The new crop of pro-worker legislators who have recently been elected at the state and local levels can pass laws that can rebuild the labor movement, even with Donald Trump as president. Here are six ways they can do it.
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If unions are going to grow, they will need new state and local policy.
Over the summer, primary victories for pro-worker candidates running for US Congress like Abdul El-Sayed have stolen headlines. But the numerous candidates who won downballot, like Janeese Lewis George for mayor in Washington, DC, could have significant impacts on workplace organizing in the coming two years.
Whether we like it or not, laws — not just on the federal but also on the state and local level — shape the opportunities for and constrictions on union organizing. For unions to grow at the scale the moment demands, workers and policymakers must reshape those laws so that organizing can expand. Workers need to use every strategic option available. That includes using state and local policy and government action.
Indeed, many of the harms the labor movement faces come down to federal, state, and local policy changes or government interventions, like the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947, which amended the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and made it much harder to organize a union and strike as a worker. It will take new interventions to undo them. Meanwhile, presidents, including this one, have used executive orders to unleash a war on unionized federal workers and workers at large.
At the same time, pro-labor policy has spurred, and been spurred by, workers in their efforts to organize. The NLRA of 1935 created a government-recognized and -supported process for organizing unions and precipitated widespread growth in union membership. In the 1960s and 1970s, state- and local-level expansions of public sector bargaining rights enabled the creation of the public sector backbone of the labor movement. More recent efforts to expand bargaining rights to workers like home health aides and childcare providers have grown union density in a number of states.
The NLRA governs how most workers in the private sector formally unionize, strike, and collectively bargain, and it creates serious constraints on what state and local governments can do. Nonetheless, states still have ample opportunity to establish workplace protections and create more favorable conditions for organizing.
Over the past two decades, we’ve seen state legislatures and city councils improve the lives of workers through the $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, and paid parental leave. Even major programs of the national American welfare state, such as unemployment insurance, depend heavily on state legislation and were first developed on the state level. Wisconsin, under pressure from organizing workers, created the first unemployment insurance system in 1933, two years before the current federal-state system was first set up in 1935.
State legislators, city council members, governors, and mayors can do more than pay lip service to supporting workers’ ability to organize. Here’s how.
1. Expand Who Can Organize, Who Can Bargain, and Who Can Strike
Millions of workers across the country remain uncovered by the National Labor Relations Act. Policymakers and workers can expand the right to organize, bargain, and strike for those excluded workers. These workers often include state and local public sector workers like public-school teachers, domestic workers like housecleaners and nannies, and farmworkers.
Virginia provides an example of both progress and work still to be done. The commonwealth lifted the ban on collective bargaining for public sector workers in 2021, allowing localities to permit collective bargaining by their public employees. Teachers in Fairfax County organized and formed the largest bargaining unit of 2024 nationally — the 27,500-strong Fairfax Education Unions. But Virginia’s governor vetoed a bill that would have extended collective bargaining to public sector workers statewide, leaving critical work to be done in the coming year.
2. Remove Barriers and Lower Costs for Workers to Organize
Another way is to decrease the cost of organizing by making the conditions for organizing more hospitable and less risky. Some of these changes have been won in the last decade such as Just Cause for Fast Food Workers in New York City. Just cause protections make it illegal to terminate an employee without warning or a good cause. This means workers can feel more secure in coming together with their colleagues in forming a union.
Decreasing turnover in service sector industries, by mandating more predictable schedules or paid meal and rest breaks, might make it easier for workers to stay at a given job for a longer period of time and organize. Likewise, guaranteeing eligibility to a dignified amount of unemployment benefits for any worker without and looking for work would improve the likelihood that workers take action on the shop floor.
3. Supporting Workers Taking Forceful Action
Workers in several states have already won and can win more policy changes that decrease the risks they face when they go on strike or take other action.
When workers decide to go on strike, they take on significant economic risk to fight for dignity. States like New York, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington expanded unemployment insurance eligibility to striking workers, just like other employees temporarily out of work. Writers Guild of America East and Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists members put those programs into good use in New York and New Jersey as they struck in the summer of 2023. Other laws that guarantee strong retaliation protections backed by well-funded enforcement for workers who are fired can further boost the likelihood of action.
4. Eliminate the Corporate Race to the Bottom on Workplace Standards
Setting industry-wide standards decreases employers’ cost differential for having organized employees. In the United States, some jurisdictions have created industrial standards boards like Minnesota’s Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board. Worker, industry, and state government representatives set industry-wide wage, hour, and health and safety standards, with strong worker-led compliance training and enforcement.
When that happens, competing employers face more uniform labor conditions, and unionized employers are able to compete without being at a disadvantage because of their higher labor standards. That means firms can’t compete and profit from keeping wages down and cutting corners on health and safety. As a result, businesses would have less reason to oppose workers unionizing.
5. Create New Opportunities for Workers to Meet and Join Worker Organizations
State resources can create new opportunities for nonorganized workers to come into contact with labor organizations.
The unemployment insurance system presents one such opportunity. The program has low uptake rates among those eligible. Thanks to the organizing of unions, unemployed workers, and other community organizations during the pandemic, Maine established a community navigator program in which worker organizations helped disadvantaged workers apply for unemployment insurance. It significantly improved access to unemployment insurance for people out of work. It also raised workers’ expectations and changed their attitudes about action on the shop floor.
Other states could replicate this kind of program. They could go further and take inspiration from the Ghent system used by several European countries, in which unions directly administer unemployment insurance and deliver benefits. Similar programs would enable workers to come into contact with and join labor organizations.
6. Enforce Rights in a Way That Brings Workers Together
Worker protection laws face a crisis of underenforcement. Employers often bet that underfunded public agencies, hampered by decades of austerity, will never enforce state and local laws against them; as a result, too many cut corners, pay less than the minimum wage, refuse to pay overtime, and ignore health and safety rights. Workers have won and can win more laws that increase the chances they catch scofflaw corporations, highlight the benefits of unions, and bolster revenues for their enforcement agencies.
For example, the EmPIRE Worker Protection Act, a bill proposed in New York State, would give workers, whistleblowers, and unions the right to sue on behalf of the state over violations of labor rights for fines. The law would enable workers who fear retaliation to seek help from a union that could bring a case for all workplace violations; as such, it would give workers more reason to turn to the labor movement for help.
Fulfilling the Promise
The categories and examples above are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive but represent just some of what is possible if workers organize — not just on the shop floor but also in city halls and state capitol buildings and take action to enact policy that empowers working people.
Many elected state and local officials are worker allies; some, including many who just won their primary elections, come from the labor movement and will fight fiercely to pass laws that facilitate worker organizing and building strong unions. Other elected officials will not help grow the labor movement. With either group, worker organizing and strategic action is needed for government policy to change: worker allies within the government need external support, while fence-sitters and opponents need external pressure.
The resulting legislative process represents a forge for new tools workers will need to scale their organizing. Once workers win a new policy, it requires implementation to make sure it’s real in people’s lives, then rigorous organizing to make the most of it and use it for unionizing goals. For example, to turn mandatory paid rest and lunch breaks into organizing conversations at lunch, workers must know their protections, rights, and abilities under the law inside and out, unions need to actively educate and support workers taking action and exercising their rights, and the government must enforce the law.
Only then will the policy promise of the soon-to-be-elected crop of pro-worker state and local officials be fulfilled with union density growth.
This article was originally published by Jacobin; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.
Francisco Diez is an organizer and economist and a project coordinator at the New York University Wagner Labor Initiative.
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