The Union Makes Us Strong

This morning I woke up thinking about—and singing—the song Solidarity Forever. Ralph Chaplin wrote the lyrics in 1915 and Pete Seeger sang it, my favorite version of it anyway. I always liked the Battle Hymn of the Republic growing up in church, though my reasons for liking it were based in the childhood fantasy that we could all come together to fight the evils of racism and injustice. Though the words go back further, to the labor movements of the early twentieth century. My favorite line in the song is “But the union makes us strong.” It’s a simple line, almost too plain to carry the weight of history. But it does.

When I think back across my last forty years, I can see how unions once held together a fragile kind of security for working people. Union jobs weren’t glamorous where I grew up. They didn’t pay enough to build dynasties or live in extravagance the way the promise of post-industrial jobs (engineering, medicine, computer science, entrepreneurship) do. But they came with a dignity: health care, pensions, a steady wage you could plan a life around. They came with the kind of safety net that made families feel they might be able to look past the end of the week, month, and year.

That world feels so far away now. The decline of unions has meant not only fewer protections, but also a kind of hollowing-out of collective imagination. Without the union, every worker stands alone, told to negotiate for themselves against corporations whose entire business model depends on making people disposable. What I have recently been so dismayed about, of course, is how many liberals and conservatives alike have fallen for the lie of individualism. The notion that we are all isolated workers who must constantly negotiate, and that those negotiations must be related to results seems so common place, no doubt anyone reading this now takes it as a given. You may even agree with it. But we see where this mentality has led us: It’s no coincidence that “flexibility” became the buzzword of the gig economy—what it really meant was stripping away stability, benefits, and voice. More and more people are coming to the realization, too, that the major political parties that claim to represent their interests are working for the corporate ruling class. In fact, I am sure that even if you don’t wish that to be true or disagree with it, you can think of numerous cases since the pandemic where politicians have absolutely failed to deliver on the basic material promises of their campaigns or their party’s official platforms.

And I can’t help but think about the jobs being lost today. Layoffs come dressed in press releases about “restructuring” or “innovation,” but at their core, they tell the same story: people are expendable. The protections that unions once offered—those meetings in dusty halls, the collective bargaining sessions that dragged late into the night—those were the buffer between a worker and the abyss. Without them, too many of us are just free-falling. Many people who are free-falling now have been so indoctrinated by the bootstraps invective that they don’t even realize that’s what they’re doing. Too many of them, we know again from evidence, that many take this on as shame, guilt, feelings of worthlessness — and these lead to depression, anxiety, and worse. Suddenly, the whole idea of connecting human worth to productivity has shown to be an empty rhetoric, one built by and for the ruling class. No human being should feel worthless. There are no qualifiers to add here. Think on that bolded line and ruminate.

Singing that old song this morning, I wasn’t just humming nostalgia. I was grieving. And I was asking myself the quiet questions it plants: if the union once made us strong, what might make us strong again? Can we return the country to a place where people see their value and self-worth as related to the dignity of work (or not) rather than to their productivity and status? Asking nicely or expecting politicians to support we, the people, seems not to be working. And with a SCOTUS bought and paid for by the same ruling class who’s been rolling back workers’ rights for the last fifty years and human rights for the last five, it seems unlikely that unions can survive, much less thrive.

And so I wake up think of songs of solidarity to remind myself that the majority of United Statesians are tired, overworked, underpaid, and struggling. “But,” I tell myself, “the union would make us strong again.”