Chris Townsend has been organizing workers, conducting political work for labor unions, and teaching young workers to organize for almost all his adult life. He is, as we say, “the real deal.” While most of us opine and pontificate about labor, Chris does the dirty work.

    By Chris Townsend, Michael D. Yates

He organizes. His contributions over several decades have played a key role in rebuilding the United Electrical Workers (UE), rekindling new organizing and campaigning in the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), helping to initiate what has become the Starbucks movement, and contributing in countless other ways to the work of the labor movement. He declares without hesitation that, “the workplace in the United States is a dictatorship,” and proposes dramatically expanded union organizing as one antidote. Chris is also a committed socialist, someone who understands that the labor movement must be much more than just disconnected and isolated labor unions, politically adrift, organizationally stagnant, and taking blows from all sides. Organized labor must return to its roots, when bringing capitalism to an end was the ultimate goal. —Michael D. Yates

Michael D. Yates: Chris, how and when did you first become active in the labor movement?

Chris Townsend: I joined the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) in Tampa, Florida, just after I got out of high school. I grew up in Pennsylvania, and in 1979 the economy was at a dead stop. Every mill, mine, railroad and other employer had a layoff list a mile long. A young kid like me had zero chance of finding any job. Mass unemployment was a scary thing to see when hundreds of people would line up for a handful of jobs. I was on my own and took off for Florida where I had an Uncle I could stay with. He said there were at least a few jobs down there. I got hired as a sanitation worker and I found out that the ATU was organizing the entire municipal workforce of the City of Tampa. I fell into it by accident. ATU took the lead because for twenty years they had represented the bus operations which were eventually run by the city. By the time I arrived the public sector had been allowed to officially organize through a State of Florida process. The organizing drive included over 3,600 workers in every city classification, from Accounting Clerk 1’s to Zookeeper 2’s, and everything in-between. I jumped into the union with both feet, doing just about everything you could think of. Some of the old-timers who ran the local were Cuban Americans, but they were communists and sympathizers who had fled the Batista regime. The Cuban Revolution was their political North Star so to speak. These guys trained me and put me to work. I was a volunteer organizer who did anything they needed me to do in just about every corner of the city. I became a shop steward for a while, then was elected to the local Executive Board in late 1981. Somehow, I got nicknamed, “the kid,” and I hated it. There were lots of other young workers there, but I guess at 17 and 18 and 19, I was the youngest who was that active.

MY: Did you move to the left before or after your entry into the labor movement?

CT: I became a leftist in high school, by listening to shortwave radio and reading. One of the things I read was Monthly Review, it was carried by the Franklin and Marshall college library. They put it out with the newspapers and magazines, and their library was open to the public. I saw my future prospects declining day by day under the Nixon regime, then Jimmy Carter. I figured out bit by bit that this “system” we have is not our system, it’s the bosses’ system. It robs people, oppresses people, torments people, and crushes them. And it does not hesitate to massacre on a gigantic scale when it wants to. The U.S. genocide on Vietnam was sickening. When our puppet regime in the South finally collapsed at the end of April, 1975, we all saw it on live TV. It was the way that we abandoned and just ditched most of our supporters and hangers-on in the final bug-out that ironically convinced me that I was a socialist. If these people were dumped so fast, why on earth would I think that these same ruling forces would ever help me if I was in a jam? This rotten boss system is in it for the money, the power, the bloodlust. They don’t give a damn about workers.

Once I learned about the class system, the class struggle, and class interests, my loyalty became crystal clear. I owe my allegiance to my class, the working class. Period. I’m lucky I learned that when I was young. I suppose there are more complicated ways to become a Marxist, but that was mine. I didn’t need to read Marx’s Capital to realize as a worker that I was at the bottom, always at the mercy of the boss and his gang. I have read plenty of socialist literature over the decades and it doesn’t take a 400-page textbook to explain all this to a worker. I thought then, and I still think, that the constant tendency to grossly overthink these basic realities is one of our greatest and most debilitating diseases on the left. As I turned left, I was also pushed along by Carter’s revival of military draft registration, which I flatly refused. My family also lived twenty-four miles from the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in March of 1979. Seeing the nuclear industry in cahoots with our government and endangering everyone for their superprofits just put me over the top. I also read Lenin’s article, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” about that time, and the door opened for me. Every worker needs to read that short article.

