, the WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and many other unions over the last several years.

The political press loves nothing more than to speculate on what “the working class” wants to see from a candidate or campaign. Yet almost every reporter who writes about the “working class” never even mentions the institution that gives working class people power and hope – unions. And so it is all the more distressing and exhausting to see the congealing conventional wisdom that the sources of working class alienation are liberal elites and politicians whose messaging doesn’t respect their cultural values – rather than an economic system that cackles over firing them if they seek the just dignity and just compensation for their efforts that unions provide.

Further Reading

Longer term subscribers know that most Labor Day weekends, I publish a version of “More Than the Weekend: Unions, the Past and the Future of Democracy,” which goes into much more depth about points I make in this post, but I skipped that to make today’s point more crisply. That document is chock full of charts showing the policy outcome difference between RTW and RTU states, and provides exhaustive evidence of “the union difference” on these topics:

1. How Unions Strengthen Democracy 

2. How Unions Give Working People Political Voice

3. Why Unions Are the Bulwark Against MAGA Fascism and Authoritarianism

4. How Unions Reduce Economic Inequality and Racism

5. How Unions Create Better Working Conditions 

I also did not digress to elaborate on the essential role played by the justices appointed to the Supreme Court by the Republican presidents. If you are interested in greater depth there, see: “To the Supreme Court, the 20th Century Was Wrongly Decided” and “Breaking the Law: Trump Is the Means, Not the End.” 

Finally, “How White Christian Political Might Made the Republican Party Hard Right, in 8 Charts” elaborates on how white Christian nationalism hijacked the House Republican Caucus. 

Weekend Reading is edited by Emily Crockett, with research assistance from Andrea Evans and Thomas Mande.

1. If you are reading my Substack, you almost certainly know what “right to work” means. Right to union states are states that do not have Right to Work Laws; the current RTU states are: AK, CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, MO, MT, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, VT, & WA. In 2008, IN, WV, WI, and KY were also RTU states, but they enacted RTW laws after 2008, and MI was RTW between 2012 and 2014. For the most part regional comparisons are on the basis of the state’s status in 2024 to avoid introducing the possibility that changes between the regions is a result of composition change, rather than the focus of this piece, change within the region. For example, if we made the comparison between states that were RTW/RTU in 2009 with those that are now, the fact that whites make up a greater share of the voters in the states that became RTW after 2009 would make it seem like the states currently RTU had undergone rapid demographic change, when in fact that was not the case in any of those states.

2. I say this lest you might be tempted to ascribe what follows to that difference in college graduates. So while that may or may not explain regional differences in 2008, the fact that the difference is as small as, and has remained, 6 points makes it difficult to ascribe the rapid divergence between the regions since then to the educational divide. This can be confirmed by looking at the vote for president in the three subsequent elections, as Obama, Clinton and Biden won the RTU region by 16, 15 and 17 points, while losing the RTW region by 9, 11 and 8 points. Thus, the regional gap was a remarkably steady 25, 26 and 25 points.

3. In other words, this is a truer accounting of the human impacts than, say, counting the number of states that enacted abortion restrictions, as it is based on the number of people actually subject to those laws.

4. For current data, the most recent available is always used. Some data is as of 2024, but for data that has not been updated this year, we use the most recent data captured within the last 5 years.

5. Looking at abortion laws passed by year, from Guttmacher.

6. https://sites.google.com/view/jakegrumbach/state-democracy-index

7. Cost of Voting Index

8. Source: Urban Institute. 2019 dollars used to measure pre-pandemic aid spending. 

9. Data source ARDA 2020 religious census, method applying RTW/RTU categories to aggregated evangelical church membership counts; including LDS congregations and excluding congregants of predominantly Black churches & denominations. 

10. 94 percent of those living in the original Confederate states live in a RTW state, and two thirds of those living in RTW states live in the original Confederate states.