“Unions Are Laboratories of Democracy”: Hamilton Nolan on Joe Biden, Gawker, and the Power of Labor

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In the summer of 2015, the online news site Gawker, known for its gossipy scoops and puckish style, became the first major digital media company to vote to unionize. The victory bucked a then widespread belief that young journalists had no interest in unions, and spurred a wave of labor organizing in digital media. At the center of the Gawker effort was a journalist named Hamilton Nolan, who had joined the site amid the Great Recession and became its “de facto labor reporter,” publishing scoops on corporate malfeasance and union drives across the country. “We had a lavish roof deck at the office, but no system of getting regular raises; big parties with open bars, but no functional system of internal communication; a pancake machine in the kitchen, but no severance pay,” he writes in his new book, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. “All major company decisions were made inside the mysterious mind of the owner. He smoked a lot of weed.”

Gawker Media’s first contract only lasted for a few months before the company filed for bankruptcy in the face of a $140 million legal judgment stemming from a Peter Thiel–funded defamation lawsuit, filed by the former wrestler Hulk Hogan. (The site was revived in 2021, only to be shuttered again last year.) But the experience created a lasting impression on Nolan, who went on to be a labor reporter at The Guardian and In These Times, a progressive magazine in Chicago. “My immersion into unions felt like finally grasping the right tool after rummaging around in a toolbox for years,” he writes.

The Hammer, which hits shelves this week, comes at a moment of unprecedented public interest in organized labor, even as the percentage of American workers in unions continues to decline. It is both a love letter to the power of workplace organizing and a lacerating critique of the shortcomings of mainstream labor organizations, which Nolan argues have failed to meet the moment. In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Nolan talks to Vanity Fair about whether Joe Biden really is “the most pro-union President in American history,” and why he believes that the labor movement is “absolutely central to the success or failure of the American experiment.”

Vanity Fair: How did this book grow out of your own experience trying to unionize your own workplace?

Hamilton Nolan: I grew up with activist-type parents, went into journalism, and started working at Gawker, where I was writing a lot about labor, inequality, and class war. Every once in a while, people would say in the comments section, Why don’t you all have a union? But I didn’t really take it seriously for many years until 2015, when I spoke to an organizer. We said, “Let’s give it a shot here.” And we unionized. That experience of going through a union drive, especially at a time when there weren’t a lot of unions in the media industry, gave me a lot of insight into the topic. And it also impressed upon me the value of unions, and then the gap between the potential they had and how they were actually being used. For a lot of people who’ve gone through the process of organizing their workplace, you get such a burst of energy and excitement about the potential of unions, and then you look around society, and you’re like, Why doesn’t everybody have this? That was the seed of what grew into this book.

Last year, we saw a number of high-profile strikes in major industries, including Hollywood, automobile manufacturing, and health care. Polling consistently reveals some of the highest public support for labor unions in decades. And yet, as you write in the book, the current reality for the labor movement is a bit less rosy. Can you talk about that?

The average person who reads the news and maybe reads about exciting union campaigns has a perception of a new level of energy around unions and organized labor in America. That energy is real. But the most important measurement of the strength of unions in America is union density, which just means the percentage of workers who are union members. And that measurement has been declining since the 1950s. It used to be that one in three Americans were union members. Now it’s one in 10. The most recent figures in the book were from 2023, where you saw union density was still declining. In late January, the Labor Department released the new union density figures, and it declined once again to the lowest point on record. What we have is this situation where there’s all this public excitement about the labor movement, and yet organized labor has not figured out how to stop its systematic decline. That tension kind of punctures the bubble of the happy narrative around organizing.

We also have a president who touts himself as the most pro-labor president in US history. How would you evaluate the Biden administration’s actual record on labor?

I think he is the most pro-union president, but that’s a very low bar, even among Democratic presidents. Barack Obama did not pass “card check” [legislation], which was a pretty modest pro-union reform. Bill Clinton was sort of the heart and soul of neoliberalism. You can go back through Democratic presidents through my lifetime, all the way back to Jimmy Carter, and none of them were really that enthusiastic about spending their own political capital on behalf of unions. Biden has done that. Probably the best thing that Biden has done for unions are some of his appointees, particularly at the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB is very good. They’ve done what they could to try to reshape labor law, when it’s impossible to get any good reforms through Congress. So, yes, Biden is the most pro-union president, but he also broke the railroad strike. He ain’t perfect. But we’re coming up from a very low bar.

Much of the book focuses on the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the US. You criticize the organization in quite strong terms, calling it a “mediocre in-house lobbying firm and traffic cop for America’s unions.” Can you outline your criticisms of the AFL-CIO?