MY: You worked for many years with the United Electrical Workers (UE). Tell us about this time in your life. What is special about the UE? What lessons did you take from your work there?

CT: I was recruited to work for UE in 1988. I joined a squad of organizers who were assigned to try to organize the plastics division of General Electric (GE). There was no bigger, more powerful, or more anti-union corporation than GE. UE was the original union that organized huge portions of that conglomerate in the 1930s. But by the time I joined UE, the combined forces of GE, Westinghouse, Congress, the FBI, the CIO, the AFL, practically all the Democrats and Republicans, and the news media had thrown every punch there was to try to kill them off. While enormous damage was done, they failed to completely liquidate UE. It really is a “rank and file” union, a “democratic” union, a “militant” union. The salaries of union leaders and staff are very modest. Militance is encouraged, not crushed. New organizing is a top priority of the union, not just an afterthought. Political positions are arrived at democratically, by the members. I saw all that up close. Go to the UE web page and read their Constitution. That’s the document that mandates how the union is run. You won’t see anything like it anywhere else, sadly. UE represents today a living fragment of William Z. Foster’s TUEL (Trade Union Educational League), the TUUL (Trade Union Unity League), and the early CIO. There were other unions similar to UE in many ways, but they were the unions wrecked and destroyed by employer and state repression in the 1940s and 50s. The business unions were also eager to feast on the wrecked left-led unions, but UE and ILWU managed somehow to survive.

After four years in the field as an organizer, UE sent me to Washington, DC, to run their Washington Office. It was quite an assignment for a guy like me. No other union would have ever, I mean ever, selected a guy like me to staff their political action work. That’s another UE “difference”. Being “just a worker” really meant something. For twenty-one years I conducted the federal and state level political work of UE, its political education work, and I also kept a big hand in organizing and bargaining. As the political staffer I still participated in new organizing, independent union affiliations, strike struggles, and bargaining. I joined the General Electric UE bargaining committee at that time. During this assignment I was also able to work closely with Bernie Sanders. The AFL-CIO had banned him, wanted to oust him from his House seat, but he was extraordinarily supportive of our UE locals in Vermont, and our new organizing. We were happy to work with him, and I had five or six years where UE was practically the only union who would deal with him in DC. I am considerably to the left of Sanders, and it was always fun for me when I was introducing him to a UE group as “My conservative friend from Vermont.”

In those years UE was grappling with the need to diversify from being a strictly manufacturing union. Plant closings and layoffs were draining away tens of thousands of members, and new organizing in factories was at a low ebb. Where it remains today. We continued to try to organize in manufacturing, but practically all the results were found in other sectors. When I retired from UE in 2013 after twenty-five years, we were already a majority non-manufacturing union. There was no alternative.

Today, UE has experienced a major rebirth with the addition of more than 35,000 workers in the higher education field. We first organized graduate and research workers in 1996 in Iowa, and today UE is composed of workers in seven different industrial sectors with the higher ed grouping now the largest by far. And I have to point out that today, in mid-2025, UE is once again larger than the IUE, the right-wing union started in 1949 with the sole goal of destroying UE. The dwindling IUE fragments merged with the CWA about twenty years ago. They have rejected significant new organizing, and it was sometime in the past two or three years that UE passed them up. I wish that the tens of thousands of IUE victims, now gone, could see this day.

