Trump is President. Which Way Forward for the Labor Movement?

Almost a week since November 5, this much is clear: Trump is heading back to the Oval office while trying to pose a Republican party under him as a new viable home for the American working class. But how did we get here?

To preface, it has been an election cycle that hasn’t just been an approval of Trump’s agenda, but also a ringing indictment of Harris and the Democratic Party. While Trump has, so far, won a few million more votes than he did in 2020, Harris has won about 10 million less votes than Biden did four years ago. Beyond the millions who abstained and cast no vote for either party, Trump increased his share of votes across the board. Notably, he did so among non-college educated voters, as well as among Black men, Latinos and men under the age of 30. 

The shifts within the lowest- and middle-income people are particularly noteworthy here. Trump increased his share of the vote among people making less than $50,000/year by 12 percent and for those making between $50,000 to $100,000 by 17 percent. Meanwhile Harris made significant strides among those making over $100,000 a year. It provides an important look into one of they key stories that have emerged this week, this phenomena of “dealignment” coming to roost – of the most precarious sectors of the working class, increasingly feeling abandoned by the Democratic Party and moving away from it.

Indeed it has been a specter that has haunted the Democrats for years, and only accelerated since 2016. While Biden was temporarily able to slow the tide in 2020, channeling the Black Lives Matter movement to the ballot box and making some promises to the Sanders base, it is a crisis that was far from resolved. Stepping away from Bidenomics, Democrats placed their bets on the fight against abortion and, in turn, on an urban and suburban middle class in 2022 to keep off a red wave. 

So here we are in 2024, with a Democratic Party that stuck to that playbook. This, even as Trump mediated his dialogue on abortion, saying he’ll leave the decision up to the states, while he tried to convince the working class that he’ll put money in their pockets and get rid of the immigrants who, according to him, were taking government funds.

Harris, beyond hoping that abortion and the defense of “democracy” would drive numbers for her to the polls, had little to offer but the status quo. As we saw, she moved to the right on most every issue, from immigration, to trans rights, to climate change, to imperialism and the military. In the last phase of her campaign, she aligned herself with war hawks like the Dick and Liz Cheney while distancing herself from Biden’s more “populist” promises.

In the days since, the right wing of the Democratic Party to the NYTimes to Jacobin have painted this as Harris’ Original Sin – a campaign that made empty promises and had nothing to offer to working people. But, this “dealignment” isn’t just a question of this or that campaign promise alone, and begs us to look at the experience of the working class over the last four years.

It is hard to account for the experience of our class through that time without thinking about the incredibly profound effect that the pandemic had. Workers not only saw themselves as essential and the ones who make everything run, but were also the ones who had to work through it, while the bosses went off to their vacation homes or quarantined away. They worked without PPE, got sick, and saw their coworkers and family members die. 

And in response, two things happened. First, millions of workers in tedious work, fed up with their conditions, and with the security of stimulus checks, began to quit their jobs en masse in what was the Great Resignation. It happened across both unionized and non-unionized sectors, healthcare and service workers making up the vast majority of those who quit, all while union leaderships either avoided the fight for better conditions, or put no struggle to fight to unionize new work to protect the most exploited and precarious sectors of our class.

Second, from Amazon to Starbucks, to REI and beyond, spurred by bottom-up organizing, rank-and-file workers not only began to unionize their workplaces, but also started going on strike for better conditions. This new generation of unionists, shaped by the pandemic, not only saw their strategic power, but also saw unions as more than fighting for bread and butter demands. Like Starbucks workers who fought for trans healthcare, or John Deere and Kellogg’s workers fighting against tiered work, they saw it as a tool to fight against the divisions imposed on our class, and fought for the rights of its most exploited and oppressed. Indeed it is this generation that has been at the forefront of the fight against the genocide in Palestine in our unions now, calling on our unions to divest from the Zionist state, and pushing our unions to call for arms embargos. It was clear that workers were willing to fight with one fist against the bosses, and wanted to break with the decades of “peaceful coexistence” that had haunted the labor movement due to decades of business unionism.

In response to this tremendous uptick within the labor movement, the labor bureaucracy posed two different paths to rearticulate this relationship between this new generation of workers, the unions, and the state, in the figures of Shawn Fain and Sean O’Brien. On the one hand, Fain appeared to emerge as a real champion of rank and file militancy, attempting even to reinvigorate the memory of the combative labor movement of the 1930s in last year’s stand up strikes, putting forward ambitious demands and taking a more confrontational relationship with the bosses. And we see that now with the recent off-contract strike authorization at Stellantis too. On the other, there’s O’Brien, who too puts forward a pro-working class dialogue and defends strike actions, but largely sees it as a bargaining chip, while fostering the illusion that Trump could be pro-worker. 

