NYC journalist and 1999 St. Augustine High School graduate Hamilton Nolan is the son of esteemed civil rights historian David Nolan. From The New York Times:
The Labor Movement Hasn’t Taken Off. A New Book Explains Why.
“The Hammer” offers portraits of organizing efforts from around the country at a time when the future of union power has reached an inflection point.
Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, addresses Amazon workers on Staten Island in 2022.Kena Betancur/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Willa Glickman is on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books.
THE HAMMER: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor, by Hamilton Nolan
In 2022, after being elected president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the biggest federation of unions in the United States, Liz Shuler stood before a crowd of union officials gathered in a large ballroom in Philadelphia and announced a new goal: “In the next 10 years, we will organize and grow our movement by more than one million people!”
The longtime labor reporter and former Gawker journalist Hamilton Nolan was in the audience and he was not impressed; given projected job growth, sticking to this aim would actually cause the percentage of workers in the country who are unionized to drop. As Nolan writes in “The Hammer,” his lively account of the current landscape of American labor organizing, “It was reminiscent of Dr. Evil in ‘Austin Powers’ demanding as his ransom request for the entire world, ‘One million dollars!’”
Nolan’s book joins the ranks of Steven Greenhouse’s “Beaten Down, Worked Up” and Jane McAlevey’s “A Collective Bargain” in making a rousing case for a robust labor movement. “The Hammer” aims to show that unions are the best way to combat economic inequality, give disenfranchised people genuine political power and counter the allure of the far right among the working class.
At the same time, Nolan is critical of the labor establishment, writing that many large unions have embraced what the labor strategist Rich Yeselson calls “Fortress Unionism,” an argument that it’s better to avoid difficult, new campaigns in states and counties hostile to organizing or in industries with few existing unions in favor of waiting for a mass worker uprising to announce itself. What would such an announcement look like? “Perhaps every worker will emerge from the office and fire guns in the air,” Nolan muses, “until the smoke wafts over A.F.L.-C.I.O. headquarters.”
Nolan has felt the mess of organizing from the inside — “The labor movement can make you feel crazy,” he writes — and his depiction of his own vexations is one of the book’s charms. At Gawker, where he worked for the first decade of his career, antagonism was the house style. The union effort that began there in 2015 “was the first thing in my life that forced me to spend an extended period of time genuinely listening to the positions of people who disagreed with me and pissed me off.” A balm in its own right and an exercise, he says, that allowed him “to become a better person.” (The union also ensured that he and his colleagues weren’t laid off when the company was sold in the wake of Hulk Hogan’s Peter Thiel-backed lawsuit.)
“The Hammer” offers an impressive array of scenes from the front lines of the 21st-century economy: Child care workers run a decades-long campaign to bargain collectively with the state of California; a prep cook launches a unionization effort at a biscuit restaurant in West Virginia. Even in the most traditional fight that Nolan describes, at a good old-fashioned factory, the antagonist is a giant conglomerate that describes itself in very modern terms as a “global snacking powerhouse.”
A recent wave of spontaneous labor agitation, in addition to more favorable political conditions under the Biden administration, has suggested to some observers that a reverse in the persistent backslide of union power that has been underway since the 1970s might be possible. “For people who had toiled in the union world for the first two decades of the 20th century,” Nolan writes, “the post-pandemic labor boom was like emerging from a dark cave into a daytime fireworks show.”
But the small, grass-roots unions that took on behemoth companies like Starbucks and Amazon have faded from headlines — in part because those companies have used illegal tactics to deny their unionized employees contracts thus far. (Both companies are appealing the judgments against them in such cases.) It infuriates Nolan that labor leaders did not more aggressively seize the day: The percentage of unionized workers fell between 2020 and 2022.
To illustrate why this happened (and fume about the missed opportunities), he tells the story of Felix Allen, a young man with no organizing experience who, inspired by union drives at Amazon and Starbucks, tried to unionize the Lowe’s store he worked at in New Orleans. He had reached out to a Teamsters local and found them to be friendly but not able to offer much material support, so he decided to organize independently. Anti-union lawyers and consultants descended on the store, and it was found that a minor paperwork error — Allen was taking this on without legal help — meant he would have to redo his petition for an election. While he was regrouping from this setback, he was fired.
Nolan argues that big unions leaving workers like Allen on their own is an act of “callous abdication.” Organizing new employees is usually a resource-intensive endeavor with uncertain results, but ignoring them, he writes, has left “a black hole” in the middle of the labor movement.
Nolan’s search for a leader to step into this void brings him to Sara Nelson, the charismatic president of the Association of Flight Attendants. Raised by Christian Scientists in a small city in Oregon, she first got involved with the A.F.A. after a fellow flight attendant and union member lent her $800 in her first month working for United: Her paychecks were delayed and she was going hungry.
Progressive, media-savvy and unafraid of a hectic travel schedule, Nelson zoomed around the country supporting workers of all kinds — baggage handlers in Chicago, miners in Alabama, Starbucks baristas in Richmond. She soon became one of the most prominent faces of the movement. Nolan fantasizes about a refreshed A.F.L.-C.I.O. under a Nelson presidency, but his hero was sidelined by a serious hip condition before she could even launch her candidacy.
Given the book’s passionate, muckraking spirit, it is a bit surprising that Nolan suggests the famously stodgy A.F.L.-C.I.O. as the answer to labor’s ills, even as he critiques its lumbering ineffectuality. He notes that a previous reformist president, John J. Sweeney, failed to make headway with top-down measures, but doesn’t explain how a Nelson-led coalition would be any different.
The argument that the labor movement needs a powerful center, or that the right leader might have been able to “turn it all around,” sits uneasily alongside Nolan’s observations about “the natural conservatism” of large institutions. On the other hand, grass-roots energy alone hasn’t been enough to expand union membership, especially in the face of coordinated and lawyered-up corporate pressure. As “The Hammer” shows, the kind of solidarity that might naturally arise from shared frustrations on the conveyor belt doesn’t necessarily translate to the broader movement all on its own.
In 2021, one of Nolan’s subjects, Donna Jo Marks, helped lead a strike at a Nabisco factory in Portland, Ore. Then the Democratic Socialists of America came knocking. Would Marks speak at a rally to bolster community support for the strike? She initially declined, because she didn’t see the point of leaving the picket line for a bigger platform. “I still didn’t understand the gravity because I lived in Nabisco world,” she says. “All I could see was Nabisco problems.”
Eventually, after weeks of little progress in the strike, Marks decided to attend a rally. She was frustrated with her fellow union members, who didn’t seem as committed to picketing day after day as she was, and she wanted to give them “a piece of her mind,” Nolan writes. But when she saw the crowd of local supporters, many of them from other unions, she choked up. A co-worker put an arm around her. Suddenly, her focus shifted. “They’re trying to show us our place,” she said, gesturing behind her to the factory. “It’s not about money. It’s about where we are in society.”
THE HAMMER: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor | By Hamilton Nolan | Hachette | 260 pp. | $30
The upper classes need a constant stream of income and wealth to feed their egos and ensure that their offspring will be just as well off. That money has to come from somewhere, and that's your ass along with various financial schemes. That and political reasons is why the labor movement can't flourish. Gonna get a veto from the upper classes every time and they're the ones who buy offices.
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