UE is known today for lots of things, its left character perhaps one of the most widely known aspects. But the really amazing thing is that UE has survived and is rebuilding. Most embattled unions just fold up and merge with another union, never to be heard from again. We were determined to survive and preserve as best we could the member-run and left principles of the union. All serious labor students should examine UE for its history, its character, its methods of bargaining with and dealing with employers, and its political stands. If you are in a union today, looking at our current moment, I would say that you had better study how UE suffered immense blows for decades and has still somehow survived. And now grown again, without resorting to gimmicks like union mergers that get labeled as “new organizing.” UE defies convention, and they prove over and over again that there really is an alternative to the failing business union model that we are all saddled with today.

MY: You have belonged to and worked for other labor unions, and you have been a successful organizer everywhere you went. You have also trained many organizers. Give readers a rundown of your organizing activities, including recently through your union organizing schools. How is it that you have succeeded? What is your secret, so to speak? Why are workers receptive to what you do? Why aren’t there many more of you out there, because if there were, we might now see our labor movement being revitalized?

CT: I have belonged to four unions over forty-six years in the labor movement; ATU, UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers), SEIU, and UE. All very different kinds of unions. My short time in UFCW was as a successful salt, and my brief stint at SEIU was characterized by my jerking the local union forward by restarting its new organizing and adding almost 500 new members. In 2013 I retired from UE and rejoined ATU after a break of twenty-nine years since I had been a member in Florida. Larry Hanley, a bus operator from New York City and a force determined to revitalize ATU, was elected ATU President and recruited me to start his mobilization department and restart their new organizing. My time at ATU was a whirlwind. I kicked new organizing into gear and today ATU is at its largest membership ever in 133 years. Almost 10,000 new members have been added by winning more than 235 campaigns in the U.S. and Canada. And we built a campaign apparatus that now allows the union to conduct bargaining support and strike struggle, and to defend transit workers from political attacks.

Almost one-third of that organizing success has been in the South. The AFL-CIO is well aware of this success, but they sit camped-out today in several southern states, claiming to “organize.” They should take a look at ATU’s experiences in the south, but they won’t. They are busy spending a lot of money, organizing little, and diligently carrying on the AFL-CIO tradition of organizing failure. In my time at ATU we also engineered one of the greatest victories against transit privatization when we defeated the privatization of 175 bus operators here in Washington, DC. And won their return to the public transit agency. We did this after an 84-day strike in 2019, in Lorton, Virginia, of all places. We followed an initial game plan devised by ATU President Larry Hanley, myself, and my co-worker Todd Brogan. Big ATU Local 689 in Washington, DC, was won over after initial resistance. Hanley’s bold goal was to try to win a reversal of privatization someplace and then launch this movement in other places to combat and turn back the spreading privatization cancer in the transit industry. But he passed away before the final success of the campaign, and his successor regime immediately abandoned any notion of continuing this work. Today it’s as if this remarkable victory never happened. When I decided to retire from ATU in 2022, this was one of the reasons. The post-Hanley leadership is quite content with privatization. Business union lethargy and small-mindedness comes in many flavors, always at the expense of the rank-and-file.

My most remarkable feat at ATU was when Larry Hanley, myself, and longtime organizer Richard Bensinger started a union organizing school in late 2017. We needed a means to train ATU leaders and local officers to expand the new organizing program. Bensinger raised the idea of the training work being done in the context of a multi-union collaboration to encourage “salting” as an organizing tool. Each participating union could rely on the overall experience of the volunteer collective as they engineered their own campaigns. A number of unions including ATU were able to organize new shops through the school, and in 2020, even under the cloud of the pandemic, Bensinger and the Workers United, Rochester, New York, Joint Board launched what became Starbucks Workers United. Salts were recruited and deployed to three Starbucks stores in Buffalo, New York, where the first three NLRB elections were won in later 2020. As of mid-2025 more than 600 Starbucks stores have been organized through NLRB elections. It is still amazing for me to think about how that drive is in large measure an outgrowth of the homemade organizing school that we had constructed under the ATU umbrella. I worked to get William Z. Foster’s collected works, American Trade Unionism, back into print to use with the school. Nearly a thousand copies of Foster’s book have been used with the Starbucks workers and in 250 other workplace campaigns since then.

