Difficult as it may be, unions must organize workers in the nation’s largest and most powerful corporations, and they cannot afford to wait for labor law reform or a more favorable administration to do so.
To build worker power during the second Trump administration, unions will need to learn or relearn how to organize outside the NLRB process and without the benefit of federal government enforcement. And they will need to do it with the same scale and intensity that they used to win major strike victories at the Big 3 automakers, hotel chains, and Hollywood in 2023.
Most importantly, unions will need to leverage the power of workers and their allies, through worker- and community-centered, strategic, multifaceted, and escalating campaigns, to make the cost of fighting the union greater to employers than the cost of recognition and bargaining a fair agreement. It won’t be easy—but taking on corporate power never is.
