Tag Archives: union density

Nolan’s The Hammer, Blanc’s We Are the Union, and the Question of Rank-and-File Leadership

“A union is a great way to meet new people, and argue with them,” writes Hamilton Nolan in his 2024 book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Nolan rightfully emphasizes the value of workplace democracy and its many opportunities for constructive argument in building a union movement to fight capitalism.

Books and blogs are also great ways for organizers to interact with lots of people, and argue with them. Democracy, or more accurately in this context, a productive discourse of back and forth, exploration, and experimentation is something the labor movement doesn’t have nearly enough of. Partly this is due to a dearth of good writing about strategy in the labor movement today.

Nolan’s The Hammer and Eric Blanc’s 2025 book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big are well-written and carefully argued. In this way they are exactly the kind of books that we need more of to create a culture of informed and healthy debate on the labor left.

Continue reading →

Not My Union: The Workplace Politics of Stan Weir and Martin Glaberman

[This post is part of a series on relationship-based organizing.]

Despite an increase in buzz and news stories about labor organizing in recent years, actual union membership in the US is continuing its long decline. The most recent statistics show a 10.1% union density in 2022, the lowest on record. 

The image is of a graph of union density in the US from 1955 to 2022, showing a steady downward slope from 35% density in 1955 to 10% density today.
Source.

All of the respectable ideas for fixing this problem have been tried and failed. On the fringes of the official labor movement is an idea that doesn’t get much airtime but might have the ingredients of an effective solution: To save the labor movement we have to abandon the Union movement. 

I capitalize the U in union deliberately to designate the form of union that has become historically dominant in the US. Such Unions include all of the big-name ones in the AFL-CIO and all of the other prominent unions in the US today. Such Unions have two distinguishing features. First, they contain no-strike clauses that prohibit workers from withholding their labor for the duration of the union contract. Second, they contain management rights clauses that take away union voice and influence from workers over job conditions and that declare management alone has the “right to manage” the workplace. Together, these Union clauses amount to telling workers to shut up and get back to work, something workers now hear as much from their Union reps as from their bosses.

Two worker radicals and writers who posed a different vision of unionism were Stan Weir and Martin Glaberman, authors of, respectively, Singlejack Solidarity (2004) and Punching Out & Other Writings (2002) (out of print and expensive to buy used, but downloadable as a pdf). Both books are collections of the authors’ shorter writings and were published shortly after their authors’ deaths. 

Continue reading →