What is even more amazing than the historic success of the Starbucks movement is the near complete lack of interest in this actual upsurge by the rest of the labor movement. The AFL-CIO is thoroughly disinterested in listening to the details of how the school, the salting, and the early campaign was put together. I have personally spoken to the top leaders of 15 unions to try to coax them to sit for an hour and listen to how the school was started and how the salting was conducted. No takers. This same near-total lack of interest goes for the academic labor programs and the labor nonprofit world. You might think that the story of how one of the most successful campaigns in recent decades was started would be a curiosity. Not at all. I have, thankfully, had considerable success with young workers, some local unions from a variety of unions, and left organizations who have listened to the story of how we started the organizing school and by extension the Starbucks movement. Through probably 125 different Zoom sessions and meetings, I spread the story and have promoted Foster’s book. Many of the participants go on to attend one of the organizing schools I run, or teach at, and dozens have become volunteer salts in campaigns in ten different industries.

MY: Following the previous question, the labor movement continues to lose ground and most unions do little organizing. Nor do they do anything to educate their members, especially to teach workers the truth about the political economy in which labor has to operate. Yet, some academics and popular organizations and magazines continue to claim that there is taking place a resurgence of the US labor movement. Every strike, every time a “dissident” wins high office in a union, every new contract is greeted with unadulterated joy and a sign of good things to come. What is your assessment of the US labor movement? Why, given that the facts do not match this optimism, do we keep seeing what we might call “the good news only” school of reporting and commentaries?

CT: We have slid into a period in our labor movement where decline, decay, stagnation, and timid leadership have become formalized. The “leadership” today in many unions is at best an administrative layer: functionaries carefully tending to the decline, keeping things on-track as we are pushed towards oblivion. There are examples to the contrary, but not very many in my experience. Our left and labor press also suffers during this period, as increasing numbers of writers come forward who have virtually no substantial experience in labor work. We have to be careful not to blame the inexperienced, especially in an era when getting any real experience is difficult, and sometimes impossible. But we should not excuse the editors of these publications, who dutifully cram all sorts of “good news only” stories into the publications. We have folks writing articles and even entire books on new organizing today who have organized few, if any, new workers in their own careers. I use the example of someone with a car repair issue; How many of us take our cars to the shop and then tell the service manager to assign the least experienced “mechanic” to fix our problem? That’s patently absurd when we think of it that way, but this is today how labor staffs most of it organizing work, and it certainly applies to how many of our left writers are selected. And to top off this problem, there seems to be little to no curiosity or desire to go out and find the people who are, or who have, done the difficult organizing work. And really debrief how they are actually winning the campaigns they are. Our movement leadership just puts the “organizer” hat on almost anyone, offers little guidance and even less training, and then hires another crop of “organizers” when they quit—or are fired.

This state of labor journalism also doesn’t inform very well. Who is Liz Shuler, the head of the AFL-CIO? Of course, that’s a trick question, since she is one of the absolutely least experienced labor “leaders”—ever— at her level. She was given the top spot in the labor movement with virtually no trade union experience to speak of. Writing about that I suppose might explain a lot of how we got into the jams we are in, but god forbid we would say something unkind about “the first woman” to run the labor federation. The reality is there are 10,000 women unionists out there, toughing it out in the shops, winning grievances, leading, bargaining, striking, and organizing. But none of those things are requirements for holding the top spot in the labor federation today apparently. Any one of them could outrun Shuler.

