In celebration of May Day, International Workers Day, we are issuing this special episode of Policy for the People examining the state of the labor movement. Our guest is Don McIntosh, editor of the Northwest Labor Press, who has been reporting about the labor movement for over two decades. Don discusses the present state of the labor movement, what the Trump Administration means for organized labor, and the policy changes that would remove the barriers that workers face when seeking to form a union.

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Transcript

We make this transcript available for your convenience and to increase the accessibility of our content. The transcript was generated by software and was slightly edited for clarity. If you are able to, we encourage you to listen to the recording.

May 1st is International Workers Day, a day that honors the sacrifice and victories of organized labor. It’s a holiday in just about every country around the world. But not here in the US, even though the date is a recognition of a historic and bloody strike in 1886 involving hundreds of thousands of workers in the US, mainly in the city of Chicago. These striking workers were demanding an eight hour workday. While it took some time, organized labor eventually won the eight hour workday, something that many of us today take for granted.

As history shows time and time again, the power of working people comes from being able to act collectively, according to Don McIntosh, our guest in this special episode of Policy for the People. Don is the editor of the Northwest Labor Press, which reports on the labor movement in Oregon, the Pacific Northwest, as well as developments nationally. Founded in 1900, the Northwest Labor Press is one of America’s oldest and last remaining labor movement newspapers. I spoke with Don about the present state of the labor movement, what the Trump administration means for organized labor, and the policy changes that would remove the barriers their workers face when seeking to form a union. 

Juan Carlos Ordóñez (host): Don, welcome to Policy for the People. 

Don McIntosh: Thanks for having me. 

Juan Carlos: Don, could you share a little bit with our listeners about the Northwest Labor Press, its history, and what you’re currently focusing on?

Don: Absolutely. Well, so it’s an unusual sort of paper. It’s an independent, labor union-owned newspaper that provides news to the labor union community in our area, which is Oregon and southwest Washington. Right now, we go out twice a month and print to about 45,000 union households. And we estimate that when you add in the spouses and roommates and so forth, you know, we potentially reach about 140,000 people.

You know, there used to be papers like this, quite a bit around the country. Now, I think there’s only about seven left. But you know, I feel like it’s a newspaper with a mission. Our goal, obviously, is always to be fair and accurate, but we also we have a perspective where we believe that the union movement is a vital force and worth supporting. And, so we’re reporting about both the activities of our local labor movement and also the things that matter to working people as working people. 

Juan Carlos: So you mentioned that there used to be a lot more papers focusing on the labor movement, but not as many today. Why is it important for there to be publications that focus exclusively on what’s going on in the labor movement?

Very often, quite frankly, working people that might be in a union don’t necessarily hear about the union day in and day out. And so, at the minimum, when you’re getting this publication, you remind them that there you’re a union member. And not only that, but to the extent that people are aware of being in a union, they might still be in a little silo, were you don’t know what other unions are doing. And so when you get a paper like ours, you’re actually coming into contact with an understanding that your organization is part of a larger moral movement for justice and dignity and security for working people. And I just feel like that it creates a community and it expands your consciousness.

Juan Carlos: How would you describe the current state of the labor movement here in Oregon and nationally? 

Don: We’re in a very interesting moment. I think in the medium term and certainly in the short term, I feel like we are in a moment of great opportunity because the polls in recent years are consistently telling us that, by and large, public support for unions is at its highest level in over 60 years.

And I think that’s really telling, because I think it’s a signal that people understand that the economic system we live in is not just and that maybe there’s real value in having unions and being in a union. So, you know, that’s looking at like above 60 or 70% of public support. So that’s very encouraging. And in fact, when you drill down into those numbers, it’s actually the younger workers who are most likely to say they’re pro-union, even though those are also the least likely to be in a union. So generally speaking, if you have younger people wanting what you have, what you are, that’s probably a good sign for growth in the future.

The problem is that wanting union or supporting union is different than becoming a member of a union. And there are so many difficulties and obstacles, legally and structurally, to doing that because of employer opposition and the weak law. But also, frankly, we don’t live in a time where people are used to coming together around anything. So the idea of collective action, of collective membership, this is a little bit alien. And of course, I never say never. You know, change is constant and it may come back. I certainly hope it will. But I think translating that sort of latent support into actual joining and becoming members and active in unions, that’s a big challenge.

