What can we anticipate from the labor movement in 2025?

The major labor struggles in 2024 should give us reason for optimism that the labor movement is trending in the right direction – from new auto organizing by the UAW in the South to ILA dockworkers shutting down East Coast ports to protect their jobs from automation, from hotel workers in major tourist cities striking for and winning major raises to grad workers striking in California in response to violent university repression against the movement for Palestine. While union density (the number of union workers compared to the labor force as a whole) remains at around ten percent, unions continue to enjoy record popularity, private sector union workers are securing the highest wage increases they have seen since 2001, and we have seen an uptick in large, high-profile organizing campaigns at non-union companies.

A whole book could be written to evaluate the labor movement in 2024, but the point of this article is to look ahead: what can we expect in 2025?

New organizing

New organizing is crucial to the labor movement regaining serious strength and influence to counter corporate America. A labor movement that doesn’t aggressively grow into new unorganized sections of the workforce has effectively accepted our decline. But more of the labor movement is rejecting this future and working to build a brighter one through investment into new organizing. The opportunity is there, but we will need to fight for it.

The Teamsters leading the fight to organize Amazon

The Teamsters have been pursuing an aggressive new strategy to organize Amazon – the country’s second largest employer with over one million workers in the U.S. and worth $2.4 trillion. Teamsters have been building momentum with new announcements coming regularly out of every part of the Amazon logistics empire – delivery driver hubs, warehouses, and airhubs going public with their union campaigns. We’ve seen workers sign a majority on union cards and march on the boss to demand recognition in Staten Island, Palmdale, Skokie, Queens, San Francisco, Industry, Victorville, and Atlanta. And more are continuing to follow.

Their strategy isn’t to rely on NLRB elections though. Teamsters can safely anticipate Amazon will drag out the normal process for years and years, especially given Amazon’s existing challenges to the constitutionality of the NLRB itself. Instead, they will continue to build their organizing momentum across hubs and prepare to fight.

With majorities signed up at more and more facilities, Teamsters are demanding Amazon recognize their union and negotiate a contract. The national strike of Amazon facilities this Holiday peak season was just the first taste of what the workers can do as they organize more of the company. It will take more to bring the corporate goliath to its knees, but this strike has helped to build the confidence of Amazon workers in their union. That means more workers reaching out to the Teamsters, more facilities hitting the majority and marching on the boss, and spreading their union across more of the logistics network.

All of this continues to build the momentum of the movement and sets the stage for the next strike to be bigger, until the movement is big enough to force Amazon to have no choice but to concede. When the UAW first took on the auto industry in the 1930’s, many thought it was simply impossible to take on the likes of GM, Chrysler, and Ford. Through the ingenuity and steadfastness of the workers and their union, they did the impossible and built auto into a foundational part of the US labor movement, setting standards for good jobs across the country. And they did it through the groundbreaking use of the sit-down strike and militant organizing against the richest and most cutthroat captains of industry, not waiting for any politician or broken process to save them.

Triple Threat Against Delta

Delta has been the White Whale of the airline industry for organized labor for decades now. They are the largest passenger carrier in the states and have been the non-union outlier in an industry with otherwise very high union density. Delta is facing three different organizing drives at once. The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) are organizing 28,000 flight attendants, the Teamsters are organizing the mechanics, and the International Association of Mechanics (IAM) are organizing the ramp workers and baggage handlers. All three union drives are facing a steep climb against Delta which is notorious for preventing workers from organizing for decades.

If successful, the AFA drive would be one of the largest and most new organizing campaigns in decades. Since airlines fall under the more restrictive Railway Labor Act, the union will need to reach majority support on union cards, can only collect cards in person, and will most likely need to run a mail-in ballot election.

While this battle is heating up for union recognition at Delta, flight attendants with AFA are in ongoing contract negotiations at United (28,000 workers), Alaska (6,900), and Frontier (4,000). All three bargaining units have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, and have been navigating the bureaucratic maze of the Railway Labor Act to build their strike threat despite the legalistic barriers imposed by the government.

Organizing New Tech Manufacturing

In recent years the government and corporations together have been directing hundreds of billions of dollars into building out high tech manufacturing in the U.S. The CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act have been two central pieces of legislation aimed at building up these sectors with massive subsidies and tax-breaks to major corporations. They are investing in building out the sectors most critical to future technological development, like semi-conductors, electronic components, electric vehicles, and battery technology.