Everyone oohs and ahhs when some new progressive looking or sounding labor face pops up, but who are they? What have they actually done in their labor careers? Half of the labor articles written today are just fluff, tiny episodic reports on the passing of resolutions, quickie advertisements of one-off events with little context for readers, or labor travelogs repeating the obvious. I blame the editors—if there are any—for this low-calorie offering. Of course, let’s not let the unions off the hook. Their reporting and writing, if it exists in any substantial way at all, is frequently an embarrassment. No substantial reporting or researching is produced by most unions. The web sites are bare minimum on content. This history of unions who have struggled for more than 100 years are covered in two paragraphs—maybe.

I am a vigorous promoter of labor books and deeper reading on our rich history of labor movement struggle, and I’ll say that 95 percent of the books I sell and promote are completely unknown to the readers. The unions, with only a few exceptions, do nothing to educate their members in any significant way. And there is certainly no discussion about the disasters we are experiencing, and no explanation about how the Democratic Party has systematically participated in our destruction—by literally setting the stage for Trump. Union conventions and meetings are few and far between today and cut to minimum to allow a platform for the incumbent leaders only. And let’s not forget the generous socializing and casino time. The money spent on any one major union Convention these days could double the new organizing of dozens of unions. This is a disaster in so many ways, and one not to be minimized. It is no wonder that we have lots of members wandering around in a daze, or if they are not in a daze they might actually think that we are moving forward because they read an internet blurb about some incidental win someplace. The facts are that organized labor in the United States continues to be ground-down across all fronts. We cannot face our many crises for many reasons, including that there is little understanding of the real gravity of our situation.

MY: Needless to say, there are many unions that could use new leadership, However, those who champion union dissidents almost never ask themselves, change for what? The same goes for organizing. Cesar Chavez and the UFW leaders had periods of success, and they taught others to organize. But then what? What about building a radical labor movement as a goal, even as you fight for better working conditions, better pay, shorter hours, etc.? How can we avoid creating institutions and elevating leaderships that, in the end, refuse or fail to challenge the most critical foundations of capitalist society? Capitalism tends to create and shape, in effect, the people and institutions it needs to reproduce itself. How can this be challenged?

CT: Many top labor leaders are largely content, smug, immune to challenge in most cases. They construct staff and crony machineries to stay in office. They make 2-3-4 hundred thousand dollars year upon year, and pretty soon they are millionaires. They will do anything, and I mean anything to keep those jobs. Even the better labor leaders all strike me as overwhelmed, isolated from outside ideas, and just plodding forward reacting and not leading. Grinding away until their own retirement arrives. The so-called “Change-to-Win” movement of twenty years ago was led by some of the labor millionaires. Whatever that was, it was a monumental fizzle. We all had to witness that huge multi-year uproar just to re-learn that highly paid leadership and staff regimes are incapable of self-reform. There is more political life at the local level, and for the honest elements and the left that is where time must be spent. We need the left to dive-in and learn how these unions really work and then run for office. Staff jobs at a certain level can allow for influence, but not nearly enough to really alter the disastrous course of things. We also need to reach the “center” elements in the labor leadership, that large layer that is uneasy, worried about the decline, have some basic trade union principles, and are willing at times to put their support to attempts to correct course. The path to power in these unions has always been a principled left-center alliance. The members overwhelmingly support change, forward motion, and frequently even hard struggle. But the conservative elements, the corrupt elements, the self-serving elements in the leadership want to hang on to that power and money. And we won’t build the momentum needed to drive those elements out of the unions by running around yelling about political issues remote from the workplace, passing endless resolutions, or by not doing any of the work required. Our unions are in desperate need of a revival of new organizing and recruitment, something the existing leadership largely wants to avoid at all costs. If they even think of it at all. The members instinctively see the need to bring the unorganized into the unions, not to do them a favor but to defend our weakening situation. A center-left alliance in the union is the only path forward for the required new organizing. I run new union organizing schools regularly and there is huge and expanding interest out there from workers. The problem is that most of the unions are inward-focused, some are asleep, and most are structured to ignore outsiders such as the unorganized. And when was the last time that left elements raised the call to “organize the unorganized!”? Never.

