In the years immediately before and after the pandemic, we witnessed a new phase of workers’ insurgence in the United States, at first with the multiplication of strikes between 2020 and 2022 and then with a unionization drive in several workplaces, also facilitated by the National Labor Relations Bureau under the Biden administration. What is left of that insurgence in front of Trump’s anti-labor counterattack, anti-union legislation and attacks against migrant workers?
There was certainly a moment when this uptick and new dynamism was quite potent. Some of this was owed to the simple tightening of the labor market that occurred in the course of the pandemic, when many people were dropping out, there were different forms of state support and subsidy and large eviction moratoriums, while large numbers of older workers stayed out of the labor market because of ongoing health concerns. And this leverage was felt in a quite intuitive way by a number of workers across a range of sectors. And they pressed that situation to their advantage. And in many cases they were able to win new organizations, launch successful strikes, and certainly saw their wages increase to a degree that we hadn’t in the US labor market in some time.
But I think we should avoid an overly optimistic portrayal of what that movement was, in the early part of the decade. The general story for labor is still one of a precipitous decline in union density. It is still a situation characterized by employer offensives looking to de-skill large portions of the labor movement through the introduction of new technologies and ongoing efforts to violently discipline, especially the lower ranks of the labor market and the parts of the working class whose relationship to citizenship status or the general protections of the state are quite checkered.
The Trump administration has deepened and accelerated those trends, with the attacks on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the deportation boom, together with the introduction of AI explicitly framed around disciplining white collar labor, which has been a prime enemy of the administration. More than a million federal workers have had their formal rights to be in a union organization attempted to be stripped away, which is a relatively large plurality of unionized workers in general.
So, the situation is quite difficult, but there are trends from that earlier moment which have survived, and there are moments of dynamism that do persist in the labor movement. Two of them, in particular, which need to be analytically disarticulated.
The first is the recomposition of the formal institutional level of the union movement in a more left-wing direction. There have been significant efforts to transform and take over the Teamsters, the UAW, to fight for more progressive leadership of the Communication Workers of America, to just name a couple of prominent examples. The real challenge is that this has not penetrated or actually gotten into where the rank and file exists. The vast majority of these organizations still promote a certain level of passivity amongst the rank and file. They are not democratic organizations and are largely hollow.
The second one is the trend among the grassroots and rank and file of the labor movement to experiment new models of organizing predicated on self-activity, self-organization, democracy, and militancy. This trend sometimes is working in conjunction with some of the more institutional layers of labor movement, sometimes working at a distance.
The strike activity has been curtailed in certain sectors under Trump, but you can still observe many people groping for a different way to organize. And this precisely is a result of the weakening of juridical forms of protection in the sense that under Trump people are having to find extra-legal, non-grievance, non-NLRB forms of defense and are turning to a range of other kinds of tactics instead. So, there is a much more conflictual organizing posture.
In recent months we have also seen the emergence of new struggles by new subjects. I’m thinking about tech workers in particular. A few weeks ago Long-Haul promoted an online discussion with the tech workers that had gone on strike at the New York Times and Kickstarter. What are the potentials of these struggles in a context in which tech and AI are increasingly central to productive processes?
In the labor movement, tech workers are rarely considered to be interesting. They are extremely well paid relative to other parts of the workforce. They’ve in many cases been the symbolic representation of gentrification or displacement even. And they are working at the commanding heights of American capitalism. And they have a lot of the features that highly skilled workers have historically had in relation to those kinds of jobs, as engineers, as skilled technicians, including a high level of identification with the work process, or sometimes even the enterprise.
But there’s been quite a bit of dynamism over the last decade of tech worker organizing. In the first Trump administration, there was a series of walkouts that took place, especially in solidarity with anti-racism or against misogyny in the industry, against the potential complicity between the large platforms and Trump’s policies of one kind or another. And over the last decade that movement has undergone a real process of maturation. In Long-Haul we wanted to capture some of this really important dynamic learning process that’s underway amongst a group of workers who in many cases are not even formally unionized, but are struggling nevertheless to exercise some control over the labor process.
We are interested whenever there are workers that are taking action, but it’s also hard not to see the historical analogies between this particular layer of the class, these skilled software engineers, and those highly skilled technicians with those instincts for workers control that helped also build alliances with a range of other layers of the working class to produce things like the workers councils of the early 20th century.
I think the dynamism that comes from the sector might allow us to rethink the playbook that has existed for large parts of the official labor movement, centered on an apex of power being organized for a one to three day, maybe one week strike and through the demonstration of unity would maybe bring the employer to hear. In certain sectors or industries, you can feel the impact of a work stoppage relatively quickly. But with tech workers, their leverage builds durationally in that it takes time for the things that they work on to break.
