by Jason Bellamy-Fults
In the coming months, I and other local union members are committed to working with the Gainesville Iguana to bring you front-line stories that are relevant to working people in our region and will help us collectively resist the ongoing attacks against working people by oligarchs and their political cronies.
For this issue, we want to remind you why unions matter in this struggle. We’ve seen no better articulation of this argument recently than Michael Podhorzer’s essay “Oligarchs Understand Power. Do We?” (tinyurl.com/Iguana4148). We strongly recommend reading Podhorzer’s essay in full, complete with charts and references. But for those short on time, here’s the abbreviated version:
“Elon Musk’s destructive ransacking of our government should remind us of what previous generations of Americans understood intuitively: that ‘we may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both,’ as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it. Yet in all the commentary about how to survive the Trump regime, almost no one mentions the single most proven constraint on oligarchy and autocracy: unions.
“There’s a reason … Trump has fired the first Black woman member of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox—clearly violating labor law and denying the board the quorum it needs to conduct business and protect employee rights; fired two commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and asserted in an executive order that he can fire any member of the Senior Executive Service, which includes regional directors at the NLRB who run union elections and investigate and decide whether to prosecute corporations’ unfair labor practices.
“It’s the same reason that Project 2025, which has informed the lion’s share of Trump’s early shock-and-awe actions in office, would effectively dismantle union power nationwide by banning public sector unions, eliminating overtime protections, and making collective organization nearly impossible.
“It’s the same reason Musk—who wants to make the entire NLRB unconstitutional and whose companies have been fined millions of dollars for labor or workplace safety violations – is reportedly targeting the Department of Labor for the next round of DOGE sabotage. (Of course, Musk’s aims are twofold: defending his coup, and his very real interests in protecting Tesla and Space X from ongoing investigations into their anti-worker efforts.)
“And it’s the same reason corporations and billionaires spent decades working to decimate union power in the United States. The reason is: Oligarchs know politics is about power, and they know strong unions don’t just deliver better wages and benefits for their members (though they do that in spades). Unions also build the kind of real democratic power – for all of us, not just union members – that keeps oligarchs in check.
“Unions are the only major civil society institution in this country that give ordinary working Americans reliable access to collective political power. Corporations and billionaires, on the other hand, have boundless options to exercise outsized collective power over our elections, legislation, and judicial appointments, especially after Citizens United.
“Unions build democratic power in three crucial ways. First, they offer members the chance to practice democracy in their everyday lives, which leads to higher rates of voting, community involvement, and political participation. Second, although far from perfect in this regard, unions have been at the forefront of pluralistic social change, promoting racial and gender equality and resisting authoritarian tendencies. Third, unions help prevent the translation of economic power into political domination. As Frederick Douglass observed, “power concedes nothing without a demand.” But in today’s economy, individual demands mean little against oligarchic power. Unions turn individual grievances into organized demands backed by real institutional power.
“Encouragingly, organized labor is already playing a major role in fighting the latest round of oligarchic abuses … Unions have filed critical lawsuits to block Musk’s access to Treasury payment data and to challenge the Trump administration’s shady “buyout” offers to federal workers.
“Oligarchs like Musk will continue to have more and more power, and we less and less power, until we heed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s warning that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.”
“Oligarchs try to break the back of civil society because when people see they can’t succeed together, they lose the courage to act and the imagination to even think a different future is possible. Thus, it is for us—as it was for those facing down the robber barons in this country and the rise of fascist movements in here and in Europe—to recognize that rebuilding democracy and restoring shared prosperity has to begin with the robust democratic counterweight only unions can provide. There are no shortcuts or work-arounds.”
So, in short, please join and get involved with your workplace union if you’re lucky enough to work somewhere where one exists. If one doesn’t already exist, as is the case for most of us, then consider helping to start one. A good local example would be United Campus Workers at UF (ucwfl.org/), which is seeking to represent all UF workers who don’t already have access to a union. And if you can’t find your way to either of those options, then please consider joining a labor-adjacent organization like the local Alachua County Labor Coalition (laborcoalition.org/) and/or the AFL-CIO campaign “Department of People Who Work for a Living” (deptofpeoplewhowork.org/). Keep an eye on the news and support workers elsewhere (e.g., Amazon, Starbucks) who are taking the fight directly to the oligarchs. Encourage your friends and family to do the same—as the old saying goes, the longer the picket line, the shorter the strike!
Till next time, keep resisting and keep organizing!
Jason Bellamy-Fults is the recording secretary for IBEW Local 1205, a delegate for the North Central Florida Central Labor Council, and a member of the United Campus Workers. He can be reached at jasonfults@gmail.com. See more at
substack.com/@workerscreateallwealth.