The same goes for what we ultimately want from this labor movement. What do we want at the end of this ordeal? A slightly better deal in this rigged game? Or how about “A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work?” the old AFL beggary? What the hell does “fair” mean, anyway? Don’t we want something bigger, something to upend this rotten system? It astonishes me how timid, how narrow, and how docile the unions are. How will we get through the coming 80 percent of Trump’s term with this mindset? By trying to reason with unchecked corporate power? Relying on suspect judges and failed Democrats? We better think harder about the need to not just challenge this system, but replace it.

MY: As one example of the struggles of a prominent union today, you and I have had correspondence about the state of the United Auto Workers union. How do you explain its current difficulties? Shawn Fain, the union president, has been a hero of the social democratic left. According to The Nation’s president, Bhaskar Sunkara, who also owns Jacobin magazine, has declared Fain “labor’s greatest voice,” and he applauded Fain’s support for Trump’s simple-minded tariff policy. Yet, Fain is now accused by some of running the UAW in a dictatorial manner, with not much to show for his leadership in terms of new organizing and member education. What is your take on all of this?

CT: The UAW was delivered to its current dilemma on account of a federal government takeover and a leadership election that was compelled by government decree. The ideological corruption of runaway “labor management cooperation” eventually created a corruption rot that permeated entire layers of the auto union leadership. Is the U.S. government the best force to address a mess like that? Of course not. But like in many unions there was zero chance that the membership would ever find the means to get things cleaned up. And let’s note that the federal government control mechanism is paid for by the UAW members, another price to be paid by the membership for the miserable leadership of past decades. Millions and millions of dollars each year are paid out for this government monitor. Imagine this; the corruption gets found out and is prosecuted, and the “remedy” is for this federal government to meddle for as long as they want, and it’s all paid for by the members!

Shawn Fain was elected several years ago in this huge mess, and he defeated the old guard – but just barely. He takes over running a union afflicted with all sorts of corruption, a staff where many had been associated with all that, and with a membership that has never, ever, in living memory had to face playing much role in running their union. I think he did as well as could be expected with the Big 3 auto negotiations and strike in his very first months, and the union was able to organize the VW plant down south. These are significant things for any labor leader today. As for the left media and all of its chatter on the union, I would dismiss most of that out of hand. Most of these writers have no experience running a union, nor do very many of them have any idea of the dynamics in this – or any union. A few of them who thought Shawn Fain was some sort of far-left force are just lost in their own fumes. The intrusive and perpetual federal monitor rarely even gets mentioned. His job is to run around and collect incidental complaints and grievances, and then report it all as something substantial. This is ludicrous. One thing the federal monitor – or the left reporters – will not investigate is the fact that the UAW has lost 80% of its membership in the last 50 years. All in just the time I have been active in this labor movement. Is that an issue we need to consider? Or is it some ridiculous he-said-she-said jotted-down by the federal monitor, so he can allege some sinister activity is afoot? We have to consider the unaccountable roles of these federal monitors in any thinking we do about the state of the auto union today.

Yes, I have some opinions about how Fain has operated, of course I do. But I am rooting for the union to get back on something like a sustainable and relevant course, so the UAW can play a far larger role in a positive way. We need that. We need the UAW to get back heavy on the organizing front. But I don’t see that yet. I see some odd staffing decisions and not a lot of results, at least so far. I would counsel Fain to not get roped-in to the staff-driven habit of commenting on everything. So far as Trump’s tariff frenzy, let’s get a few things down for the record. Tariffs are a federal tax on imports to supposedly protect domestic manufacturing. One problem is, what is “domestic” manufacturing? And we all know— Shawn Fain most of all knows—that the “domestic” companies like the rest will lie, scheme, collude with competitor companies and governments, and do anything to squeeze more profits. That is how the U.S. auto industry was reduced to the fragment that it is today. Trump has made so many claims on tariffs that it’s safe to say that nobody knows where it is at. They are on, off, up, down, this is his deliberate style of bamboozling. The fact is it will be months and years before this calms down and it will be possible to see their real impact. Brother Fain is also in an epic jam. Democrats have imposed free trade for forty years. Look at the obvious destruction visited on our manufacturing sector. How many jobs lost, fifty million in fifty years maybe? Then along comes Trump, and he tells the working class he is going to reverse that. If you want to know how Trump was elected twice just read the last page of Karl Marx’s speech on free trade from 1848.