Yet, despite their rhetoric, both of these figures, along with the labor bureaucracy at large over the last decades, abandoned the most precarious sectors of the working class. In what was one of the most heavily anticipated contract struggles in recent years, Sean O’Brien took on the bosses at UPS. Yet, within a week of the strike date, Teamsters leadership reached a tentative agreement which, while scoring some gains, importantly maintained a key tiered division among workers — that between drivers, who are highly paid, and warehouse workers, who are disproportionately Black, Brown, and immigrant, and get paid significantly less for equally backbreaking work. Instead of using it as a means to unite the ranks of workers to take on the bosses, they pushed hard among the rank-and-file to ratify, leaving many warehouse workers to feel left behind.

While Fain faired better with the stand up strikes across the Big Three auto companies, he was quick to throw his support behind Biden, despite Biden not only breaking the rail strike in 2022, but also failing to pass the PRO Act or increase the federal minimum wage, all while workers still felt the aftershocks of the inflation in their daily lives. He then threw his weight behind Harris, even as she lacked major progressive promises for workers. And while I speak to experience of the last four years, we can reach even further back: it was the experience of a class with Obama bailing out the banks while people had their houses repossessed, or the brutal conditions that NAFTA imposed on the workers both here and abroad.

So while many write about the crisis of a Democratic Party of losing the working class vote in what they ascribe to the “diploma divide” now, they miss the key tension in front of the American labor movement — of a working class that is incredibly fragmented, spread out, very diverse, and increasingly precarious. And it is precisely this sector, left behind by an organized labor movement that has largely hand waved their problems away to extract some crumbs for the rest, that Trump made his case to — and won. The union bureaucracy, by abandoning the fight to unite our ranks and giving political support to the bipartisan regime, paved the way for the Far Right. It opened the opportunity for the Republican Party to paint itself as a pro-labor party that could harness the aspirations of the working class.

So now, while much will be said about the prospects of organized labor under the Trump presidency, we have to ask: what is the role that the labor movement sees for itself in the next period? 

We know that Trump is going to unleash big attacks against the working class and oppressed. So it is necessary for us to unite our struggles, and fight for a united front that can fight the right. 

It is essential that we fight to organize independently of the capitalist state, and break with the Democratic party that ties us to it. The interests of our class are totally antagonistic to the interests of a state that exists to ensure better conditions for the bosses, and the two parties that administer it.

But we aren’t starting from zero. We have the seeds of this already: in the anti-Zionist youth who have been fighting against Israel’s genocide in Palestine, and in workers fighting to unionize their workplaces, and striking for better conditions, and even fighting within their unions to have them break with labor Zionism. As the multi-millioned working class, we are tremendously powerful, and are the only social force that can shut it all down. We have to leverage that power to fight against any attack levied by Trump and his base. 

The editors at Jacobin advise the Democratic party that it is necessary for them to drop their support for “woke” politics, and instead concentrate on good, ‘ol economic populism. Workers don’t care about democratic rights, they essentially say. For our purposes, it is but a myopic (and dangerously limited) vision of a working class that is not a monolith and incredibly diverse. It is precisely the kind of economist argument that Jacobin makes that will continue to divide our struggles instead of uniting them, and will be prime fodder in the hands of a Democratic Party — and of Trump.

In the next period, especially as the Democratic Party seeks to rebuild its relationship with the working class, and, thus, contribute to the peaceful administration of the biggest imperialist state in the world, it will stand as a real roadblock to the development of our class power. As one of the two grand parties of this imperialist regime, it has the goal of disorganizing our ranks and maintaining this fragmentation of labor that is necessary for the functioning of capital. In alliance with sectors of the labor bureaucracy, they are likely to offer even more concessions to a sector of American workers, all of which, in this reconfiguration of labor within the ongoing crisis of neoliberalism, are likely to come on the backs of workers across the border and across the Global South. We have to fight for a united front that fights against these chauvinistic divisions, tooth and nail.

And it is through uniting these struggles that we’ll be able to sow a new kind of party for our class — one that doesn’t limit our horizon to our most pressing demands, or negotiate with sectors of the ruling regime for this or that concession that maintains the fragmentation of our class, and puts forward the fight for its own program, one that is able to articulate this unity between exploitation and oppression: the fight for socialism.