Letter to a New New Left (Or, How Unions Got Cool Again)

A new common sense has emerged in labor organizing, a shift that coincides with renewed labor militancy and organizing across various industries. Labor unions, once derided as anachronistic and bureaucratic dead ends—pale, male, and stale—are seeing a resurgence among young, radical, and non-normie culture.

In his famous 1960 “Letter to the New Left,” C. Wright Mills flippantly rejects the way young radicals positioned “‘the working class’ of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency.” At the time of writing, his argument was disruptive—the paroxysms that punctuated the long 1960s often opposed unions and their members as much as the state and corporate America.

But after a seemingly endless line of corrupt union bureaucratic men, each distinct only to the extent to which they one-upped each other by undermining rank-and-file demands, Mills’ argument became not only commonplace, it had been proven.

Mills found hope in the New Left, a “youthful intelligentsia” composed of the global student movement and revolutionary forces in the developing world. The multicultural band of young punks, queers, socialists, and racial justice activists that Mills once imagined, and who now exist and see unions as important to their collective survival, have breathed new life into a movement that has been negatively portrayed by the media (think The Sopranos), union-busting companies, and even segments of the Left. But as recent organizing campaigns at Amazon, Starbucks, and in higher education have shown, the burgeoning labor movement is working.

Data has long shown that unions improve people’s lives on the individual and national level. Today, public approval of unions is at its highest point, 70 percent, since the mid 1960s. Union density, however, has not risen alongside the groundswell of popular support. In 2021, 14 million workers had union membership, a 20 percent decline from 1983. And while about 70,000 more workers joined unions in 2022, the overall percentage of those in a union continued its precipitous decline.

No group epitomizes the disjuncture between what they have and what they want, more than young workers—only 3 percent of those aged 18 to 34 are union members, but the general cohort approves of unions by 72 percent. Young workers are hungry, and bosses are on the menu, but nobody seems to be taking their order.

Emily Hoff, 23, is one of the lucky ones. She joined the Boston Ballet at 18 and was surprised to discover her co-workers were represented by a union, the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA).

“We need protections. If the room is too cold, we can’t dance safely. If we don’t get regular breaks to stretch and rest, we can’t dance safely,” Hoff explained. “The culture in this industry is that you’re just told what to do and you can’t question it,” she continued. “But with a union, you can, and I think that’s really cool.”

The origins of labor’s recent ascendance to coolness, especially among young workers, are multidimensional. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign is a major flashpoint. In 2015, during his first presidential bid, DSA membership was at about 5,000. By the time of Sanders’s second run, it had grown to 66,000. His campaign resuscitated a dead radical tradition among young people, fueling the rise of a new labor-Left political block dedicated to transforming American society. By 2021, DSA had helped elect four socialists to Congress, more than had ever served at one time in US history.

The shift in inclination towards socialist politics, especially among the educated and downwardly mobile classes under 40 is well documented. But Sanders’s brand of socialism is more about unions, reigning in inequality, and progressive taxation than it is about a dictatorship of the proletariat. His campaign gave voice to Millennials and Gen Z who’d grown up frustrated by the material deprivations and false promises of late capitalism.

The explosive rise of the Movement for Black Lives demonstrated to a segment of the Left what the labor movement has long known: the US working class is disproportionately Black and Brown, and includes poor workers who are also queer, and non-binary. Labor, it was soon realized, spoke up for the socially and culturally marginalized.

“For many LGBTQ Americans, a union card is their only form of employment protection,” Richard Trumka, then president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) wrote. Until very recently, in more than half of US states, workers could be legally fired for their sexuality or gender expression.

Labor history is littered with moments where unions have acted as allies and accomplices with queer and gender-nonconforming workers when it is convenient for them to do so. This history, and the communal, non-hierarchical character of the queer movement, is the basis for recent demands to “queer the labor movement” even further.

Political-economic shifts also meant that the US working class—in a volatile state of recomposition since the Great Recession—was composed of more downwardly mobile people with advanced degrees, debt-burdened or failed by their elite educations. Unions became appealing to younger and more diverse workers in “cool” sectors like tech, online media, and higher education, which had long acquired valuable cultural capital, despite paying low wages and providing few benefits to an overworked “creative class.”

