Democracy fans: Take a break from the obsessive doom-scrolling and read Dave Kamper’s hopeful book Who’s Got the Power?: The Resurgence of American Unions. It offers a bracing—and often inspiring—reminder of how much workers have won in recent years, and how little we can afford despair. As bad as the news coming out of Washington is every day, now is not the time to give up. And, as Kamper writes, “[T]his, intentionally, is an optimistic book.”

Kamper, a veteran union organizer now at the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor think tank, tells stories of worker communities that deserve wider attention: from the Frito-Lay employees in Kansas to Harvard graduate students, from Hollywood actors and writers to flight attendants, from West Virginia teachers to Midwestern autoworkers. He shows how much intelligence, determination, and solidarity goes into a successful strike. As an active union member, I appreciated the context, the well-reasoned optimism, and the granularity of Kamper’s approach. The book taught me much about my own union—the United Auto Workers (UAW)—that I didn’t know. I loved the constant reminder that you don’t always know what is going to work and may have to try different things. As a unionist, I would recommend this book to my co-workers for background on our own union, models of how to fight, and reminders to keep going.

I also appreciated how much Kamper notices about the small daily business of union activism. It mostly isn’t an experience of big Norma Rae triumphs, but rather of talking with your co-workers, filing grievances, attending meetings that might be boring or irritating or too long, and above all, getting people to show up to things, over and over again. Most labor journalists and historians gravitate toward the heroics, for obvious reasons: Our disciplines are structured and defined by the obligation to chronicle the most significant events. Kamper hits all the salient dramas—the UAW’s 2023 Stand Up Strike, for example, which led to huge pay increases for autoworkers and a buoyant sense of renewal in the labor movement—but he also gets the importance of the mundane work that we do every day:

[T]he actual, quotidian work of unions, the overwhelming bulk of unions’ time, isn’t spent on the big stuff…. It’s representing members facing disciplinary action. Filing grievances over the denial of someone’s vacation request…. Holding new member orientations. Assisting a member navigating the Americans with Disabilities Act…. Double-checking membership lists in the database…. Finding a venue for the next meeting…. Writing up minutes of the board meeting and sending them out…. Ordering more union-branded pens.

This captures life in a union, in all its comically mundane detail, so well. I recently became a shop steward in an academic local that is part of UAW. As I write this review, I keep being interrupted by a fellow member’s emails about her reappointment rights. I want to make sure I understand her question, so I write back to her to clarify. I remind her that an encouraging Slack message from a colleague in management isn’t enough; she needs to get everything in writing in the form of a reappointment letter, which won’t come till next year. I explain to the member some jargon that she didn’t know. I confer with my fellow steward and we agree: Consult with a more experienced rep, as the member’s situation is complicated, and we don’t want to get anything wrong. We are once again going to have to explain to the member that her problem is due to some weaknesses in the contract, some of which we can’t renegotiate until 2028. I write a few more emails about this situation, then I go back to this review. I love that Kamper gets all this.

Because Who’s Got the Power? is so valuable to me as a union member, I’m confident that many other unionists are also going to find it useful. As a journalist, however, there is much that I found unsatisfying about the book.

There’s some factual sloppiness that it’s hard to believe no one caught. Kamper describes, for example, the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) as being on Long Island, when it is in fact on Staten Island, an error that goes beyond a typo, appearing in the text more than once. The ALU is so iconic among unionists and our sympathizers—its lead organizer, Chris Smalls, became a global icon of sorts, and the Amazon workers’ success in winning their union election helped create the “anything is possible” feeling for labor in the past decade—that the error feels especially glaring. What’s also distressing journalistically is that Kamper frequently speculates about things that are knowable. He often imagines what subjects “must have” felt. Why not ask them, since everyone involved is still alive?