Can our auto industry be defended and rebuilt? And if it is rebuilt, even a little, will it be organized, or unorganized? And doesn’t the UAW have to deal with Trump’s tariffs no matter their opinion of them? A too-big section of UAW members support Trump. Or they did for last year’s election. Is the union addressing that? How? And as for the “reform” forces in the UAW, the two opposing trends have fallen out, the organization which was a part of the election of Fain is now dissolved. Where does all this go now? There are a lot of questions here. It is time for all of us to spend more time considering the entire puzzle here with the ongoing UAW story, as opposed to falling for cheap internet click bait based on the federal monitor’s skullduggery. That’s good counsel on a lot of things.

MY: When the left-led unions, which included the UE, were disastrously expelled from the CIO in the late 1940s, the US labor movement lost its most progressive forces. Those that favored the extension and deepening of the best features of the New Deal, organizing workers in the South, and promoting international working-class solidarity. There has been no recovery from this. You have always maintained your radical, communist, and anti-capitalist principles, whether it has been playing your role in building a left bloc in the unions, resurrecting the organizing thinking of William Z. Foster, or relentlessly promoting new and expanded union organizing. Global solidarity has been strikingly absent from the labor movement ever since the expulsion of the left-led unions. Which, by the way, had the most progressive collective bargaining agreements. Why is it that today’s AFL-CIO is, to put it bluntly, so politically backward?

CT: William Z. Foster observed 100 years ago that the U.S. labor movement was small, weak, industrially scattered, and politically backward. Yet he saw that it possessed immense possibilities for forward movement—if it could be stirred to action. I see the identical situation today. He also observed that, “The left wing must do the work.” I have been a mostly out-of-the closet communist in my many years in labor, although I was always careful. You have to be. I want people who work with me to know that the largest part of why I have been successful, and have made whatever contributions I have, is because of my underlying Marxist understanding of how things really work. I find it curious that so many leftists manage to exclude “communism” from their list of approved beliefs, yet in case after case they have to confess that it’s the communist movement that must be credited for so much. They harken back to the 1930s and the explosive growth years of the communist movement, yet refuse to adopt the same methodologies for their work today. They daydream about those decades of great working-class advance, and then apply the same loose, fuzzy, and unscientific methods in their struggles that communists reject. This is not a specific U.S. defect, but we do face it. And in my opinion, it’s why our left today is incapable of crystallizing out of the several million people who would hold communist or socialist views any organizational form that possesses coherent structure or power. Our movement is also weakened, and finds its vigor and discipline sapped, by an addiction to a myriad of identity politics. And with the bulk of the left today unconnected to workplaces we have little contact with the working class that is all around us. Everyone wants to glory in what divides us, but rarely does anyone care to explain what it is that unites us—the class system, and the class struggle. As for the AFL-CIO, last year the federation paid a consultant lots of money to dream up a new slogan. They came up with, “It’s Better In A Union.” Now they are driving around the country in a big bus emblazoned with the same label. I presume AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Secretary Treasurer Fred Redmond, with assorted staff and functionaries are out meeting members in different places. Ok, the members appreciate a visit from the top brass, but since “it is better in a union,” what is the Federation doing to reach out to the more than 100+ million workers who are unorganized? Who labor increasingly for dictatorial bosses. Who work with few, if any, benefits. Working to pay for their health care. Have no retirement pensions. But who overwhelmingly support unions, as public opinion polls have shown for years? Well, the AFL-CIO does virtually nothing to organize the unorganized masses. That’s the job of the affiliate unions. What if they refuse to do it? Then it doesn’t get done, like it has not gotten done for many decades. The union bigs will however talk about one thing on their bus trips, which is “Elect Democrats!” Never mind that this corrupt and collapsed Democratic “Party” is in large measure what delivered Trump to us not once, but twice.

