The Working Class Built This Country. It's Time We Started Acting Like It.
The unions played an important role in our economy. We need them back.
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There’s a version of American history that gets told a lot — the self-made man, the entrepreneur, the rugged individual who built something from nothing. I believe in that story. I really do.
But there’s another version that doesn’t get told nearly enough. It’s the story of the guy on the factory floor in Rockford, Illinois in 1955, pulling a good wage, owning a home, sending his kids to college — not because someone handed it to him, but because he had a union at his back that gave him the leverage to demand his fair share. That story is just as American. And we’ve been systematically dismantling it for fifty years.
I’m a Republican — or at least I was one before the party decided to become something I don’t recognize. And one of the things that made me different from a lot of my colleagues was that I believed in unions. I had significant union support in my district. I was proud of it. Working people were my constituents, and their interests were my interests.
That hasn’t changed. And right now, those interests are under serious threat — not from some foreign enemy, but from an economic system that has tilted so far toward the top that it’s barely recognizable as the country my grandparents built.
Let’s Talk About the Numbers
In 1950, America had just emerged from a world war and was entering one of the most sustained periods of broad prosperity in human history. The middle class exploded. Wages rose. Home ownership became attainable for regular people. The wealth of the country was, by historical and global standards, reasonably well distributed.
Here’s where we are today.
The top 1% of Americans now hold roughly 31% of total household wealth in this country — about $55 trillion. That is nearly equal to everything owned by the bottom 90% of Americans combined. Let that sink in. One percent of people hold as much wealth as nine out of ten of your neighbors, combined.
Between 1989 and 2022, the increase in wealth for a household at the top 1% was 101 times larger than the increase for the median household. One hundred and one times. For someone at the 20th percentile, the gap was nearly a thousand times larger.
This is not a natural outcome of a free market. This is the result of deliberate policy choices, sustained over decades, that systematically tilted the playing field.
And one of the most consequential of those choices was the slow, steady destruction of organized labor.
What Happened to the Union
In 1954, roughly 35% of American workers were union members — more than one in three. Today that number sits around 10%, and it’s been falling for decades.
This didn’t happen by accident.
It started with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, passed over Harry Truman’s veto. Truman called it a “slave-labor bill.” He wasn’t wrong. It opened the door to right-to-work laws — which, despite the name, are really right-to-undercut-your-coworker laws — and systematically chipped away at union organizing power.
Then came August 1981. Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers and banned them from federal employment for life. It was a signal to every corporation in America: the government is not going to protect your workers anymore. The era of labor is over. Capital wins.
And capital took note. Union busting became an industry. Right-to-work spread to state after state. Trade deals shipped manufacturing jobs overseas without requiring a living wage. The NLRA — the National Labor Relations Act — became a punchline, with a neutered board and enforcement mechanisms that couldn’t keep pace with aggressive corporate legal teams.
The result? The middle class that unions built started hollowing out. Wages stagnated for working people while productivity kept rising. The gains went somewhere — they just didn’t go to the workers generating them.
I’m Not Asking for Perpetual Strikes. I’m Asking for Power.
Let me be direct about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying unions should be on a perpetual war footing, grinding commerce to a halt every time there’s a contract dispute. Strikes are a tool. Sometimes they’re necessary. But the most powerful thing a union can do isn’t a strike — it’s making a company understand that a strike is possible.
Leverage matters. The threat of organized collective action is what produces the contract, the wage, the safety standard. You don’t always have to use the weapon to benefit from having it.
What I am saying is that the labor movement needs to get serious about power — and that means two things above everything else.
First, vote as a bloc. Unions used to be able to move elections. They can again. In 2024, exit polls showed significant variation in how union members voted — Teamster members broke nearly a third for Trump, while other unions held firm for Democrats. The political power of organized labor is fragmented and declining because unions themselves are fragmented and, in some cases, politically unserious. That has to change.
Second, support candidates with middle-class policies regardless of party label. I know that’s complicated in today’s environment. But the standard should be simple: does this person support the right to organize, collective bargaining, fair wages, and worker protections? If yes, they’ve earned your support. If no, they haven’t — no matter what letter is next to their name, and no matter how good they sound on cultural issues.
The Elephant in the Room: Unions Drifting Republican
I want to be honest about something, because it’s important and because sugar-coating it doesn’t help anyone.
A significant and growing number of trade union members — especially in construction, building trades, and manufacturing — are voting Republican. And the Democratic Party has, in many ways, earned that drift.
Trade union members are disproportionately working-class men. Many of them are culturally conservative. They go to church. They hunt and fish. They’re skeptical of elite institutions. They don’t love being lectured to about politics and culture by people who’ve never held a wrench. The national Democratic Party, in its current form, sometimes feels like it was designed specifically to alienate them.
I get it. I really do. These are my people.
But here’s what I need to say plainly: the Republican Party, as it currently exists, is not your friend. I say that as someone who spent years inside that party. The GOP has opposed every major piece of pro-labor legislation in modern history. They’ve stacked the courts and the NLRB with anti-union judges and appointees. They’ve pushed right-to-work in state after state. The rhetoric may appeal to your cultural instincts — and I understand why it does — but the policy record is unambiguous. They are on the side of the people writing the checks, not the people cashing them.
Democrats, for their part, cannot take union support for granted. If you want union votes, show up. Talk to actual workers. Stop treating the labor movement as an ATM you visit before elections and ignore the rest of the time. The drift toward Republicans is a warning — a loud one — and the answer isn’t to dismiss it as false consciousness or culture war manipulation. Some of it is. But some of it is earned frustration, and it deserves a real response.
This Is About the American Promise
Here’s my bottom line.
The deal that built the American middle class was simple: you work hard, you get a fair share of what you produce. That deal held — imperfectly, unevenly, but it held — for about thirty years after World War II. And it held, in large part, because organized labor had the power to enforce it.
We broke that deal. Not workers. The people who spent fifty years systematically dismantling the institutions that gave workers leverage broke that deal. And the bill is coming due — in wage stagnation, in hollowed-out communities, in a politics full of rage because people can feel that something has gone deeply wrong even when they can’t always name it.
The answer isn’t nostalgia. You can’t just reload 1955. The economy has changed, the workforce has changed, and any serious labor movement has to grapple with that honestly. But the principle doesn’t change: workers deserve a fair share. They deserve a seat at the table. They deserve to be able to look their employer in the eye and negotiate as something approaching equals.
That’s what unions provide. That’s what’s been stripped away.
It’s time to build it back.
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