I’ve been now a reporter on the labor beat for 20, 26, 27 years. And for a long time, it was, I want to say, a little a little depressing. Year after year of labor declining. Andnd that’s been the case. But I think in recent years I’ve just seen an increase in activity, an organizing activity, an increase in enthusiasm and involvement that’s really notable. 

That said, unfortunately, it’s not translating into an increase in the percentage of workers in the United States who are union members. So that’s a problem. 

And now there’s a new obstacle, which is this guy in the white House. Very interesting, a long story. We could spend the whole time talking about that, but he really is taking some measures that are going to harm the union movement.

And the biggest of all was, a couple of weeks ago, an executive order that stripped about a million federal workers of their fairly limited union rights. But as a union busting move, it’s really unprecedented in U.S. history. 

Juan Carlos: So in 2023, just a couple of years ago, you could hear the phrase “the summer of strikes” being used. And there were a lot of notable strikes that summer and into the fall. And we’re talking about United Auto Workers, writers and actors in Hollywood, health care workers at Kaiser Permanente. Do you think that level of energy that we saw a couple of years ago is still here?

Don: To some extent You know, it’s funny. Tthe Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks what they call large work stoppages for basically strikes that involve more than a thousand workers. And you can see this really dramatic trend. First of all, you had really the most active strike movement, the most active, organized working class in the world in the United States in the 1950s, where you had 400 to 500 large strikes a year. And these were big deal strikes, strikes that could shut down the economy in some cases. That fairly high level of strike activity continued through the 50s, through the 60s, even into the 70s, without a noticeable dip until you pretty much hit a wall at the very end of the 1970s and early 80s. And then it drops dramatically and continues to drop until by the 2000, the strike is almost a thing of the past. I believe the low point was some somewhere in the mid 2000, when there were like 5 or 6 large strikes a year. Again, compared to a period of the 1940s and 50s where there had been 400 plus. So you see the strike disappearing. 

That narrative has changed somewhat since 2008-2009, when we started with the red state teachers strikes, you know, large numbers of teachers walking out for basic kinds of improvements in K-12 education. But then we really seen a sort of a new level of strike activity since then, to where, going back to that Bureau of Labor Statistics number, you’re looking at 20 to 30 or maybe 40, large strikes a year. Large strikes is only one part of the analysis, and you have to think about small strikes, too. But unfortunately, they stopped measuring that in the early 1980s. 

Juan Carlos: What’s your sense as to the reason for this long term decline in the strike activity? You said it began around 1980. And here we are today with very low levels, relatively speaking, of strikes. Why do you think this happened? 

Don: Well, I’m sure it’s a combination of things, but everyone seems to want to point to the 1981 strike by the professional air traffic controllers organization, PATCO. These were federal employees who were air traffic controllers, and it was illegal for them to strike. But by the way, back back then, that didn’t necessarily matter. You showed your power by striking and then they figured it out afterwards. But in this case, they struck. And Ronald Reagan, who went to their union and got their endorsement because he said he supported their aims, he said, well, if you if you don’t go back to work like tomorrow or the next day, you’re all fired. And that’s what happened. And so basically he fired them all. And I think that really set a tone that like, it was time to get tough. Employers had never really maybe accepted the legitimacy of having to bargain with anyone to determine what they were going to pay their employees, how they were going to treat their employees.

And so I think that sort of served as an invitation for employers to bust unions. And they would do things like, in negotiations which they were obliged to do, give proposals that really they knew that the workers couldn’t accept. And so they had some really, just really difficult strikes in the early 1980s.

And I think what happened in that time is that you got this narrative, this feeling among working people that striking was a very dangerous thing. You could lose your job and it was likely to be unsuccessful. And so I think there became a lot of fear and hesitancy around striking at that time.

And I think striking is, in many ways, a great example of nothing succeeds like success. I think when no one in your life has ever struck before, it may sound like a scary thing. But if you see other people striking and getting dramatic gains, then you’re like, well, I want some of that too.

They’re truly transformative moments. They’re moments that people remember all their lives, where normally you just were going to work and doing what the boss says, but instead for a day or a week or 40 days you’re out there on the line with your coworkers, spending all day long with the people you work with, getting to sort of form an organization for forming a unified sort of body.

Juan Carlos: Since you’ve been covering the labor movement for a while now, have you seen shifts in the kinds of industries that are generating more labor activity, more labor organizing, perhaps even striking? 

