Unions Without Strikes [View all]

Today’s labor movement has been built to rely on forms of power that are all going away.

By Hamilton Nolan April 10, 2025



You can spend a lifetime studying the rich history of the labor movement. While you are doing that, new union battles and campaigns will constantly arise. Laws will change, the economy will change, industries will rise and fall. New technologies will challenge workers in previously unimagined ways. Yet the fact remains that the more you study all of the complexities of the past, present, and future, you are left with one central truth: The power of organized labor is the power of the strike. Without the strike, the labor movement’s claim to power falls apart.

This fundamental and unalterable truth — the basic insight that led workers to form unions in the first place — has been echoing in my mind as I have watched the Trump administration carry out the most naked assault on organized labor since World War II. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired about 12,000 striking air traffic controllers during the infamous PATCO Strike — an action long considered to be the worst thing the U.S. government has done to labor unions in my lifetime. For Donald Trump, that would hardly constitute a single day’s work.

Trump has illegally fired hundreds of thousands of federal government workers; tossed out the active union contract covering nearly 50,000 TSA workers; and, most staggeringly, declared that more than 700,000 unionized workers at a slew of federal agencies are just not allowed to have unions. Using the laughably flimsy pretext of ​“national security,” Trump’s March 27 executive order purports to tell all of those union members, working under union contracts, that they are no longer union members working under union contracts after all. It is the boldest and most grotesque example of union-busting the modern labor movement has seen from an American president.

So what will the labor movement do about it?

FULL story: https://inthesetimes.com/article/unions-labor-strikes-afge-doge-trump-federal-workers