Why Labor Must Act

Workers, Unions, and the Defense of Democracy

When we look at the history of U-turns from democratic backsliding to democratic revival, the success rate is about fifty percent. That’s the finding that emerges from decades of research into how societies resist authoritarian consolidation—and it should unsettle us. Fifty percent is a coin toss. It means that roughly half the time democratic backsliding becomes permanent, and the institutions, rights, and freedoms people took for granted simply don’t come back.

But there is a variable that shifts those odds dramatically. Where there is active, vibrant union participation in civil resistance, the success rate climbs to over eighty percent. Not a coin toss - a near-certainty. This is the finding that Tarso Luís Ramos, one of the country’s leading analysts of right-wing movements, presented at the 2025 CUNY conference on Labor in the Age of Authoritarian Politics, and it aligns with a growing body of research on the role of organized labor in democratic transitions.

The question this essay addresses is: why? What is it about labor that transforms the odds so decisively? And what does this mean for the American labor movement at a moment when authoritarian consolidation is not a hypothetical but a daily reality?

The Research Foundation

The baseline comes from Erica Chenoweth’s landmark research at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Analyzing 323 violent and nonviolent mass campaigns from 1900 to 2006, Chenoweth and her co-author Maria Stephan found that nonviolent civil resistance was more than twice as effective as armed resistance in achieving its goals. Countries where resistance campaigns were nonviolent were ten times as likely to transition to democracy within five years. And movements that mobilized at least 3.5 percent of a population - roughly eleven and a half million people in today’s United States - never failed.

Four factors drive success: large, diverse, sustained participation; loyalty shifts among security forces and other elites; creative tactical innovation; and nonviolent discipline maintained under repression. Organized labor amplifies every single one of these factors. That is the mechanism behind the eighty percent figure - not coincidence, but a structural relationship between what unions are and what successful resistance requires.

Five Reasons Unions Are Democracy Infrastructure

1. Workers Hold the Kill Switch

Every other form of resistance is fundamentally persuasive. Protests try to change minds. Legal challenges try to change rulings. Advocacy campaigns try to change policy. When workers withdraw their labor, the effect is coercive. Strikes don’t ask the regime to change. They force the economy to stop until it does.

This is Gene Sharp’s pillars-of-support theory in its most concrete form: authoritarian power rests on the cooperation of the governed, and the most consequential form of cooperation is economic. Regimes need revenue, production, logistics, public services. Workers control all of it. When they withdraw that cooperation through strikes, slowdowns, work-to-rule actions, overtime bans, or mass sick-outs, the material foundation of regime power erodes. No other sector of civil society can pull this particular pillar with anything close to the same directness.

2. Unions Are Already Built for This

Civil resistance movements need organizational infrastructure that ordinarily takes years to build from scratch: membership lists, communication networks, meeting spaces, treasuries, elected leaders accountable to their base, legal teams, and the capacity to mobilize large numbers of people on short notice. Unions already have all of it.

This is often underappreciated. When analysts ask why some movements succeed and others fail despite similar levels of popular discontent, the answer frequently comes down to infrastructure. The Tunisian revolution succeeded in part because the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) had offices in every town in the country and could coordinate action at a national scale. The Polish Solidarity movement succeeded because shipyard workers in Gdansk had organizational structures, including shop stewards, communication channels, and strike funds that could scale from a single workplace to ten million members within months.

American unions represent this same latent infrastructure. Millions of dues-paying members connected through locals, regionals, and national federations. Internal communication systems that can disseminate strategic guidance rapidly across industries and geographies. Democratic structures in which members vote for leaders, ratify contracts, and authorize collective action - which means unions are not only infrastructure for resistance but also training grounds for democratic participation itself.

3. Labor Bridges the Divides Authoritarians Exploit

Authoritarian movements succeed by fracturing opposition along racial, cultural, religious, and partisan lines. The wedge issue - whether it’s immigration, transgender rights, or so-called “woke ideology” - is designed to split potential coalitions so that no unified opposition can form. This is the divide-and-rule playbook, and it has been devastatingly effective in the United States.

Unions organize across every one of these divisions, because workplaces are already diverse. A hospital workers’ union includes the Filipino nurse, the white orderly, the Black technician, the immigrant janitor, the Trump voter in administration and the Biden voter in maintenance. When that union joins a pro-democracy movement, it brings cross-class, cross-race, cross-ideological participation that no other institution can deliver at comparable scale.

Chenoweth’s research identifies large, diverse participation as the single most important predictor of success. Labor’s entry into a movement dramatically expands who participates - not just politically active progressives, but working people whose primary identity is “trying to make a living,” not “activist.” When labor joins, the movement signals: this isn’t a niche cause. This is everybody. That signal is what produces the loyalty shifts among elites and security forces that Chenoweth identifies as the second critical requirement for success.

4. Unions Bring Discipline and Endurance

Nonviolent discipline is the hardest thing in civil resistance. When regimes provoke us - through police violence, mass arrests, propaganda campaigns, or agent provocateurs - the temptation toward reactive violence or simple burnout can destroy a movement overnight. Chenoweth’s data shows that campaigns maintaining nonviolent discipline succeed at dramatically higher rates than those that don’t, and that the window for success typically requires sustained action over nine to eighteen months.

Unions bring something rare to this challenge: experience sustaining collective action under pressure over extended periods. Strikes are inherently exercises in disciplined endurance. Training in picket line discipline means union members know how to maintain nonviolent conduct under provocation, follow collectively agreed-upon rules, and escalate and de-escalate tactically rather than emotionally. These are directly transferable skills for democracy defense. And unions have strike funds and institutional continuity that enable them to sustain action for months, not just the days or weeks that burn out ad-hoc protest movements.

Labor also brings a graduated escalation ladder: strike, slowdown, work-to-rule, sick-out, overtime ban, secondary boycott. This keeps movements strategically flexible. This tactical repertoire means movements don’t face a binary choice between doing nothing and doing everything. They can calibrate pressure, test what works, and sustain momentum without overextending.

5. Workers Confer Moral Legitimacy

Authoritarian regimes always attempt to delegitimize opposition by framing protesters as elites, agitators, outside agitators, radicals, or professional malcontents. When working people across multiple industries join a movement that narrative collapses. The broader public sees people like themselves standing up, and the regime’s framing loses its power.

Polish Solidarity began with shipyard workers in Gdańsk. Within months, ten million people joined; a third of the entire Polish workforce. The communist regime could dismiss intellectuals and dissidents. It could not dismiss a third of its own economy refusing to cooperate. The Tunisia model is similar: the UGTT, with its roots in every community in the country, conferred a legitimacy on the democratic movement that no other institution could have provided. Together with three other civil society organizations, the UGTT won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for “its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia.”

Without active central participation by working people in the organizations that represent them, we don’t win. Or it’s a coin toss whether we do. —Tarso Luís Ramos