The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and The Struggle for the Soul of Labor
Hamilton Nolan’s new book makes the case that unions are the best tool we have to fight inequality and save our democracy
In The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor, longtime labor journalist Hamilton Nolan observes that “there are only two ways to reverse our poisonous level of inequality.” The first would be for the government to redistribute wealth by aggressively taxing the rich while regulating capitalism, and the second would be for workers themselves to “increase their own power.” In Nolan’s view, the first is not likely to happen, and there is only one way to make the second thing possible: unions.
His sense is that unions are not just a vehicle for leveling the playing field economically but the foundation upon which any thoroughgoing democracy should be based. As he puts it:
When does the typical American ever experience democracy? As a child, they are told what to do. At school, they are told what to do. When they grow up, they get a job, and are told what to do. If they go to church, they are told what to do. And everyone with any common sense can see that voting, the one activity explicitly branding and participating in democracy, seems to change nothing, as power is concentrated, and decisions are made by unknown people in places remote from the everyday experience of a normal person. From this base of nothing, we expect Americans to treasure democracy as their greatest value. That is a hard ask, when it is something they have never seen in the wild . . . Unless—unless—they happen to be in a union. In a decent union, their opinion will matter. They can directly participate in discussions that lead to a set of demands. They can decide, collectively, to take direct action to win their demands . . . It is not democracy as a slogan, but democracy as lived experience.
Unions are, for Nolan, the only tool the American worker has to make the “sham version of the American dream” real. In his chapter on the Culinary Union in Las Vegas, he calls it “the actual American dream in action.” His description of what that union has achieved verges on the evangelical as he writes:
Out of nothing, this union has built a system that allows an immigrant to this country who works hard to provide health care for her children, support her family, buy a home, and retire with a pension. And while doing all of that, that person can talk and vote and participate in democratic decisions of an organization strong enough to make the mayor and the governor and the senators and the presidential candidates all come down to the union hall to hear what they have to say . . . the entire system is a way to teach people what democracy is and show them its power and then make them messengers of its continuation.
He calls the organizers of childcare workers here in San Diego “a network of love” and extolls the work of Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants as close to messianic and argues that “real unions spread like religions, not like businesses.” Thus, it is hard to call Nolan anything but a friend of labor when it is at its best.
That said, he does not stop short of engaging in a full-throated critique of the “conventional wisdom” of national labor leadership as he argues that they have clearly failed to meet the moment. Citing the inability of American unions to dramatically increase union density despite an angry working class in the post-Covid years, strong public support, and a pro-union president, Nolan blames the national AFL-CIO for not following the lead of militant social justice unionists like Sara Nelson and advocating for a class-based unionism with a singular focus on organizing the 90 percent of workers who are not in a union.
Nolan argues that the problem for unions is not just the intense hostility of the corporate sector and the rich along with an “anti-worker labor law system” that makes organizing difficult, but also “a lazy, unimaginative union establishment” whose own organizing goals at the national level, if achieved, would keep the movement on track not to win the future but to lose more union density. That, combined with existing unions’ tendency to focus exclusively on serving their own “little pool of existing members” rather than “working people as a whole,” has made the kind of explosive growth that unions and American workers need elusive.
What is to be done in the face of this? Nolan proposes nothing new here but rather a return to the fundamental building block of the American labor movement: organize, organize, organize. And organize all workers, not just those already in the union fold. While not novel, his argument is correct, and he makes his case with principle and passion.
Nolan charts the landscape of the American union movement throughout the book and follows Nelson’s unsuccessful quest to ascend to the top leadership post in the AFL-CIO and notes how her failure, like the defeats of Bernie Sanders in his presidential campaigns, has not killed all hope but has tempered many activists’ expectations as “Hope springs eternal, and so does heartbreak.”
But we must still fight because, as Nelson puts it in a rousing speech:
Unchecked capitalism has run amok, and is putting us on the march to fascism. And if we don’t give people power, and give people the right to organize—and especially women, who have just been told that not only do they not have equal rights, be we can be controlled forever by a man, through rape or some other action that keeps us in our place. That’s what the Dobbs decision was about: it was about lopping off half of the working people in this country. And if we don’t call that out . . . we will lose any hope of reclaiming our democracy. It’s on life support now.”
So, what is to be done? How do we revivify a union movement that has seen union density fall by a third since John Sweeney became President of the AFL-CIO in 1995 and unsuccessfully called for unions to dedicate 20-30 percent of their budgets to organizing new workers? Nolan again implores the union movement to devote billions of dollars to put muscle behind new organizing drives for whoever wants to organize wherever they want to organize.
In addition to this, Nolan echoes Nelson’s proposal that labor form an organization that “would be an open door to any worker who wanted to organize,” have a “solidarity fund” to help them do so, give assistance to workers on strike, and push “labor history education in schools and universities” along with “a media relations program to make unions more visible in the news.”
He also presents UNITE HERE as a “model for building political influence on city and state levels via relentless organizing of an economically vital industry and nonstop internal organizing to keep those workers mobilized.” Along with this, Nolan holds up the “childcare workers in California” who produced a big victory by engaging in “statewide planning, and coordination between multiple unions” with one of the focal points being right here in San Diego where the folks at the United Domestic Workers helped lead the charge.
These and the other case studies in the book from the deep South to Oregon, emphasize Nolan’s belief that, despite all the past failures and current economic and political obstacles, the potential for the mass organization of American workers not only exists because they want it but has to happen because it is our last best hope to save democracy through grassroots organizing and a new commitment to solidarity that includes everyone.