This massive investment ultimately isn’t coming from a desire to “uplift the American worker” or to “save the middle class” from a declining standard of living. Biden and Congress chose not to include requirements for job creation or union neutrality agreements, and left in loopholes that companies could use to buy back stocks despite taking CHIPS money. Earlier this year, Intel, who committed to creating 10,000 new jobs upon receiving $8.5 billion in CHIPS funding, announced that they would instead lay off 15,000 employees by the end of the year.

At its core, the primary objective of the CHIPS Act is competition, not jobs. It’s a war policy intended to counteract China’s rapid rise in advanced manufacturing, after decades of U.S. corporations offshoring production in search of greater profits.

In fact, politicians will explicitly say so in all of their speeches motivating this influx of cash to corporate America. Fear mongering around the economic rise of China serves as an excuse for these corporate give-aways and as a distraction to tell American workers their enemies are abroad instead of sitting in the corporate boardrooms and Congressional seats.

Putting aside the why of the legislation, we know that these industries are growing and growing fast. With the growth of these new industries and mega factories, unions are recognizing the historic opportunity to organize these new massive facilities, ensuring good, stable union jobs. If unions can successfully organize these massive facilities, they can begin to shift the balance of power towards organized labor across the country, especially in the South where many of these new mega factories are being built.

After the historic victory of the UAW at the Big 3 in Fall of 2023, UAW set out to organize non-union auto and battery plants in the South. So far, the UAW scored a major victory at the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, TN, and the Spring Hill GM Ultium battery plant, not to mention the new organizing drive at the massive Ford BlueOval battery plant in Louisville. Strong contract campaigns and eventual victories at these newly organized facilities can serve as inspiration for more non-union auto and battery plant workers to join the movement.

In the coming year, we are likely to see more organizing across the South take on the non-union auto industry at these new manufacturing facilities. At the same time, we are seeing more non-traditional organizing of low-wage service workers by the Union of Southern Service Workers which could change the calculus on organizing a group of workers often written off as too difficult to organize.

Making serious in-roads to organize the South and break up the anti-union political stronghold there could finally conquer some of the ghosts of Jim Crow holding back the labor movement. Efforts to organize these industries could lift up one of the least organized and most exploited workforces in the heart of the anti-union south. Without overcoming either of these challenges, our movement could find itself stuck between them.

Contract battles and potential strikes

Just as new organizing drives will be critical to expanding our movement beyond the density we see today, the success of major contract fights serves to provide inspiration for all working people on what we can win if we are organized. The UAW’s Big 3 strike in 2023 showed non-union auto workers the power of union organization and ultimately strike-readiness. And without the 2023 UPS contract gains the Teamsters won with the massive strike threat by 340,000 workers, there would be no Amazon organizing wave. These are some of the fights we believe will have the greatest national impact and can help serve as that inspiration for more to join the movement.

ILA Dockworkers Strike Again

At the start of October, 2024, 45,000 dockworkers and members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) struck all ports from Maine to Florida to Texas for three long days, costing corporations as much as $4.5 billion per day. The entire billionaire class panicked. Chambers of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers called for the government to invoke Taft-Hartley to end the strike. The corporate media demonized the dockworkers for hurting American workers and anti-union politicians like Florida Gov Ron DeSantis called in the state national guard to attempt to break the strike.

Ultimately, the ILA reached a tentative agreement over wages, scoring a 62% increase over 6 years and a 90 day extension with the shipping companies to resolve the remaining issues. That extension expires on January 15th. Their central fight remains unresolved – preventing the introduction of automation and semi-automation on the docks. The existential concern for the union is based on the experience of these same workers seeing their jobs slashed with the introduction of containerization technology in the 60’s and 70’s. With the introduction of shipping containers, bosses decided to lay off huge portions of the workforce, leaving as many as 95% of dockworkers without work. The country’s largest port in New York and New Jersey went from over 35,000 longshoremen in the mid-century before containerization down to just 3,500 by the mid-1970’s.

Now they see the threat of new automated systems nearly eliminating the remaining jobs in other ports around the world, so they have put down a red line against the unmitigated introduction of automation on the docks. Since the extension, negotiations have broken down once again. If no agreement is reached by January 15th, dockworkers will shut down all the East and Gulf coast ports once more.

