Class struggle unionism in the USA: an interview with Joe Burns
Donald Trump is on a rampage against workers in the United States. According to the 2025 Global Rights Index, published by the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest trade union federation, the new administration has “taken a wrecking ball to the collective labour rights of workers”. Trump has stripped protections and bargaining rights for tens of thousands of public sector workers and paralysed the National Labor Relations Board, which protects employees’ rights to organise and join unions. And he’s just getting started.
The US union movement is historically weak. Strike rates remain at decades-long lows. Union density has steadily declined from a peak of 35 percent in 1954, recording a new low in every decade since then. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 10 percent of all workers are now in unions. This obviously poses challenges for the workers’ movement, particularly for workers who want to organise against Trump’s reactionary agenda.
Red Flag’s Ryan Stanton spoke to Joe Burns—a labour lawyer, union activist and bargaining negotiator since the 1990s—about where the US union movement has gone wrong and what needs to change. Burns recently completed negotiations for 27,000 United Airlines employees and Association of Flight Attendants members. He has written three books on labour organising: Strike Back, Reviving the Strike, and Class Struggle Unionism.
--------------------
What is the state of the American labour movement in the era of Donald Trump?
It’s obviously a difficult period with Trump in office. He has unleashed attacks on immigrant workers and workers in the federal government. But the problem is much bigger than just Trump. The United States has seen a decline in the percentage of workers who belong to trade unions. Only six out of 100 private sector workers now belong to unions. While there are flashes of success here and there, the reality is that the labour movement has been stuck for decades.
This is in large part because we’ve abandoned the principles of class struggle unionism. We put a lot of money into organising, but we’ve been unable to convince workers to join our weak and ineffective unions. We were told that when Democrats like Biden got in and we had a new NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], things would be different. But the similarities between presidential administrations over the last few decades outweigh the differences. The decline in union membership has continued at an equal rate under both Republicans and Democrats. All the Democrats have done is change some rules around the margins.
We’re not going to revive the labour movement this way. The union reform movement and the left within the labour movement are the weakest that I’ve seen in decades. Certain sectors of the economy and certain states are better organised, but I think the crisis is pretty much throughout the labour movement in the entire country. There are a lot of fuzzy ideas about teaching organising approaches, as if that’s our problem.
We really need a complete revamp of approach. Labour’s decline is not fundamentally a product of one party or another—they are both capitalist parties. It reflects a deeper problem with the labour movement. What we really lack are the principles of class struggle unionism and how we fight both inside and outside of our unions to take on the capitalist class. And I think it starts with the left of the labour movement coming to grips with the crisis that we face and what it’s going to take to move forward. That’s the fundamental problem.
My first two books focused on reviving the strike in both the public and private sectors. My most recent book, Class Struggle Unionism, focuses on the internal problems within the labour movement, including our inability to confront the shifting regimes of labour law, the legal restrictions on the right to strike, worker self-activity and so on. Although my knowledge of the Australian union movement is somewhat limited, I do try to follow things over there and it seems that both union movements face similar problems.
How have the unions approached the Trump administration?
Well, obviously Trump is doing this sort of right-wing populism thing. He’s certainly won over a base with his tariffs and protectionism, which have an appeal to auto workers and steelworkers, who have been decimated by decades of neoliberal attacks and the elimination of protections for workers. Many liberal labour leaders are aghast that Sean Fain from the UAW [United Auto Workers] and others support the tariffs. However, we spent a lot of the 1990s fighting against the North American Free Trade Agreement and other free trade agreements that were geared towards allowing corporations to shift manufacturing jobs overseas without regard for workers. These agreements allow capitalists to exploit workers around the world, while eroding manufacturing unionism.
So, it’s not surprising to me that some of these unions support tariffs. It’s economic nationalism, but it’s also rooted in material reality in which workers have faced job losses. They’ve felt the effects of an era of neoliberalism that was spearheaded in many ways by the Democratic establishment. However, the tariffs are not going to fix things. To the extent you support them and take a narrow, sectional point of view, you cut yourself off from your natural allies and move away from class struggle unionism. In the worst case, you end up like the Teamsters [one of the largest unions in the US], who have been cosying up to Trump. This is an abandonment of working-class principles.
Has there been much opposition to the Trump administration from the union movement?
For the most part, the union leaders oppose Trump—at least rhetorically. To be fair, while the UAW came out with qualified support for Trump’s tariffs, they have fought him on other issues. Although we’ve seen some protests, there hasn’t yet been the same kind of opposition we saw during his first term. I think he came on so ferociously that it put people on the back foot. While the union movement is participating in smaller, localised protests, I wouldn’t say they are doing much to seriously oppose Trump.
What is the relationship between the US union movement and the Democratic Party?
The union movement allied itself with the Democratic Party through the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. The unions deluded themselves into thinking they had an important role in business and government. They have the trappings of power, but not real power. Over the years, the labour movement has allowed itself to be incorporated into the Democrats and become increasingly dependent on the state for its existence. In doing so, we’ve accepted of a lot of restrictions on unions and the right to strike.
