SPONSORED: This article is part of a series that seeks to elevate and define a progressive vision of “the good life,” developed by the Roosevelt Institute in collaboration with The American Prospect. You can read the whole series here.
Labor unions should be a key part of the progressive response to the yearning for a new vision of the good life. Unions, by their nature, are a vehicle for regular people to improve their jobs, community, and society, all while building solidarity with one another.
But even though public approval for unions is at near record highs, the proportion of workers in unions has been declining for decades. There is plenty of discussion in the labor world about what policies are needed to reverse this trend, with particular focus on the need to reform labor laws, and for existing unions to organize aggressively. These reforms are certainly both necessary and vital.
A less-discussed factor that may also be contributing to the labor movement’s dwindling numbers, however, is the virtual absence of positive portrayals of unions in our culture, and of structures that connect people to unions. It is common for people to have a positive view of unions in general while not being interested in joining one themselves. This is consistent with cultural stereotypes of unions as being just for blue-collar factory workers, or only relevant in the past. The wave of organizing and strikes happening now has the potential to replace those musty images with new ones, and to allow both virtual and real-life communities of union members to flourish. But the left must be conscious about amplifying those cultural messages and nourishing those structures, something it sometimes neglects as it focuses on pursuing victory in the next campaign and on the indisputable need for policy reforms.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of unions in achieving a progressive vision of a good life. The unions formed by workers of the 19th and 20th centuries were responsible for securing many of the basic material ingredients of personal happiness: the eight-hour workday, the weekend, minimum-wage and overtime pay requirements, limits on child labor, and workplace safety laws. Today, unionized workers are able to build a strong middle class. They shrink racial and gender earnings gaps, reduce income inequality, benefit non-union employees, and even improve the economic mobility of future generations. Through their unions, workers strengthen democracy; they gain experience in democracy by participating in it at work. Voter turnout is higher among union members and even in communities where unions are strong. White workers in unions have lower levels of racial resentment.
Harder to quantify but perhaps just as important, through unions people build a sense of community, identity, and meaning, which are vital elements of the progressive vision of a good life. In his recent book about the modern U.S. labor movement, Hamilton Nolan profiles Jackie Jackson, a family child care provider in California who worked for 20 years to win a union for herself and other providers like her. This benefited tens of thousands of people, almost entirely women, many of them immigrants or women of color, who work significantly more than full-time to provide vitally important child care in their own homes to children from low-income families, and are dramatically underpaid through the state subsidy system. In addition to her acute need for better pay and benefits, Jackson continued to fight all those years “because it felt like a lifeline against resigning herself to a system that seemed impossible to live with.” Working with other providers to build a union was a way to combat isolation, to build power, and to insist to the world that child care is a profession worthy of respect—exactly the sort of community and meaning that people crave in our isolated and fragmented world.
Union representations in popular culture are sparse, mostly very old, and often negative.
Forming a union at work, or going on strike, can be empowering and rewarding to a life-changing degree, but it is also often terrifying and high-risk. Whether a person decides to take that risk is shaped, in part, by their background beliefs about unions. When unions represented a larger portion of workers, they often served as community hubs and identity-shaping organizations for members, their families, and their neighbors. In their recent book, Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol show that this was the case in the mid-20th century in Western Pennsylvania, when being a “union man” was central to many workers’ lives, shaping how they viewed themselves and their fates as intertwined with those of their fellow workers. But as those unions declined, right-wing institutions like gun clubs and megachurches took over the cultural and social role that unions once played, with dramatic effects on the political affiliation of those communities.
Today, some workers understand the value of unionization thanks to family and community history. Many of the teachers and school support staff in West Virginia who started the “Red for Ed” educator strikes of 2018-2019 cited as their inspiration their coal miner relatives who went on strike during the “mine wars” of the early 20th century. And some workers are inspired to take action, or are assisted in doing so, through conversations with union organizers.
But declining union density means that fewer communities have an identification with unions, and fewer people have deep family histories with unions as those older generations pass away. Unions do not have the resources that would be necessary to organize every workplace, especially given the significant legal and other barriers that employers employ to prevent workers from unionizing. All this means that mass culture, including social media, is even more important in shaping people’s ideas about unions.