Don: Absolutely. I mentioned the poll earlier about how support is very high. A point I forgot to mention was, of course, it’s the young. It’s also the educated. This is a shift. It’s a significant shift. The more education you have now, the more likely you are to say that you support or approve of unions. So we’re seeing that where you have workforces that are both young and highly educated, the rates of unionization are quite high. And so, for example, graduate students and even now undergraduate students. If you so much as work in a cafeteria and you’re an undergraduate student at a university, there’s decent chance that you’re either unionized or are thinking about unionizing.

That’s certainly the case with graduate employees, with scientific researchers at universities, in our area. You know, Oregon Health and Science University has seen just really an incredible explosion of unionizing in the last 5 to 10 years. Soon they may be something like what we call wall to wall, entirely union. But group after group has basically said, it’s our time. We’re going to unionize. So, yeah, I do think that’s one area. 

Of course, you probably know, there have been interesting experiments in some nontraditional terrain for unionizing. Starbucks is a good example. But I think,unfortunately, it’s been very difficult for them to get that first contract. It’s one thing to have several hundred Starbucks stores formally say that they want to be a union, which is extraordinary.  I don’t want to say otherwise. I mean, who would have thought that was going to happen 5 or 10 years ago? That has happened. But then figuring out how to get that company to give a reasonable contract is not something that they’ve solved just yet. 

Juan Carlos: You mentioned the Trump administration earlier, and what a threat it is to the labor movement. I wonder if you can say more about what else the administration is planning with regards to the labor movement. What are the threats it poses to the labor movement beyond its executive action versus federal workers?

Don: It’s a funny thing because Trump is very unusual for Republicans, let’s say. Trump really has made some overtures to labor. He’s had the building trades unions in the office for meetings. He’s met with the Teamsters. He seems to want to appeal to unions that are more along the traditional working class unions, because to some extent, those are his base.

I mean, if you look at people without a college education, one definition of working class, you know that those people did vote for Republicans and for Trump in much better numbers than they used to. And in fact, the majority of them, I think, at this point, are in that camp. So he’s not wrong when he says your members support me. 

But the problem is when you look at the policies. I do think that most unions are nonpartisan ultimately, and they would be glad to have both parties competing for their allegiances. And unfortunately, we have had a Republican Party that’s gotten more and more anti-union. And now Trump has actually reversed that in small ways. 

But unfortunately, too many of the things we’ve seen in the first hundred days don’t look good for unions. So, for example, he’s put people in some of the offices, like, for example, the person that’s up for confirmation to run OSHA, the worker safety organization, someone who worked in safety at Amazon. So it’s not exactly a model of worker safety, unfortunately. You know, there are spectacular and dramatic executive orders that you never saw coming. For example, no one’s ever heard of the Federal Mediation or Conciliation Service, probably. But the reality is that this is a tiny, independent federal agency that has several hundred mediators that help resolve labor disputes when an important union and an employer can’t come to an agreement. He just basically laid them off, all but like a dozen of them. And there are a number of cases like that. Certainly the attack on the federal workforce,we could take an entire segment and talk to about that. But the indignity of sending them emails saying: you’d be better off in the private sector; how about you resign and get a few months of pay? And then the dishonesty of these layoffs of probationary employees where it says, here is a directive from on high to local management that says fire all these people and tell them it was for performance.

But that’s a lie. It’s not true. And so you’re looking at tens of thousands and probably more decent public employees in the federal workforce who are just being let go en masse. I mean, it’s almost hard to keep up. In fact, we’re a local newspaper, the Northwest Labor Press. Mostly we’re focused on our local labor movement, the things that are happening in our area. But, since Inauguration Day, an enormous amount of my time has been spent just keeping up with all of the actions of the White House. 

Juan Carlos: You also mentioned before that we’re seeing a lot more labor organizing among college educated folks, even with graduate degrees. Do you think we need to redefine what it means to be part of the working class? Do you think that today the working class should include, all workers, including well-educated workers, because economic insecurity is so widespread? 

Don: Well, I mean, that term working class has probably been in contention for a while. If you look at someone like Karl Marx, one of the original economists, he defines working class as  having to do with your relationship to the means of production. So basically, if you work for a living, then you’re working class. If you own for a living, then you’re not working class.