Worse, it never becomes clear what Kamper means by his subtitle’s claim that unions are having a “resurgence.” As Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants and one of the best minds in the labor movement today, points out in her foreword to the book, only 9.9 percent of American workers belonged to a union in 2024, and in the private sector, that number was an even more disheartening 5.9 percent. The public sector numbers were little changed from the previous year, and the private sector numbers represented a slight decline despite the union-friendly policies of the Biden Administration. In 1983, in contrast, 20.1 percent of U.S. workers were union members. (These numbers come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, before President Trump laid waste to that valuable agency.) We can’t even justify the idea of a resurgence by strike numbers, as an increase doesn’t really show up in the broad data there, either.

Despite all this quantitative nitpicking, the idea of labor’s recent resurgence does feel true. I share Kamper’s enthusiasm for the important and visible fights that unions and workers have been winning. These victories have given labor momentum, made it exciting and more politically salient. Part of the reason for this is that for much of the period Kamper is discussing, the labor beat itself was having a resurgence, giving these wins far more attention than they would have received in the past. Kamper, for his part, notes that “We’re in a golden age of labor journalism,” but doesn’t acknowledge the role this has played in creating the big labor vibes that he’s chronicling.

At the end of the twentieth century, other than the excellent Steven Greenhouse, then at The New York Times, there were almost no full-time labor reporters left in the United States. But more journalists committed to labor—including Alex Press, Harold Meyerson, Kim Kelly, Sarah Jaffe, Hamilton Nolan, and Josh Eidelson—emerged on the national scene in the 2000s and ‘10s, along with organizer/writers like the late (great) Jane McAlevey, who became The Nation’s “strikes correspondent.” Labor Notes, a publication that had once been relegated to the margins of the left, has become so popular that its conferences sell out.

Labor issues also got a lot more attention from the mainstream media, partly because journalists were driven by our terrible working conditions to organize unions of our own, giving us a personal stake in the labor movement. The burst in coverage has led to an explosion of awareness of unions, which is where the perception of the “resurgence” Kamper writes about comes from. But as Nolan observed last year in a piece for In These Times, that heyday is unfortunately coming to an end, as media jobs are vanishing at an almost unprecedented rate. Nolan wrote:

Rather than wailing about the poor journalists, I want to make a point instead about the labor movement itself. When there are no reporters around to cover what unions are doing, their campaigns become like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them. It is hard to threaten union busting bosses with bad publicity when there is no publicity to be had. It is hard to get a community to rally around newly organized workers when there is no local news coverage. It is hard to convince America that organized labor should be the beating heart of our political system when all of the writers who were supposed to be capturing that stirring message are instead out looking for freelance advertising jobs to pay the rent.

It’s hard to imagine the wins Kamper chronicles here, whether at Amazon or the auto industry Big Three, without the labor journalism that made so many aware of them. Not only does such coverage help make the wins happen, for the reasons Nolan suggests, but it also contributes to a sense of labor solidarity among the public. That helps inspire others to organize unions in their workplaces, to not cross picket lines, and to support pro-labor politics and politicians. Indeed, this resurgence in labor reporting has probably been one reason that pro-union sentiment among the public is the highest that it’s been in years. Even though those good feelings haven’t resulted in an increase in union membership overall, their impact has been significant.

With the crumbling of the renewed labor beat, Nolan is right to argue in his essay that the labor movement will need to find ways to support labor reporting. The UAW has been getting its message out through strong social media, and president Shawn Fain, a powerful communicator, has done some talks over livestream that rival FDR’s “fireside chats”: engaging, friendly, and with lucid explanations of controversial issues (like the union’s support for some of Trump’s tariffs). Many other unions are going to have to step up their communications game. But it’s not going to be easy to make up for the steady stream of free and largely sympathetic coverage that labor enjoyed over the past decade.