Union representations in popular culture are sparse, mostly very old, and often negative. As discussed on the podcast Citations Needed, Hollywood’s portrayals of unions have generally been consistent with the anti-union positions of studio heads. Early portrayals of unions focused on organizers as outside agitators, as in the 1914 silent film The Strike, in which a union organizer blows up a plant in which he’s working. By the 1950s, the predominant trope had shifted to union leaders as corrupt, as in On the Waterfront (1954), the second season of The Wire (2003), and Hoffa (1992) or The Irishman (2019), both about Jimmy Hoffa, who, in actuality, was not the only union leader of the 20th century. More recently, cultural representations have focused on unions as ineffectual or greedy forces that drive companies out of business or protect lazy or incompetent employees, as in the pro–charter school, anti–teachers union documentary Waiting for Superman (2010). Not coincidentally, these tropes echo messages that union avoidance consultants use; they portray unions as “corrupt, money-grubbing businesses that … neglect workers and tear companies apart.”
As union density started to decline, especially in the 1970s, the number of cultural portrayals of unions dwindled. There have been some positive portrayals of unions in movies like Norma Rae (1979), Newsies (1992), Bread and Roses (2000), and Sorry to Bother You (2018), and one-off episodes of TV shows like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1996), Sister, Sister (1996), The Simpsons (1993), and Bob’s Burgers (2018). But all but two of those are more than 20 years old. The NBC sitcom Superstore (2015–2021) included realistic portrayals of the injustices of retail work, and had storylines about a strike and a union organizing drive, but never showed workers successfully standing up for themselves. There are also excellent labor publications and journalists, some of which engage regularly on social media, but none yet that have the reach of a high-profile influencer.
By contrast, as “The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism” shows, the right engages intensely and successfully on a cultural level with people’s longing for meaning, community, safety, and good feelings. Right-wing influencers like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan provide alienated men with apparent solutions, starting with basic self-improvement advice but ranging quickly into toxic masculinity and conspiracy theories. Anti-abortion groups and MAGA rallies welcome newcomers and provide a sense of belonging. The success of these messengers and movements points to the fact that the left does not simply need positive cultural representations of unions in order to inform people that unionizing can raise wages and improve working conditions. Rather, progressive cultural messages and institutions must acknowledge the deeper human needs for connection and meaning, and show how collective labor action can satisfy those needs.
To rebuild a strong labor movement, the left should focus on the cultural representations that inform how workers think about unions. When unions win big, as happened last year when the United Auto Workers secured impressive gains from the Big Three automakers after their historic strike, and Hollywood writers and actors won concessions from studios after their strike, those triumphs generate buzz and cultural interest. But in terms of mass culture, as opposed to news, the representations are sparse. There’s a great movie or TV show to be made about the story of underdog workers at Amazon or Starbucks triumphing against a giant corporation while building community with their co-workers and gaining a sense of purpose. And more investment in labor podcasts, YouTubers, and TikTokers would be valuable for keeping narratives about unions in the culture, even when huge strikes are not in the news.
On a more grassroots scale, the model of worker-to-worker organizing, in which workers connect with each other to share their experiences in launching unionization campaigns or strikes, serves the dual purpose of changing the way workers think about unions and creating connection and a sense of shared identity and purpose among workers. This kind of grassroots digital organizing, supported by existing unions, helped the Red for Ed teacher walkouts to spread from West Virginia to other states, and has contributed to unionization waves at Starbucks and in industries like higher education and journalism.
A focus on cultural messages and grassroots connections among workers could help to replace old images and ideas about unions—the black-and-white pictures of grim-faced men at a factory, or the Springsteen song about how the kid knew his youth was over when he got a union card—with new and optimistic ones. It could also build solidarity and community among workers in their workplaces and across the country. A focus on culture will not by itself solve all the problems facing the labor movement. But more prominent cultural stories about how people can build good and meaningful lives by joining together in unions could help direct people’s longing for community, agency, and understanding toward unions as part of the solution.