Most people work for a living. Whether it’s a PhD, a scientific researcher, or a construction laborer, both in the working class. Sure. But do they have the same perspective, outlooks, work environments? Maybe not. And so this, this idea of a working class that’s more of a sociology school definition, that says, well, it’s everyone you associate with as a peer or similar to you, in in that case, you know, I think there is somewhat of a cultural divide. There’s a cleavage in our society between people who have, you know, a college education or a substantial amount of education and people who don’t. And I think that’s very painful, especially for the union movement, which is really ultimately about uniting all working people.

And if working people aren’t united because they’re divided over cultural issues or they have different outlooks because maybe they do or don’t have education. That’s a painful problem for the labor movement to solve. 

Juan Carlos: You mentioned before the high levels of approvals for unions, but that union membership is very low right now relative to what it used to be. What do you think needs to happen for the labor movement to gain strength, to regain the power that it once had to broadly lift up wages and working conditions? 

Don: Well, I think that’s a question that 10,000 people or more who have their lives invested in the union are all trying to think of the answer to. It’s one that they’ve been grasping for, trying to come up with the answer to for decades. I look iin some ways at the really long term trends and just wonder whether they’re sort of forces and conditions that are somewhat beyond our control. I’m not meaning to propose any kind of fatalism. I do think there is free will. We can come together. If you look at the 1920s, that was a very dark period of labor history. And in many ways, the labor movement that had formed previous to that was in retreat, and maybe you would look around and say it’s defeated. And yet it came surging back in the 1930s in a big way. 

And so I think that that is often the trick that that history plays. It’s always darkest before the dawn. The trouble is, you don’t necessarily know when the dawn is. And so, is labor going to come back next year, the year after, or ten years from now, or one hundred years?  I don’t know. I mean, I think in a way, we were looking at what we thought of this normal, being actually pretty rare in historical terms, like the period of the post-World War II period with broadly shared prosperity and powerful unions. That’s pretty rare.

And unfortunately, most of human history consists of a very tiny number of people pretty much owning everything and everyone else working for them and paying them rent. And I’m very concerned that that’s the direction we’ve been heading now for the last 40 or 50 years, not just the United States, but globally.

So what will it take to get working people to come back? I wish I knew the answer. I don’t think it’s outright deprivation because there are places in the world where people will starve to death before taking collective action to right themselves by improving their conditions by organizing. So I don’t know the answer. But I think one of the roles of someone who is in the labor press, what we do, and anyone who is attached to the labor movement is, when you see an ember, when you see a spark, do whatever you can to fan the flames. When a strike is happening, put it out on the line and help them succeed. Because it’s only that kind of thing. I’m convinced that the strike is a necessary ingredient for a comeback of labor.

We need to have, whether it’s the United Auto Workers setting examples of saying, well, it looks like the employer said they couldn’t give us a $3 an hour raise, but we went on strike for three weeks and they realized they were mistaken. Showing that kind of power, which we still have. That the power still exists. If for example, the million of federal workers that just got their rights stripped from them, what if they went on strike? What if they went on strike? You know, Congress comes to a crisis, a national crisis, when they can’t come together and agree on funding the government. Well, what if the government just shut down because the workers were on strike? Now, surely some of those agencies wouldn’t be missed. Fine. But there’s a lot of public services that Americans rely on and that would create a crisis.

So I feel like the power is still there. It’s the mechanism for how to use it, how to demonstrate it, that’s lacking, like the ability to have that strike. In France, if they try to take away your retirement or make changes, they seem to have a habit of going out in large numbers and showing the country. Whether it’s the airports, or the trains, or the trash service, or you name it. They have a feisty sort of tradition. I wish we were more like that. And maybe we will be again one day. As I said, we were the strike-iest working class in the 1940s and 50s. 

Juan Carlos: You touched on this briefly earlier that there are structural problems when it comes to the ability of workers to organize. I’m wondering what you think would be the most important changes, policy changes, that are needed to make it possible for workers to come together and form unions, be it policy changes at the federal or state level.

Don: First, there was a version called the Employee Free Choice Act, and then later it was called to Protect the Right to Organize Act, PRO Act. These are some pieces of legislation that would be fantastic, that really could help change the fortunes of labor. And those have to do with taking labor law seriously. Enforcing the law. Right now, if you try to unionize in your workplace, your employer can fire you. Now, that’s illegal. But it might take two or three years before you get a wage settlement, and by then you’re gone. And the union is crushed. There’s no penalties, actually. There’s only make-wholel remedies, like whatever wages you lost, minus wages you made in the meantime.