In addition to its journalistic weaknesses, the book suffers from the incompleteness that bedevils any author chronicling a still unfolding story. This mostly isn’t Kamper’s fault, but it means that readers should consider this book a beginning and not an end to their reading on the labor struggles he describes. He acknowledges that the return of Trump isn’t good for labor, but doesn’t (and probably couldn’t, writing in 2024) grasp the magnitude of the elite backlash against worker power that Trump’s return represents. He admits that the timing of the book is awkward and uncertain, writing beautifully:

This book is…a hostage to fortune. There is every possibility that the tide will turn in the Trump years, that unions will be forced back into long, slow retreats, and this moment in time will be just that—a moment, here today, gone tomorrow. I really don’t think that it matters. If this is the beginning of something amazing, it’ll have been important to have a record of that starting point. If it’s just another somewhat bigger blip, that takes nothing away from the courage and genius and power we’ll see in these pages. The story is worth telling no matter what the ending will be.

I agree! But the specific stories Kamper tells, too, have already shifted, mostly in ways that darken his largely positive narrative—and that’s not all Trump’s fault. There are some ominous clouds Kamper could have observed even last spring. For example, take UAWD (Unite All Workers for Democracy), a reform caucus that played a key role in working for direct democracy—one member, one vote—in the election of the UAW’s leadership, and then in electing the leaders who have brought a fighting spirit to the union, leading to the Stand Up Strike and other significant actions. Kamper’s discussion of this is, like most of the writing in this book, funny and self-deprecating. He recalls that when UAWD first started, “with the same keen insight and understanding I’ve shown again and again in my time in labor, I was pretty sure the UAWD wasn’t going to go anywhere, that they were well-intentioned folks who weren’t going to be able to get anything done.” UAWD rightly plays an inspiring role in this book, but it has already fallen apart, as I know because I was a member (of UAWD as well as of UAW). UAWD voted to disband itself at a membership meeting on April 27, 2025, after months of tension (schism had been evident at the caucus convention in September 2024 and even earlier). Now, the leaders and members who made the Stand Up Strike happen in 2023 must build up a new internal caucus if president Shawn Fain and other democratically minded leaders are to stay in power. That such sobering events are largely missing from Kamper’s narrative has partly to do with the problems of writing on a shifting timeline but also stems from his bias toward optimism and solidarity (a bias I share).

Kamper also gives short shrift to the stakes of his story—namely, why unions matter to the large majority of Americans who are not members. Unions raise the bar for all workers in an industry, but less obviously, a more democratic workplace also raises the expectations for democracy in a society spiraling into oligarchy and autocracy. Union organizing helps us fight oligarchs in our everyday lives, at our work sites, while also building the institutions that can stand up to them nationally. A democratic society needs unions not only because of what they can do for their members, but also for the political weight they bring when they fight for everyone. Kamper is right to point out that most unions tried hard but failed to stop Trump’s return to power. But he could, in a time when we are seeing the total capture of our federal government by oligarchic interests, give more space to unions’ role as a vital counterweight to corporate power in politics.

In my own union, we lobby not just on issues that particularly affect our members, like electric vehicles or obscure regulations governing auto warranties—and boy do we lobby on those, as we should!—but on health care and disability benefits, housing, and taxing the rich to protect public programs imperiled by Trump’s cuts, all of which affect the entire working class. Our society is badly divided, but I take heart from the experiences I’ve had representing my local in our union’s political work. Our members are different from one another in the same ways that Americans in general are different from one another, but professors like me lobby and picket alongside auto techs, factory workers, research scientists, museum workers, public defenders, and more. Some members don’t want to stand up during the national anthem, others want to tell sexist jokes, but mostly, we don’t get derailed by any of that. We focus on what we have in common. While the oligarchs lobby for their own horrific agenda, unions are the only democratic institutions representing working-class people’s interests in our government, and that matters a lot.

Institutions are deeply under attack right now and may not recover in our lifetimes. By that I mean not only unions, but all institutions that serve the 99 percent: most agencies of government, the media, educational institutions, and even hospitals. That’s one reason that despite a few gaps, this book is so necessary. Our depressing news cycle, with its series of devastating and seemingly unstoppable events, cannot capture the importance of such institutions or the work it takes to nurture and maintain them. Without grasping any of that, we cannot save them.