Karla Ann Cote/NurPhoto via AP
Workers with the Amazon Labor Union at the company’s Staten Island warehouse held a press conference to celebrate their union victory, April 8, 2022.
A strain of political doomsayers have painted a dark-as-midnight picture for liberals about the next few years. Low presidential approval ratings, a terrible Senate map in 2024, the drifting of Latino support away from Democrats, and structural disadvantages across all branches of government could lead to filibuster-proof Republican dominance in just a couple of years, according to these predictions.
Losing teams always point fingers, and the prospect of this loss has led to anticipatory Democratic finger-pointing, which has been under way for months in Washington. The recriminations are by now familiar: the center-left wailing that “wokeism” toxified the brand, the left angry that the corporate wing spiked legislative progress.
You could blame plenty of other causes for the Democratic demise: successive COVID waves, high inflation from the supply chain crunch, the media’s severe swing against the withdrawal from Afghanistan. But more fundamentally, I would say that Democratic politics is structurally moribund, too unfocused, too dazzled by sweeping legislative overhauls rather than making progress through executive action, too resistant to prioritizing goals, too beguiled by policy groupthink, too blind to a gerontocracy perceived as out of touch, and too unable to connect with ordinary Americans. The party’s internal contradictions, the weight of accumulated sins and hedges and compromises, have severed it from historical roots. And it’s hard to see a path forward.
But before everything went to pot, Democrats got one thing incredibly, improbably right. I’m not sure that even now they realize what they set in motion. But it could become the long-term salvation of the working class, and the key to its gaining a foothold in government, in policy, in American life.
That one thing was the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP), which created the conditions for a revival of the labor movement, and just maybe a labor-based politics.
What we’re seeing in labor markets, with a return to the pre-pandemic unemployment rate, the lowest level of first-time jobless claims since the late 1960s, and quit rates at a 50-year high, was not preordained. Remember, the unemployment rate was still 6.4 percent in January 2021, compared to 3.6 percent today, and rapid reductions didn’t really happen until midyear, after the American Rescue Plan kicked in.
Unendurable jobless recoveries have been a feature of the past several recessions. The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress made a conscious choice to not repeat that mistake, preferring to spend too much rather than too little, because they knew from 2008 and recessions prior how that turned out. They were definitely fighting the last war, but it was a good war to fight.
The ARP has been incorrectly targeted as responsible for inflation. Even the most wide-ranging reports from official sources do not attribute more than a couple points of the inflation rate to “overheated” fiscal policy. The supply chain breakdown, triggered by the pandemic, climate-related incidents, and now the war in Ukraine, but also due to bad neoliberal policies that couldn’t adapt to even the slightest increase in goods demand, is a bigger piece of the puzzle.
The American Rescue Plan created the conditions for a revival of the labor movement, and just maybe a labor-based politics.
What the ARP did was reinforce positive economic conditions and enable full employment. The additional $1,400 check and the extension of improved unemployment benefits enhanced purchasing power, as did a one-year increase in the Child Tax Credit that dramatically reduced child poverty, despite its design flaws. Added subsidies to the Affordable Care Act exchanges made health insurance actually affordable for middle-class families. The pop-up child care program sustained by ARP grants enabled hundreds of thousands of people to return to the workforce. Small-business support and employee retention programs kept storefronts open and workers employed. And the much-castigated state and local fiscal aid set a floor for public employment and created infrastructure jobs.
Even critics would agree that the ARP played a major role in the tightest labor market in a couple of generations; they just don’t think it was worth the inflation. But those conditions mattered for the breakthroughs we’ve seen at Starbucks and Amazon workplaces. Without the confidence that comes with knowing that another job is available, it’s hard to get people to agree to take on their employers.
There are now 25 unionized Starbucks across the country out of 27 elections, and hundreds of other stores are in the midst of active organizing efforts. The Amazon Labor Union’s president Chris Smalls has described at least 50 other facilities asking about organizing their worksites since the warehouse victory on Staten Island. And it’s spilling over: Workers at the Apple Store at Grand Central Terminal are organizing.
Not only are we seeing younger educated workers in retail and food service demanding a collective voice, but also a more diverse workforce engaged in manual labor at one of the country’s fastest-growing occupations. It’s early days, and a successful union election does not necessarily translate into a first contract. But while the reasons for this burst of activity will be studied for decades, it’s hard to deny that tight labor markets and a new determination to demand better working conditions were major factors. And the American Rescue Plan undeniably tightened those labor markets.
A somewhat more compelling argument against the ARP was that its size made it difficult to pass the Build Back Better agenda. All of the ARP’s measures were short-term; some of that $1.9 trillion could have been used to lock in long-term gains. But if you view the ARP through the lens of labor activity, you begin to see long-term gains reflected in bargaining contracts. And if successful, that is likely to have a much bigger political impact.
Scholars have often wondered why no labor-led political movement has taken hold in the U.S., as it has in other countries. But the first step to a worker-led politics goes through organizing the workplaces that unions had previously been unable to crack. Union density in the U.S. is unbearably low, but the speed with which organizing is opening up new sectors like retail and e-commerce logistics could change that. And those workers, properly organized in opposition to a corporate power base that has owned politics in this country for decades, will almost definitionally exert force on U.S. politics. A country with half a million organized Amazon workers and 100,000 or so organized Starbucks workers and millions more who take their cues from these leaders and organize their own workplaces is a power center that will not be ignored.
That could mean a reorientation of the Democratic Party, or a worker-led movement that builds its own base of power and forces all politicians to pay heed. Either way would be a necessary evolution, to counter the boxed-in politics of the current moment, and structurally contend with the downward trajectory that has so many Democratic operatives and polling gurus freaked out.
This may sound overly optimistic, and any number of forces could forestall it, from an inflation-induced recession to pure bullying on the part of the Amazons of the world. But the millions of dollars spent on anti-union consultants have proven rather ineffectual in these early fights. We’ve seen historically in America that union power can take on a life of its own, once given a spark.
If you despair of the current state of left politics, dominated by foundation-funded groups that lack a popular constituency, then one remedy to that is mass-membership organizations built from the bottom up. These nascent labor movements are constructing that in real time, and while they are inward-focused now, the broad aims of the political project aren’t hard to discern. It would focus on several of the historical concerns of New Deal Democrats—support for workers, a functional welfare state, economic and environmental justice, an end to corporate control of government, health care for all—but would actually be grounded in real people. It’s built to succeed in politics precisely because it stands outside it.
Even the slightest chance of creating that movement should be taken, every time, to realign away from a Democratic establishment that has erected what can seem like an impenetrable wall between itself and the people. The American Rescue Plan opened the window a crack for that movement to take hold. I don’t think this was the intention of its architects—they simply didn’t want an Obama-style slow recovery and a midterm collapse—but politics can be unpredictable sometimes.
We saw organized resistance beat back the aims of a conservative-led government five years ago. But it wasn’t rooted in anything but opposition to Donald Trump; it didn’t have a proposition about what it wanted to fight for. A labor-led movement would have that clearer sense, and a stronger resolve to sweep out the politics of the past. If you think a new generation needs to lead the left, it’s already leading. And it might not have gotten going without the American Rescue Plan.