I mean, it’s a disgraceful labor law in terms of there’s really not an incentive. An employer who doesn’t want to follow the law isn’t really going to face any kind of significant consequences. And so they have little dictatorships where they bring in an anti-union consultant and try and talk you out of the union and demoralize you and do also dirty tricks. Many of them are illegal. And  as I say, they face no consequences.

So the PRO Act gets tough on those kinds of employer abuses. It also does something very important, which is it’s called first contract, arbitrary binding arbitration. Basically, the underlying premise of American labor law with collective bargaining is that both sides are supposed to get together in good faith and try and hammer out an agreement that works for both parties. That very often doesn’t happen in a newly unionized workforce. The employer could just say no, not interested. And then what do you do? Well, if you get a strike, maybe then you have some leverage. But you know, very often there’s not a good faith effort by an employer in a first union contract situation. The PRO Act would actually force a binding arbitration. An arbitrato would, listen to both sides and decide what’s reasonable.

And there are a dozen other really terrific improvements that that proposed reform makes. The trouble is, it’s been damnably hard to get it passed. I think the Democrat Party has woken up a little bit late to the fact that its fortunes are tied to the fortunes of the labor movement. And there have were opportunities, for example, maybe in the early Obama years, the first two years, where they might have passed something similar.

And they didn’t. I think too often in politics, I like to say, the labor movement is thought of as the the cash cow and the workhorse of the Democratic Party, but they’re never in the driver’s seat. They’re never calling the shots. I mean, they’re sort of like the ugly stepchild or something like that. Some unpleasant metaphor. But basically, I haven’t seen labor to be the dominant force deciding in Democratic Party politics. It would be transformative if the PRO Act passes. But what are its chances? I’m not so sure. 

In Oregon, there’s actually a very interesting and impressive reform that they’re considering right now that would actually tip the scales a little bit towards fairness for working people. And I believe it’s SB 916. It would allow striking workers to collect unemployment benefits. And why that matters is right now is because an employer can be really unreasonable,  like they’re doing, and Bigfoot beverages in Eugene. They’re saying, here’s our bargaining proposal. That pension that you have that guarantees you a monthly check for the rest of your life, we want to take that away and give you a 401K instead. And then, you know, you’ll be at the mercy of the market. How’s that for a proposal? Would you like that? And these workers said no. And then they and the employer were at a standoff. So the workers have been on strike since last fall. But you know, the strategy here is that the employers count on the ability to starve these folks out.

And there’s an injustice there. Workers don’t strike as a first resort. They don’t do it for fun. It involves sacrifice. They’re giving up wages, and there’s disruption and risk. So I don’t think that’s going to spur unreasonable demands by working people. But I think it will disinhibit employer misbehavior and employer greed.

If the state of Oregon says, “You’re on strike. We’re going to give you unemployment benefits.” So I think that would be, maybe not game changing, but certainly it would be a significant reform that I’m very hopeful that Democrats will deliver in Oregon. 

Juan Carlos: Don, for people who want to read the Northwest Labor Press or want to learn more about the paper, where can they go?

Don: So it’s not hard to find: nwlaborpress.org is our website, and on there you can sign up for our online edition, or even better, our paper edition, which comes out twice a month to your mailbox. And it’s $18 a year, basically, for union members, $24 for nonunion. Or if you like, as I say, in your email inbox for free. Would love to have your listeners get the publication. 

Juan Carlos: Don, any final thoughts you want to share with us regarding the state of the labor movement today? 

Don: I think it’s fundamentally about working people coming together and taking collective action. You know, the whole premise of unions in the United States about collective bargaining and reaching an agreement is not meaningful if there’s no leverage. And the leverage comes from working people being able to act in unison, whether it’s freaking out the boss because everyone wears a red t-shirt on a Tuesday or or wears a button or marches down and delivers a petition. Or maybe it’s just, you know, a practice picket where all of the employees walk out at lunchtime and pick up signs and say, hey, guess what’s coming. Or in the case of a strike, that they show that they’re prepared to go on strike for what are reasonable demands at the bargaining table. I really think it’s only that kind of organization and showing the potential for collective activity that could impact the employer. That really is the secret sauce to winning contracts. And, frankly, inspiring other workers to join a union in the first place.

So without the ability to do that, to be organized and to take action collectively, I, you know, I don’t necessarily see us turning it around. But with that, I think we could, absolutely. The power is still there if we take it.