This opens up a way to think about a union or a kind of fighting organization within a particular workplace not as being a matter of centralization of a series of individuals that are working towards a super-majority, but instead as comprised of these kind of composite work teams and a federation of those work teams. This is something which is happening in a bunch of different sectors, but tech is one place where this thinking is spreading relatively quickly and in a pretty exciting way.
Tech workers are fighting on many fronts. They’re fighting against misogyny and racism in their workplaces. Other workers are struggling over the length of the workday, trying to claw back time. Others are fighting in solidarity with their co-workers with visas. Others are organizing to exercise control over the work process, particularly with AI but not exclusively with AI.
One practice which has started to take place like wildfire across the tech sector is this struggle to develop AI norms or work rules related to how AI is used. In a number of workplaces, they had team-by-team meetings where they discussed how to actually implement or use AI and how not to. And they tried to say: we won’t ship code that wasn’t reviewed by a human, we won’t do requests that weren’t generated by a human, if you send me a bunch of work that’s just AI gobbledygook, I’m not going to use it and I’m going to send it back to you. These work rules have set the stage for new kinds of confrontation with management, but this kind of work rule also hearkens back to the way in which the highly skilled technicians in the past have used to try and exercise some more control over the labor process.
In the current context of war and global disorder, in which the consequences of the war in Iran in particular are strongly impacting the conditions of living labor in the United States, to what extent have the workers’ struggles over wages included a refusal of war in their claims?
The war in Iran is tremendously unpopular, since its outset it was more unpopular than the war in Vietnam even at its nadir point and yet that unpopularity did not translate into stopping the war from taking place or from blunting further escalations. Looking at fuel and diesel prices, I think this will translate into increased cost of living and hit workers in the United States more than it has even begun to and that might have a catalytic effect on struggles, and there certainly is the effort on the part of many workers themselves to frame this cost of living increase as being related to the bellicosity of the top levels of the American state. However, explicit organizing on the shop floor against the war is not necessarily a common frame and practice.
Despite the ways that American workers are facing the costs of Trump’s war, workers in the United States are still more insulated than other workers from those costs. Some of that has to do with the expansion of fossil fuel production over the last 20 years in the United States, and another part of it has to do with the nature of the American war-making state, which in response to the popular struggles from the 20th century has shifted from a more labor-intensive to more capital-intensive forms of warfare. This has meant not only a reduction of soldiers that are being sent to fight these wars, but also a contraction of the number of Americans who are subject to the kind of speed-ups and sweating that would be associated with wartime production in the past.
This doesn’t mean that some struggles haven’t surfaced. There’s a range of struggles we should just highlight where workers have taken up the baton of a kind of anti-imperialism and anti-militarism, and sometimes with quite remarkable effects.
One notable example is in higher education, which might seem somewhat removed, but higher education interfaces with the American war machine in several way, with a tremendous amount of research feeding either directly or indirectly into defense programs.
In the past couple of years there haven’t been just the student encampments, but also a number of shop floor struggles by lab workers at Dartmouth, at Columbia, and the University of California, who were refusing to work on contracts related to Israeli companies or the Department of Defense. In some departments at the University of California, workers were actually successful and won the right to refuse Department of Defense (DoD) and Israeli contract work if it was assigned to them, to refuse it as a lab. And this came, again, from the strength of work group-style deliberation and activity around this kind of issues.
Another struggle worth mentioning, obviously, is the strike for Palestine that took place in the University of California in 2024 in the spring, right at the kind of high-water mark of the student encampment movement across the country. For a time it was officially sanctioned by the union, and rolled across a number of campuses, starting at UC Santa Cruz, and is documented in the second issue of Long Haul.
There are struggles from dock workers, and we are doing this interview less than a week before the dockworkers’ strike in Genoa and across the world. Media workers have also been on the front lines of fighting for the right to criticize war, and the kind of consent machine that exists in many of the workplaces that they’re in. Workers at Boeing, which is a major defense contractor, have been talking about different forms of industrial sabotage that occurred before and after a major strike that they were on over their wages and working conditions.
So this kind of struggles do exist and tangible international connections are developing. I think the thing to stress is that the possibility for dramatic international action has to rest on a strong foundation of rank-and-file activity. The issue that they initially fight over doesn’t really matter, it can be a political issue, it might be an economic one, but it’s the degree to which those kind of sinews of self-organization have extended and fortified that really determine whether or not these struggles against militarism are able to go farther. And while these struggles obviously haven’t done much to blunt the war, they provide a barometric pressure map of where labor is still fitting into the American war machine and where resistance is going to be most important in the coming years as we develop a struggle against militarism.
In the past months, the deportation machine has been accelerating and becoming more widespread, with ICE having adopted a less spectacularized but more effective approach. However, after Los Angeles in June 2025 and Minneapolis in January 2026 we have not seen other occasions of mass mobilization against deportations even if there are still several organizational efforts to oppose or obstruct deportations at the local and legal level. Why do you think this is the case? How is the opposition to deportations manifesting itself at the moment?
