Labor’s Crisis Is Not a PR Problem

... as many commentators on the right and left continually assert

Scott Jenkins and I are in Jacobin today combatting the prominent tendency to frame organized labor’s problems as one of messaging and public perception. The simple fact is the labor is more popular today than it has been in some time. The key question, then, is not about PR; it’s about strategy. No one has yet figured out how to translate public approval and interest in unions into a real reversal in the union density trend, and until we do, there are of course going to be worrying symptoms of labor’s decline. But we shouldn’t confuse those symptoms with the underlying cause, which is a strategic impasse.

We offer some hints in the article about what it would mean to overcome that impasse. And I try to tackle that question at greater length in a recent article for New Labor Forum. But of course there’s no simple answer here, more of a conversation and investigation that is long overdue.