Then, in 2020, this surge of interest in unions collided with the Covid-19 pandemic. Young workers fared poorly compared to those in similar jobs, and were some of the hardest hit by the unemployment crash in March and April of 2020. Yet those who kept their jobs and became essential workers were also disproportionately young, Black, Brown, and female. They faced deadly worksites, often without adequate safety measures or training. These conditions fueled a tumultuous pandemic-era labor movement of essential workers and their allies.

The pandemic also gave rise to a new cadre of American labor leaders. Jaz Brisack, a 25-year-old barista from Buffalo, led the successful campaign to organize the first Starbucks in the country. It was the spark that ignited a movement across hundreds of cafes… and counting.

Chris Smalls, 34, has had a similar effect on organizing at Amazon warehouses. Though there’s only one current warehouse that has voted affirmatively, the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), has poked a million holes in the organizing orthodoxy of the established labor movement. Smalls, who is the president of the ALU, has made it part of his mission to bring a new cultural sensibility to labor organizing.

Brisack and Smalls, along with a cadre of youngish leaders in industries outside labor’s traditional strongholds, have emerged as the figureheads of a new labor movement. They’ve built a culture that stresses labor organizing as serious business, but must also be fun—or at least playful—to be successful. Witness Smalls throwing a street party outside Jeff Bezos’s mansion, with a custom-built guillotine, as an organizing stunt designed to generate support for their campaign that eventually won its historic victory.

The deteriorating quality of American jobs—a decline spanning at least three decades as measured by economists—has motivated interest in unions, especially since the crash of the Great Recession gave rise to an app-for-that economy. This is particularly true for Millennials, whose attitudes toward media institutions and religious organizations are more negative than preceding generations, but who seem to ideologically embrace unions. Perhaps enough time had passed to erase the image of unions as hopelessly corrupt. Mills’ critique of the “labor metaphysic” simply lost its luster.

And since the pandemic began, there also seems to be a growing sense that unions are more than an answer to an economic crisis. They’re a critical part of the political and cultural zeitgeist too, especially for the newest Left. In the summer of 2020, M4BL began speaking the language of labor. Its “strike for Black lives” hinted at an important moment of cross-pollination between unions and the street-based pandemic protest movement.

It makes sense. Today’s labor movement is targeting the largest private sector employers in the nation. These include the same targets that draw the ire of the broader Left—Amazon, Google, Starbucks, Apple, Microsoft—but also some that attract a younger, and in many ways hipper workforce, like Trader Joes, REI, and cannabis dispensaries.

And Gen Z’s labor politics are less influenced by their status as college degree-holders (or not), or partisan political divides, than are Millennials and Gen Xers. Gen Z seems occasionally repulsed by the work-hard-play-hard hustle culture Millennials boasted of—while they might not “dream of labor,” they certainly seem to dream of labor organizing.

Petitions to request union elections rose 60 percent in 2021. And there was a shocking jump in strike activity in 2022, a 91 percent increase from the year before, the largest one-year escalation in decades. Much of this growth is thanks to young workers at companies like Starbucks, who have yet to force the bitter anti-union CEO Howard Shultz into a contract.

The cultural profile of unions has waxed and waned throughout history and is unlikely to sustain itself. But the recent commitment to the movement indicates that labor may have more than just hipness going for it. It has a base that is convinced of unions’ efficacy and a large and growing segment of the working class is fed up with being disrespected and underpaid. And increasingly, workers are connecting the workplace gains that come from unions with larger visions for change.

Hoff left Boston a few years ago for the Royal Danish Ballet, where she’s also a union member.

“It’s different here because many of the things our union had to fight for in Boston are just normal things here, like people have rights,” she said, describing the social democratic environment. “So instead the union is involved in longer-term things, like pensions and the industry as a whole… It really helps you look into the future.”

Predictions are always a gamble, but if the American labor movement of 2023 can help workers envision—and build—a new future based on class mobility, racial justice, and healthcare for all… that would be really cool.