What Will 2025 Mean for Labor?vpthomas
February 3, 2025
Our guest author is Joseph A. McCartin, a professor of history and executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is also a member of the Albert Shanker Institute’s board of directors.
Only weeks into 2025 it appears as though this year will be one like no other in recent memory. Not only has power changed hands in Washington, bringing to office an administration that seems more determined than any in U.S. history to upend the status quo, this transition is taking place in a world in which democratic governments in many countries are struggling to deal with powerful ethno-nationalist populist challenges, AI is emerging as a potentially disruptive force in many workplaces, and our post-pandemic economic recovery seems to be slowing.
To predict how this year will unfold, though, seems impossible at this point – especially for a historian, for we are far better at explaining how we’ve reached this point than what is likely to come next. Nonetheless, there is one thing that anyone who has studied labor history can already say with confidence: 2025 is shaping to be one of the most consequential years that U.S. workers and their movement have ever faced.
As we contemplate the year ahead, it is well to remember that the history of organized labor in America has been periodically punctuated by turning point years. During its rise, organized labor’s progress was never incremental. Rather, labor’s growth came in sudden bursts, amid the unpredictable opening of windows of opportunity that organizers then exploited to advance their movement. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was born during such a moment, what historians call the “Great Upheaval” of the 1880s, which was marked by a wave of strikes and dramatic events like the Haymarket bombing in Chicago. Similarly, the coincidence of the Depression and the New Deal in the mid-1930s created the necessary conditions for the spectacular rise of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO). Similarly, John F. Kennedy’s granting of collective bargaining rights to federal workers in 1962 helped trigger a tidal wave of organizing among government workers at all levels in the 1960s and 1970s.
Yet past periods of reversal for the labor movement also began with decisive turning points. The Red Scare and the many strike defeats of 1919 undermined many union gains made during the Progressive Era and the First World War. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was passed amid a wave of post-World War II reaction, setting the stage for the spread of so-called “right-to-work” laws that eroded union power over following decades. And Ronald Reagan’s permanent replacement of striking air traffic controllers in 1981 helped stall the expansion of public sector unions and sap labor’s fighting spirit for many years afterward.
If 2025 is destined to become another turning point, will it mark the onset of an era of reversal or one of renewal for the labor movement?
Recent events seem to be decisively answering that question. Donald Trump has returned to the presidency despite the vigorous opposition of the labor movement and the votes of most union workers who opted for his opponent, Kamala Harris, even as the majority of non-union workers either stayed home or chose Trump. Notwithstanding his nomination of the only Republican who co-sponsored the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR), as Labor Secretary, nothing in the 47th president’s first days in office suggests that he will govern more moderately than he campaigned. The aggressive approach his administration is already taking to federal workers and their collectively bargained working conditions indicates that he has no intention of seeking to make unions their partners in governance. Nor is there any reason to believe that President Trump’s appointments to the federal bench and key regulatory agencies will be any friendlier to unions and workers’ rights than those of his first administration.
The threats labor faces in 2025 are not confined to the federal level. Anti-union legislators in Utah have introduced a bill to deny that state’s public employees the ability to bargain collectively. In the current climate it would not be surprising if other states followed Utah’s lead.
Yet history cautions us against jumping to conclusions based on these early indicators. While recent events seem like an augury of a long, cold winter for organized labor, history has a way of producing surprises. And, as the past reminds us, the more any powerful historical actor tries to bend history to their will, the more likely they are to face a comeuppance produced by the unintended consequences of their actions.
The history of the labor movement itself demonstrates history’s stubborn unpredictability. The foremost academic expert on U.S. labor relations in the 1930s, the economist George Barnett, learned that lesson firsthand. In 1932, as the Great Depression reached its nadir, Barnett predicted a future of “lessening importance” for a union movement that had been in retreat since 1919 and was then being driven to near extinction by catastrophic levels of unemployment. Of course, the eminent economist had no way of knowing that within three years this battered movement would experience an explosive revival, would launch the CIO, and would go on to become a central force in building the American middle-class, expanding civil rights, and influencing the course of U.S. politics for the next half century.
The 1930s was not the first time that a seemingly moribund American labor movement experienced an improbable revival. When the economic panic of 1837 wiped out the nation’s first effort to build a national union federation, unions seemed destined to disappear. For the next 15 years individual unions struggled to survive. Yet when the Civil War erupted, all of that changed. During 1863-64, the union movement more than tripled in size, and by 1866 a new national federation, the National Labor Union (NLU) was born. When another panic and depression began in 1873 the NLU was wiped out. But by 1886 not one but two national union bodies had been created: the AFL and the Knights of Labor. American unions are among this nation’s most resilient institutions. One of the factors that have made them resilient is that they have adapted to meet new dangers and opportunities. The very conditions that threatened to annihilate them at various points in their history have also acted as catalysts to spur their revival. Indeed, one could argue that it is only when they have faced existential crises that unions have dropped their naturally defensive posture and taken the risks necessary to retool and rebuild to meet threatening new conditions.
Unions have never been natural risk-takers. As democratic organizations responsive to the desires of the existing members whose dues fund them, workers who understandably are usually more concerned about protecting or winning improvement of their own jobs than trying to revive the movement as a whole, unions are inherently cautious about risking their resources on new departures. After all, they operate on inhospitable terrain, in a culture that esteems individualism and under judiciary that has always been suspicious of workers’ collective action. Naturally, then, unions have traditionally resisted taking big, bold steps toward reinvention – unless, of course, events have forced them into doing so. It is at those moments of existential crisis – such as the crisis that triggered labor’s 1930s revival – that the inventiveness of American workers and their unions have been most evident.
That is why, even as the political world seems to be shifting against the labor movement as this year starts, there is no way of telling how 2025 – or the next few years – will end. Just as no one could have predicted in 2020 that within four years unions would rank more highly in public opinion than they had in more than half a century, workers would rediscover the power of the strike, and an American president would join workers on a picket line, no one can say with assurance where we will stand one to four years from now.
Already, there are indications that labor is coming together to meet the challenge that we now face. After nearly 20 years outside of the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has rejoined the federation. This spring teach-ins are scheduled on or near college, university, and community college campuses around the country under the rubric of #LaborSpring. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and other unions are joining with community allies to expand the fight to improve their members lives both inside and beyond the workplace in networks like Bargaining for the Common Good. And other initiatives are also coalescing.
If we cannot know for sure what the future holds for the labor, we can at least say this: unions are not going away. As long as they survive, they will continue to carry in their DNA the potential for their own renewal and revival. Indeed, the very threats they face in this moment might end up providing the impetus they need to retool to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Issues Areas
Worker Rights
Public Sector Unions
Strengthening Democracy
by
Joseph A. McCartin
While we cannot know what the future holds for the labor, unions are not going away.