Back when we first unionized Gawker and got involved in the labor movement, I started looking around and asking, Where is the center of the labor movement? If we are going to talk about reviving the labor movement, the institution that is the most responsible for it is, of course, the AFL-CIO. There’s no other candidate for that position. If you evaluate the AFL-CIO in terms of its job—being to give workers in America power—then it’s been failing for generations now. I don’t say that because I think the people at the AFL-CIO are bad people. But institutionally, we in the labor movement have to be very harshly honest with ourselves. The AFL-CIO has the potential to be the institution that does launch the revival of the labor movement. When I look at it with that belief, I’m always very disappointed by the reality of what it does, which is not to do any of that.

What are the sorts of investments and changes that you would want to see from it?

The biggest one is just spending money on new organizing. We need at a minimum 10 million new union members in America, and that wouldn’t even get us back to the strength of unions when Ronald Reagan became president. That should be considered a first step. But instead of that kind of ambition, what you hear from the AFL-CIO is 1 million new union members in 10 years.

Which would still result in union density continuing to decline.

Exactly. So there’s a lack of ambition and a lack of appreciation of the scale of this problem that we’re facing. As I write in the book, it’s not a mystery how to organize new union members. There are tons of great union organizers in America who can tell you exactly how to organize new unions. What we need is more of them, in more places, with more capacity. It’s not that we haven’t done it yet because it’s hard. It’s that there’s not really even a plan to do it.

Can you talk about some models of unions that you think the labor movement could learn from?

The culinary union in Las Vegas in particular is a good example of a very disciplined union. They’ve spent 80 years organizing workers. The biggest thing that we can all take from a union like that is that they build political power by building labor power—not the opposite. They don’t give donations to candidates and hope that the candidates will help workers. They go out and organize the workers—and they organize all the workers—and with the power of those workers, they then become a powerful political force, which they can use to help those workers. That basic model of really serious organizing, serious union density, constant internal organizing—meaning you’re always keeping your members engaged with the union and ready to fight—willingness to strike when they need to strike, hard strikes, long strikes, bitter strikes, doing whatever they need to do to maintain that labor power in Las Vegas and making themselves a political force by having the workers first. That is what they do really well.

If, as you say, it’s not rocket science, why do you think there is this reluctance in much of the labor movement to prioritize and put resources into new organizing?

Unions are funded by dues paid by their existing members, so there’s sort of an inherent pressure to tend to the needs of existing members inside a union. If you say to a union, “We want you to spend a lot of your resources to go organize these people over here who aren’t your members,” a lot of unions can have a tendency to just say, “They’re not our members, so they’re not a priority.” That is a natural force that tends to suppress the will of unions to do new organizing. Organizing is hard. It’s expensive. It’s uncertain. You can spend a lot of money and still lose. It requires a level of ideology to really appreciate the need for new organizing. It requires unions to see themselves as part of a movement. Unfortunately, for the whole history of the labor movement, there’s been a large faction inside of labor that sees itself as just a sort of business organization rather than a movement.

One of the main arguments of the book is that the success or failure of unions in this country is central to the success or failure of American democracy. Can you explain a bit why you think that’s true?

There are a couple of things I would touch on there. One is that I really believe that the supercharging of inequality, particularly since the Reagan era, is the big trend underlying a lot of the other problems that people see in America, including the rise of Trump. There are basically two ways to fix inequality. Either the government is going to do it through the tax code and regulation, and clearly we’ve been moving in the opposite direction for a long time. The only other way to do it is to give power to workers to allow them to turn around the direction of inequality and take back wealth for themselves. Building worker power is, in my mind, the single most effective tool to fix the single biggest problem in America. And unions are obviously the institution that does that. So even though they are frequently seen as kind of a niche off to the side of the political stage, in reality, they have the potential to be the key that turns around the most damaging trends in America.

The other thing I would say is that in America, we talk about democracy a lot, but most people don’t ever really live democracy in their personal lives. You’re a child, you’re in school, and it’s an authoritarian institution. You’re in a family, you’re told what to do. You grow up, you get a job, you’re told what to do. Maybe you go to church, and you’re told what to do. All of these institutions in people’s lives are not really democratic. We pretend that politics is the democratic field, but clearly the way that politics exist in America is not really a true democracy. So where are people living democracy in their own lives? The reality is that unions—good unions, at least—are one of the only institutions that are actually democratic, in which regular people can get that experience of democracy for themselves and see democracy work. Unions are laboratories of democracy. It’s not just that we need more unions to help inequality. It’s also that the experience of organizing and being in unions changes people. It changes people for the better. It makes society healthier, going through that process. I don’t know of any other institution in America that has as much potential for positive social change as growing the labor movement, if we can just figure out how to do it.

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