MY: One final question: There can be little doubt that the United States is moving steadily toward fascism. Yet, organized labor has done little to actively resist what has been and will be a disaster for workers. The presidents of two labor unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers (AFSCME), recently quit the Democratic National Committee (DNC), presumably in protest against the weak response of the Democratic Party to Trump’s predations. Now, we might ask why any union president would be a member of the DNC. But beyond that, these two labor “leaders” have salaries well in excess of $400,000 a year. And to the best of my knowledge, neither ever organized a single worker. I couldn’t find any evidence that either one has endorsed Zohran Mamdani for Mayor of New York City. The AFL-CIO hierarchy has shown little intention of a no holds barred battle with Trump and his legion of fascists. Seriously, how can this be?

CT: When I retired from UE in 2013, in my final Convention report as their Political Action Director—for twwenty-one years—I told the members point-blank that Obama had already been overthrown. His governance was no longer his own. He was a stuffed-suit giving speech after speech, but the big moneyed interests, military and intelligence agencies were clearly operating to suit themselves. I mention that because Trump now returns to power in that environment where many of the firewalls and safety valves that might protect our weak democratic processes are already shut off. For labor, what have we done so far to resist? Wrung hands with Democrats, paid for an endless stream of lawsuits, posted things on social media, and… what else? We have lost at least half a million union members in the federal service alone. When is the new organizing and recruiting program to be launched? It doesn’t exist. It’s not coming. Not from this labor leadership. As for the Washington, DC, tempest in a teacup recently when the AFT and AFSCME union leaders quit the Democratic National Committee (DNC), I expect they will be back shortly. Labor has nothing without the Democrats, and that’s the way the Democrats like it. The New Jersey and Virginia elections this November may provide a Democratic Party boost, but Trump couldn’t care less. He obviously plans to expand his unilateral war on working people, and the courts are going to allow it. This guy is governing like any crazy boss that the unions see all the time. Bosses who ignore the contract and do illegal things. Because they know that it is unlikely that you will rise up. They know that time is on their side, not our side. They control most aspects of the situation. So just like when this happens in a union context, we need to reconsider our entire position, our response, our tactics. We need union leadership who will consider bold responses, militant responses, tactics that defy conventional wisdom.

My last thoughts are again on the dire need to mobilize the unorganized, to move them to organize, and put them in direct confrontation with the employers. Bringing new blood into the unions will act as a catalyst in many ways, it will destabilize the ossified unions and open the door to a possible revitalization. Enormous new openings for the left are in sight, if we choose to move into that territory. But our current left is largely allergic to workplace and union work. We are instead drawn over and over and over again into harmless and feel-good projects far removed from the shops, garages, stores, and offices. If we see the trade union realm as the means to confront the economic powers while at the same time reaching the masses of working-class people, we might make progress in rebuilding a substantial socialist movement.

That’s where we are at, in my opinion. Thanks for asking.

MY: Thanks, Chris. I hope readers will take the truths you have told to heart and begin to do the work that needs to be done. Private sector union membership as a proportion of wage laborers was more than twice as high 100 years ago than it is now. And the public sector unions are now under ruthless attack. The future looks bleak, unless reality is faced. We owe you a great debt of gratitude for trying to open our eyes.

https://mronline.org/2025/07/16/hard-truths-about-the-us-labor-movement-an-interview-with-chris-townsend/

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