NEW YORK—Before a cheering crowd on a packed Hudson River pier on Manhattan’s West Side, union Presidents Randi Weingarten of the Teachers/AFT and Sara Nelson of the Flight Attendants helped launch a new pro-union non-profit organization, Unionnow.org.
Joining them on the podium on April 12 were Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., the longest supporter of unions on Capitol Hill, and new New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who picked up strong–but not unanimous–union support in his successful run for the city’s top post last year.
Then came a parade of rank-and-file workers telling their stories of organizing and of oppression. Those workers, and their colleagues at the retailer REI, at Delta Airlines, at Starbucks, at Amazon, and elsewhere, are the ones the non-profit will aim to aid.
“This is really about trying to put power in the hands of people,” declared Nelson. “Workers must start thinking about how to get their product, the union, into the hands of the 70% who want it.”
“The reality is that even if unions spent all of their money on organizing and all of their efforts on organizing, it wouldn’t be enough. They have to also do all the representation of their current members, have contract fights, and all the rest.”
That’s where unionnow.org is supposed to come into the picture, by providing the funds to the organizers and unionists who fight for a voice on the job. “There’s 70% of workers who want a union, and 10% have them,” said Nelson. “If it were a company, they would figure out how to get the product into the hands of the 70% who wanted it.”
The architects of Union Now hope it will provide workers who mobilize with financial firepower. Those architects and initial funders are not listed, yet, on the non-profit’s website.
“This is really about making it possible for working people to get a union, to outweigh the boss, to be able to stand up to bosses who fire workers illegally during organizing drives, to support recognition strikes and to support contract strikes too,” Nelson said. “All in together.”
“Greatness comes when we organize and work together, and put working people first,” Mamdani declared. “Bernie and I stood on the picket line with the Starbucks workers because their campaign is for justice.”
Previously, Mamdani asked New Yorkers to boycott Starbucks until its virulently anti-union management bargains in good faith with the workers at the 600-plus unionized U.S. stores and with their allies in logistical support, Starbucks Workers United, a Service Employees affiliate.
“The most effective tool” against the oligarchy and the bosses “is to have more union density,” Mamdani continued. “Union now will provide workers with more resources, and I and my administration will stand right alongside them.” After leading the crowd in the common chant of “The people united will never be defeated,” Mamdani warned. “The work has only just begun, my friends. The work is something we will all do together.”
Sanders and Nelson tied the future of democracy to the growth and health of unions. “You cannot have a real democracy when a handful of billionaires control the economy and flood our elections with unlimited money. The future of this country must belong to workers–not oligarchs,” the senator declared. “Let’s give a shoutout because unions save democracy!” Nelson exhorted the crowd.
“What a fabulous idea this is,” exclaimed Weingarten, a New York City civics teacher on leave to be the Teachers/AFT president. “We have to fight for rights every single day. It should not be radical to want a living wage, to want a dignified retirement, affordable health care, access to child care, and great public schools.
“But the only way we’ll have it is if we have unions. Union now is about how we get there. In the 50s and 60s, we had more of a middle class then than we have now, more union density then than now, and less billionaires and millionaires.”
The obstacles to unionizing go beyond a weak and antiquated labor law. They also increasingly include billionaire bosses—Nelson singled out Elon Musk by name—who have the wherewithal to not only fight unions tooth and nail, but to outlast and outwait them, for years if necessary.
Unionnow.org’s aim is to counter that financial clout with their own, though none of the speakers said where its start-up money is coming from. That information was also unavailable on its website.
“We’ve organized 283 new units since 2022, but we still have 76 without first contracts,” Weingarten elaborated. “This new process and this new 510(c)3”—the tax code’s designation for non-profit groups—“is really important so that people who want to organize will know we have their back.”
Unionnow.org will raise money to help unions in organizing drives and first contract struggles in particular and in growing union density in general. And that’s important for recreating the middle class of the 1950s and 1960s, when union density reached as high as 33% of all private sector workers.
Now it’s 7%, but one-third in the public sector, and 10% overall. That’s even though public opinion polls show 70% of workers would join unions if they could. But they can’t. One big reason is union-busting tactics by bosses, speakers said.
The workers at the podium stressed their struggles to unionize, and commenters online were both supportive and thoughtful, though some asked where the seed money for the organization is coming from, and how it would decide which workers and which campaigns to support.
Steve Buckley, a lead organizer at the REI outdoor apparel and sporting goods store in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, said the organizing drive there, to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union began because workers “were being threatened by customers not wearing masks,” during the coronavirus pandemic, and REI was doing nothing to protect them.
The campaign has now organized 10 more stores, but “now it’s organizing around our jobs,” he said. “We’ve had targeted terminations and mass layoffs with no reason. We deserve dignity and respect at work, and it’s not going to come unless we fight for it.
“People ask: ‘Why not move on and get a better job?’ I am getting a better job, by organizing to make it less shitty here.” And a paraprofessional in the New York State United Teachers/AFT told of campaigning for a raise. “It’s hard to live in New York City on $30,000 a year,” he said.
Among the online supporters, Michael Byrne, the retired editor of the AFL-CIO News—when it was a regular newspaper—suggested involving the labor federation.
“I love this idea,” Byrne wrote. “Whatever we can to support workers is worth doing, and certainly there are donors out there who will hear the call for workplace justice. Kudos to the labor and political leaders leading this charge. I would think the AFL-CIO would also rally to this project.”
But, harkening back to the purge of leftist unions from the old AFL and the federation’s longtime cooperation with U.S. pro-corporate and often-imperialist foreign policy, Leonard Polletta warned against “letting the anti-Communists in the AFL-CIO get hold” of Unionnow.org. Polletta explained that organized labor “kept collaborating with the CIA” against popular grass-roots movements overseas.
A more positive view of the need for such financial backing for workers came from Buddy Gottlieb: “Organizations like this have been needed for many decades. There is certainly much fighting to do against the wealthiest and most worker-unfriendly companies in this country.”
“They try to sugarcoat their images while hiring the worst union-busting lawyers and consultants to thwart and frustrate the aspirations of their employees through intimidation, interposing legal obstacles, and bad faith bargaining.” And companies “exploit the fundamental weakness in labor law that effectively rewards employers for their abuses.”
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