The most basic answer is that ICE tactics have shifted in response to the successful struggles that have been waged against them. So in their earlier efforts, the paradigmatic case being Operation Metro Surge across Minnesota, they sent 3,000 or 4,000 paramilitary goons into a city, often with antagonistic relationships to other forms of local law enforcement and government.
This form of federal paramilitary invasion of cities to do mass forms of arrest has totally failed. Even before Minneapolis, these tactics were already in precipitous decline, since these quite spectacular mass arrest events often involved working in a public space, in the heart of cities, and it also meant there was quite a few people that could be congregating to have some resistance to this. It was reported that in the first year of Trump’s new anti-immigrant crusade, up to 30% of these spontaneous protests against ICE would result in physical confrontation between law enforcement and the protesters.
And then Operation Metro Surge in particular was roundly defeated by this huge day of action, but also by the tremendous ubiquity of people self-organizing neighborhood-level defense to constantly draw attention to and hector and harass and surveil the ICE agents which were trying to conduct these raids. So I really think we need to recognize the strength of these self-organized, self-defense initiatives in a couple of places where the shock and awe approach was strongest. But the ICE tactics have changed.
The older leadership have been defeated and pushed out of the administration and a much subtler approach started to increase arrests through close cooperation with local law enforcement and quieter arrests in people’s homes in small numbers, often at night or right in the middle of the workday where people are outside of their neighborhoods. And I think we still haven’t found an appropriate posture for how we fight back against these more nimble, targeted arrests.
That doesn’t mean that the struggle has stopped. And there are two things worth highlighting. One is that there has been a real proliferation of ICE watch, ICE defense groups, especially amongst workers in sites of social reproduction as schools and hospitals. Some of these like in Oakland, California have been tested to some success, like in the case of K-12 teachers in San Pedro and Los Angeles who have helped leverage their connections to school sites to build neighborhood watch against ICE raids.
But there’s also been another level of resistance amongst the immigrants in detention themselves. There’s a wave of hunger and labor strikes that kind of rolled across the country earlier this year, particularly in detention centers owned by the GEO group, like in Delaney Hall in New Jersey. These struggles became catalysts for protests outside and parts of the movement are looking to these activities as sensitive points where struggles might concentrate again.
Whether one is or is not interested in the alchemies of the U.S. electoral system, the upcoming midterm elections will be undoubtedly relevant for the prospects of class politics in the near future. While we are speaking, i.e. two weeks before the election, the political scenario seems extremely difficult for Republicans. How do you read this situation? In 2024, a Long-Haul Magazine editorial affirmed that in the last presidential elections U.S. workers, far from voting from Trump, had abstained in mass, having found no reason to support Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party. Do you think the current scenario is a sign that this attitude might be changing compared to two years ago?
Certainly workers did not participate in the 2024 election as a class and the Republican Party’s claims at becoming a new working class party were unfounded then and they’ve only become more unfounded since. It’s certainly true that Trump’s outstanding electoral performance come in part from protest votes that he drew on from more proletarianized layers of the American electorate that did participate. These were people that were not voting out of a kind of new ideological commitment to the far right, but were voting largely, to the degree that they voted at all, for Trump out of a mounting cost of living crisis that the Democrats had no policy to offer for.
Trump said he would do two things.He said he would lower prices and he said he would end forever wars. Well, he’s done neither and in fact, made both much worse. And large layers of the very provisional one-time coalition he put together in 2024 have defected and peeled off, and will not be supporting him in 2026. And he eroded support also among some of his more core supporters, which puts him in a difficult position.
I would anticipate there’s going to be some pretty significant democratic success across the country, despite the huge flooding of Republican money into the election. In some cases, they are outspending Democrats, I think like a hundred to one in some races. Elon Musk has spent more in this cycle than he did in the 2024 cycle, which is remarkable.
In any case, when thinking about this dynamic of parts of the class in their relationship to electoral politics, we need to start to think about this compositely or sectorally and across the segmentations that define the working class in the United States, rather than speak about it at too much generic level of as a class. I think there’s going to be portions of the class for whom turnout is going to be stronger and then portions where it might prove to be weaker.
In the past year, we have witnessed an increasing number of victories by socialist candidates in Democratic primaries, while DSA members have reached the record number of 120.000. What is the social reference of this kind of politics?
There are certain sectors of the class which have been all in for that. This has especially been true in New York, but also elsewhere, which is this fecund combination or alliance between a typically college educated, more educationally certified, but proletarianizing professional layer concentrating in cities and a range of first and second generation immigrants, which have low levels of identification or institutional integration into the Democratic party. And these are people who have for a range of issues rallied around internationalism, around a redistributionist agenda, because of the candidates they’ve been able to draw on, because of the strength of social movements amongst those layers of the class in the last couple of decades.