However, despite what we are commonly told, the Democratic Party is no ally of the labour movement. We have to keep in mind that Trump is not the first president to attack migrants or attempt to gut the federal workforce. Democratic governors called out the National Guard in the 1980s to break the Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Minnesota, where I’m originally from. Democratic President Bill Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, got rid of 400,000 federal worker jobs in the 1990s, probably more than they’ve cut so far with Elon Musk and DOGE.
The problem isn’t just that the labour movement spends a tonne of money supporting Democrats, money that could go into organising. And the problem isn’t just that this offers a false path and defrays the real issues affecting workers. The real problem is that it reflects the entry of capitalist ideology into the labour movement. As Tony Mazzocchi, the leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, who tried to start a labour party in the 1990s, used to say: the bosses have two parties, it’s time for workers to have one. The Democrats are a wholly corporate-funded and controlled political party. It was the Democrats’ anti-working-class policies that provided the basis for Trump’s rise to power.
In your book Class Struggle Unionism, you loosely define three approaches to modern trade unionism: business unionism, liberal unionism and class struggle unionism. What do you mean by these terms?
For the first 100 or so years of trade unionism, the fundamental divide was between what I call business unionism and class struggle unionism. Business unionism tended to be a narrower trade unionism, often focused on representing a group of workers under a particular employer or industry. Business unionists didn’t see themselves as having a broader role in society, and certainly not a role of transforming the relationship between workers and employers. Their slogan can be famously summed up by the slogan, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”.
In contrast, we have a long, rich history of class struggle unionism, which takes a fundamentally different point of view. It recognises that the source of power and privilege in society is exploitation in the workplace. Whether you’re at Starbucks, Amazon or Ford, your labour creates value during your shift. You get paid a portion of that value in wages, and the rest flows upwards to a handful of people. That’s how we get billionaires in society; that’s the source of power and privilege.
So, if you truly want to take on the billionaire class, you have to start in the workplace by challenging exploitation. When I talk about class struggle unionists in the United States, I think of the Industrial Workers of the World, or the Wobblies as they are better known, in the early 1900s. I think of the folks around the Communist Party in the Trade Union Unity League of the 1920s. I think of Farrell Dobbs and the Trotskyists who led the Teamsters rebellion of the 1930s. I think of the powerful, left-led international unions that came out of the 1930s, who were then decimated in the red scares of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
In the 1970s, thousands of anti-war and student activists joined the new communist movement. Many of those people then joined the labour movement with a conscious viewpoint of class struggle unionism. They went into the labour movement to transform it and put it on a fighting class struggle basis. They saw the working class as critical to a broader transformation of society. A lot of those leftists who went into the labour movement in the 1970s engaged in a lot of good struggles. They were probably a bit ultra-left and spent too much time fighting each other, but I think a lot of good struggles came out of their efforts.
However, in the 1980s, we faced a withering attack on trade unionism. We saw a wave of legal restrictions on the right to strike and on solidarity action, and the permanent replacement of striking workers. Great Britain, Australia and the United States shifted to restrain the sort of worker self-activity that had built a powerful labour movement, especially solidarity, cross-class and class-wide trade unionism. We were getting pummelled. This was one of the factors that led to the implosion of the socialist left in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States. A lot of these people drifted away into labour education, and some of them entered the mid-levels of the labour movement. This is when we saw the rise of the “third way” of labour liberalism in the 1980s. It was somewhat rooted in this grouping of people who were ideologically progressive or even socialist, but who began to turn away from class struggle unionism.
They hoped to straddle the two worlds of business unionism and class struggle unionism. They focused on things like the “corporate campaign” and the “organising approach”. A lot of this is rooted in the technical expertise of these sorts of mid-level staffers in the labour movement. Their politics flips from idea to idea. One minute we need social unionism, then we need broad community campaigns, then we need more trained organisers and so on. Unions have developed all sorts of alternatives to the strike, and they’ve begun to look more like NGOs than actual fighting organs of the class. In many ways, they have just walked away from the fundamental root of the crisis.
A good example is the Service Employees International Union, which has led well-promoted campaigns to organise fast food workers. But this was all bullshit. They would lead “industrial action” that would have like 50 staffers and a handful of fired workers pretending that the workers were on strike. Some of the recent Amazon strikes were like that, too. There’s a real proliferation of these types of actions—what I call publicity strikes. Even groups such as Labor Notes talk less about the reform and how fucked up the labour movement is, and a lot more about the “secrets of the successful organisers” and “what are the techniques that organisers need?”
Well, the problem isn’t the techniques. What we need is class struggle unionism. We need more fights with the bureaucracy that doesn’t want to engage in the sort of militant struggle that’s necessary to revive the labour movement. These bureaucrats don’t want to break with the Democratic Party or the state apparatus by violating injunctions and doing all the things that we would need to do to win and to attract workers to our movement.