This time, their strike would be only five days before Trump’s inauguration. While the Biden administration felt the pressure from the corporate elite to invoke Taft-Hartley to end the strike, they realized it would be politically unviable for them to take such an aggressive anti-union action only weeks ahead of the November election. Earlier this month, Trump expressed support for the ILA in their contract fight. How this statement will hold up if the potential strike prolongs into his new term remains to be seen.

Educators continue the fight to defend public education

The Chicago Teachers Union is working hard to “secure a transformative contract that can act as a forcefield against the prohibitions on teaching Black history, the elimination of supports for special education students, and the mass deportations and other harms Trump promises to rain on our city and our most vulnerable Black and Brown students.” Fairfax educator unions, following the achievement of collective bargaining rights in Virginia, recently won a historic first contract covering 27,500 workers of Fairfax County Public Schools. The Red for Ed movement continues to make important progress in the fight for public education.

At the same time, educator union locals across the state of California are preparing for the launch of the “We can’t wait” campaign from San Diego to Los Angeles to the Bay Area and Sacramento. Over the last decade, many of these educators have been organizing and reviving a fighting spirit in their unions, with major strikes having happened in cities like LA and Oakland. Despite California having the 5th largest economy in the world, larger than most countries, the state ranks 33rd for spending on education per student. Whenever educators are bargaining for the contracts they deserve, they are battling against these limitations of public spending available to meet their demands for adequate staffing, salaries, and resources for their students. The We Can’t Wait campaign is bringing a set of united demands as they organize across the state for wins for public education that serve the needs of students, educators and school communities.

In a time when public sector workers, especially educators, have been under constant attack by the right-wing, this campaign provides for an important next step in the struggle for public education. Educators have been at the forefront of the battle against the billionaire-backed charter school movement for more than a decade now, and that battle is still raging. Rather than waiting for the right-wing pro-corporate forces to weaken and do away with their union and make their work impossible, public sector workers can remind us that we can go on the offensive and demand better working conditions for educators and better learning conditions for their students.

Healthcare in Crisis

The healthcare sector has been facing multiple growing crises in recent years. Exacerbated by the pandemic, healthcare workers are getting ground down and leaving the field, public hospitals are closing down or restructuring under absorptions and privitization, and meanwhile healthcare prices keep rising for patients. The only winners have been the executives and investors who have gotten filthy rich. As a result of these mounting crises, healthcare workers themselves have been organizing and fighting back, most notably with the 75,000 Kaiser Permanente workers striking in 2023 in the country’s largest ever healthcare strike.

In the coming year, hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers will be at the bargaining table again. Another 57,000 healthcare workers across Kaiser Permanente are in contract negotiations led by Alliance of Health Care Unions representing 10 different unions with their current contracts expiring on September 30th. Also in California, UC healthcare workers and lab technicians with the Union of Technical and Professional Employees (UPTE) are in bargaining and already held a two day ULP strike at UCSF in November. They are now preparing to expand their strike across all of UC if their demands for fair pay and safe staffing aren’t met. Finally in California, two independent unions of 6,250 nurses at two Stanford hospitals are in negotiations as their contracts are set to expire on March 31st. These same units last struck in 2022 for the first time ever and are preparing to strike again if needed.

Across Oregon, over 5,000 healthcare workers across Providence Healthcare, the state's largest healthcare system, have been struggling for fair contracts. These workers are preparing to coordinate what could be the largest healthcare strike in Oregon’s history. Nearby in Washington, the state’s contract with 55,000 home healthcare workers with SEIU local 775 will expire on June 30th.

Meanwhile, Michigan is also on the precipice of major contract fights. 10,000 Michigan nurses with Corewell Health organized and won their union with the Teamsters. Now they will be fighting for their first contract. Additionally, after regaining collective bargaining rights under state law, 30,000 home healthcare workers will be bargaining with the state for fair pay for the first time in over a decade.

This all comes at a time when more and more Americans are sick and tired of the failures of the for-profit healthcare system in the country. The mounting grievances and outrage at the injustice of the healthcare debt crisis and the abuses at the hands of the insurance industry have hit a boiling point. This has never been clearer than with the outpouring of vitriol for healthcare CEOs after Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group, was murdered.

