Thank you to The Nation for publishing my piece on the role of union organizing in fighting the rise of fascism.
“It’s easy to feel powerless. The US government is enabling Israel’s genocide in Palestine and deporting immigrants to concentration camps in El Salvador. Elon Musk is gutting public services. And corporations, emboldened by the new regime, are urging it to go even further and roll back workers’ rights and public accountability. These forces can feel “too big to fail,” which raises the question: How can we meaningfully fight these powerful actors?”
Organizing a union in your own workplace is the best possible starting point: workers who experience democracy on the job are more likely to believe in democracy outside the workplace, too. But unions as institutions must hold the line against a regime that doesn’t just want to restrict their operations — it’s also seeking to co-opt unions with conservative membership bases or court union leaders on issues like trade. It’s up to us to ensure that the labor movement we’re growing is not just strong, but also independent and principled, based on the value that an injury to one is truly an injury to all.