One of the real Achilles’ heels for the social democratic current in American politics is the inability at the same level to integrate black Americans voters in the working class into the project. The older black voters in particular, despite rich traditions of struggle, despite high levels of association, culture, and organization, have still much stronger levels of identification with the Democratic party as a kind of defensive ballast against racism and revanchism. And this challenge has played out at local levels across the country.
What do you think of the first year of the Mamdani administration in New York?
I think there are two different strategic logics behind the support for Zohran and then what’s being pursued in government. There’s a dominant logic and there’s a subordinate logic.
The dominant logic can be characterized as an effort at executing a series of redistributionist and good government policies that could consolidate a constituency for social democracy. It means passing redistributive policies, consolidating a kind of durable working class block against whatever other kind of propertarian blocks that exist in US politics, building that block on a class basis that might enable ongoing electoral success at a national level.
Zoran has so far been successful. He has frozen the rent. He expanded universal childcare, which is a huge help to people to be able to stay in cities. He has promoted another range of affordability issues. And it’s an effort because the fiscal powers that actually produce these policies, the policy-making apparatus, often exceeds what you can accomplish at a municipal city level.
That strategic logic, however, often involves compromises with a range of forces, including Trump quite prominently, but also including other centrist factions of the Democratic Party, major business leaders in the local capital’s class. It’s meant compromise, again, with a range of people that are political antagonists generally to the project of socialism. This led for example to Zohran moderating and withdrawing demands on Palestine solidarity and on local policing. Whether or not this can kickstart a lasting political identification with the social democratic block, or a virtuous cycle of class formation that would trickle down from elections or policy, remains to be seen.
There is another strategic logic, though, in the movement, which was expanding everyday people’s participation in politics and capacities for self-organization. Now, one out of eight adult New Yorkers volunteered for Zohran’s campaign in the last cycle. It is a quite tremendous widening of the scope of people who are engaging in this kind of political activity. And Zohran has, in a more modest way, tried to pursue some of these policies within government.
He has promoted the building of tenant associations across the city. He has also worked in tandem with some of the more organized parts of the tenant movement to elevate demands around tenant control and municipal ownership of disgraced properties from major bankrupt corporate landlords. He is opening a new office, which is going to promote new unionization amongst workers and small shops. So there’s this other logic of self-organization and developing the organized capacity of people to exercise control over their lives.
But this is a subordinate logic. And I think that this is not the main way that he’s governing. I think the efforts towards that level have so far been quite precarious, they’re quite fragile. And they also highlight, I think, an ambiguity that formal organized activity does not always mean fighting capacity. So that’s some of the tensions that exist there. I think we’ve seen more the social democratic left populist dimension of Zohran rather than the kind of Zohran of everyday people’s protagonism.
As a member of the DSA communist caucus, what do you think is the strategic direction that the party should take in going forward? Do you think it is possible for the DSA to become something more than just an electoral force that pushes the Democratic party to the left?
DSA is the largest socialist organization in more than living memory in the United States. It does have continental reach, although a lot of membership is concentrated in the cities where those two compositional layers of the immigrant dimension and the downwardly mobile working class dimension are most predominant.
It exploded after Bernie, and it was characterized for some time in terms of quite inchoate, but a range of different experiments of organizing and politics, just about everything under the sun was being pursued under the banner of DSA. As the electoral success has grown, however, there has been a strong current pulling in the direction of the left populist experiments of Latin America and Europe in terms of consolidation or a charismatic leadership, with the disappearance of the previous militant organizer, activist layer. The focus has been more on disciplined messaging against a wide range of internal, deliberative, democratic culture. And I think New York is furthest along in these lines.
There are hundreds and hundreds of people in New York City that draw a wage from a DSA candidate, office, campaign, etc. And these people predominate in the internal deliberations of the chapter here. And it has really narrowed the space for debate and also the experiments and organizing that need to really take hold.
So, Communist Caucus has long said that we should polarize debate in DSA, not along the lines of accountability for our politicians versus cheerleading support for them, but precisely polarize along other lines, asking if politics actually trickle down from elections and legislation, or if it should be built from the grassroots level. At what level does class formation and class organization actually take place? And we have tried to promote a bunch of efforts at class organization in and outside of DSA. Within DSA in some places we’ve been successful, particularly in places where the electoral experiment for a range of reasons hasn’t taken hold.
But it remains to be seen whether or not DSA will become basically the next left populist vehicle in North America, or if it will continue to be something with a lot more potential and with a reach into more experimental forms of organizing at a grassroots and more molecular level. But that’s a debate, which is a struggle internally, the outcome of which we can’t predict yet.