Political Battles

Finally, beyond organizing a specific workplace or winning a contract, working people are facing dire political attacks on the gains won by people’s movements in the last century, including some of the greatest gains by the labor movement. We need to make our unions more than just a struggle for a better contract, but to defend the gains we have made for all working people and to fight even harder to expand those gains to new heights.

Federal Workers vs DOGE

The stated goal of the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” – or DOGE – is eliminating huge sections of the federal workforce through mass layoffs and slashing almost all corporate regulations along with many critical social services. Along with its equally evil twin – Project 2025 – it is part of the developing plan to dramatically restructure, cannibalize, and ultimately dismantle much of the federal government.

We have written extensively on the nature of these attacks and what we know so far in our recent article – The Department of Government Efficiency – The Reign of the Billionaires. As Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the two billionaires appointed to lead this effort, begin the all out assault on the federal workforce and the programs they oversee, we already know federal workers are preparing to fight back. Working people across the country will need to join the struggle to protect many of the major victories of the last century of people’s movement as the billionaires put them in their crosshairs.

Immigrant Workers Under Attack

Over the last few years, the mainstream position of U.S. politicians and pundits around immigration has taken a decisive rightward turn, to the point where both mainstream parties were competing on who was tougher on border security during the presidential elections.

These attacks on immigrants come as the politicians and billionaires search for a new false enemy to blame for the country’s problems. They want to misdirect the anger of working class people about our problems towards our immigrant neighbors, co-workers, and friends, rather than holding the billionaires responsible.

The government’s spending reflects these priorities – annual spending on immigration enforcement agencies has dwarfed spending on enforcement of fair labor standards. In 2021, congress appropriated $25 billion for immigration enforcement and employed 79,000 people, while they only appropriated $2.1 billion for labor law enforcement and employed 9,400 people. That means the government would rather spend over 12 times as much money and people power on policing the border, hunting people down, and deporting them instead of ensuring that American born and immigrant workers have safe and dignified working conditions where their rights are respected.

With the incoming Trump administration threatening to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, we can anticipate workplaces will be a critical battleground. In Trump’s first term, there was a huge spike in the use of workplace raids to crash a worksite and arrest suspected undocumented workers.

Unions, immigrant rights organizations, worker centers, and religious institutions have all played a critical role in defending immigrant communities in the past. Many progressive leaders in the labor movement are watching on for what will happen next and beginning to organize to defend their members and communities, ranging from launching Know-Your-Rights educational campaigns to issuing calls for general strikes to resist mass deportations.

Defanging Labor Law

The framework for labor law in the US has become increasingly politically volatile, with larger swings in legal interpretation from the appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from presidential administration to administration. Now with the incoming Trump administration, they will surely once again reinterpret and restrict labor law, pushing the balance further in favor of the bosses. As part of this, Project 2025 has laid out plans to dismantle other federal labor protections as yet another front of this battle. This could mean undermining and weakening minimum wage and overtime protections, health and safety standards and enforcement, and limits on union busting tactics.

Any recent progressive rulings from the NLRB will likely be reversed, including the national ban on captive audience meetings, more sensible standards for holding union elections, and limiting various other carve outs and loopholes for employers to skirt labor law. One example is the recognition of graduate workers at private universities. When these workers last gained recognition in 2016 under the Columbia decision, the Trump board immediately set sights on reversing that. Now these workers are more organized than ever with over 40% of all grad workers now represented by unions, and they won’t give up their unions without a fight.

While the Trump NLRB may once again chip away at labor law protections, pro-corporate forces are working to make even more sweeping changes to almost completely neutralize labor law enforcement. Dozens of companies now, including Amazon, SpaceX, and Trader Joes have made the argument that the enforcement of labor law by the NLRB is unconstitutional. So when these companies have been brought in front of the NLRB for violating workers rights, they not only contest the charge, but claim the whole system is illegitimate. These arguments will surely make their way to the Supreme Court, where other forms of federal oversight have recently been struck down.

As the labor movement gains strength, the bosses, politicians, and their courts will attempt to tighten legal constraints on union activity while simultaneously trying to deny any recourse through the law to defend our rights on the job. If the boss chooses to throw all the rules out the window, unions will have to fight like we did before the passage of the NLRA and all bets will be off.